Monday March 24, 2008

- Incredible! HD-DVD have disappeared - Lionel - 10:54:46

Over the years, we held our breath in the war HD-DVD against Blu-ray. A week did not pass without one of the camps making a ground breaking advertisement or announcing a new powerful product.
However after the HD-DVD camp threw in the towel, the disappearance of their products has been incredibly quick.
On the sites of the big retailers all reference to HD-DVDs have been cut from their catalogues and the term even banished from the search fields on their sites.
At this rate, in a week or two one would have the impression that Hd-DVD never existed.
For certain, one can still find the players at rock bottom prices at certain retailers, but the stocks melt in front of our eyes, a trend encouraged by these prices
Soon the only ones that will remember will be Toshiba who lost a billion dollars in this war, and those who bought a player but who will never own a collection.
The big distributers seem ready to put this nightmare behind them and put their power into selling the maximum of Blu-ray products and to increase theirs margins that had become non existant on the DVD players.

[translation by crispin]

- First opening up of the MacBook Air motherboard - Lionel - 09:15:51

Source: Macbook-com

If you find that the MacBook Air lacks connectors, John Maushammer has tried to discover those that Apple did not wire in the MacBook Air, and they are numerous. The Macbook Air Chipset is indeed capable of handling many more devices than those available to us. Of special interest would be USB ports and even a SATA port.
He has already successfully located and tested 3 USB ports.


These are 3 USB 1.0 ports on which he managed to plug in a USB drive, which mounted.
He is now focussing on an an unused connector which he hopes will also be useful.


He hopes to find the entirety of the missing ports, in particular the SATA that will open the door to all recent SSD discs and those still coming. Note that having already found additional USB ports he has already paved the way for an very important increase in storage by adding USB keys of 16 or 32 GB. The rate would be slower than that of a hard disk, or SSD, but it would be a very elegant way to be able to start an iTunes library much larger than what the machine currently allows. The dataspeed in this case is not as important as the storage itself, to be able to play the music.

[translation by jeremy]