Friday April 18, 2008

- 450 GB at 15 000 RPM - Lionel - 09:41:46

Source: Hitachi

If the capacity of hard disks for the general public has exploded in recent years, the high-performance disk is far from having followed the same path. It must be said that the reliability is a priority on these products, while the capacity is almost secondary.
Hitachi wants to shake things up and proposes a disc spinning at 15000 RPM and with a capacity of 450 GB Available in SAS and Fibre Channel, it can exceed 200 MB /s read and write and has access times below 4 ms.
This disc could very well be installed in a Mac Pro with a RAID card but only if silence is not a priority. Indeed, it is specced at 37 dB when idle, and certainly much more when used intensively.
PS: For semi professionals, we are still waiting for that Western Digital to make its move with Raptor which took a big blow with its old level of performance and capacity.

[translation by jeremy]

- Current Mac Pro model on the Refurb Store! - Lionel - 09:35:06

Current Mac Pro models on the Refurb Store!
The Refurb Store is once more offering surprises, with its bad deal MacBook Core Duo, but one can enjoy discounted iMacs and also a Mac Pro. This is the current entry level model powered by two Quad Core Xeon clocked at 2.8 GHz and priced 2199 €. For sure when you will read those line, the Mac Pro will most likely have disappeared from the Refurb Store
As usually take your time to fully evaluate the discounted product, its generation and the specifications before taking your credit card out of your wallet.


[translation by Linathael]

- Towards an overhaul of the private copying - Lionel - 09:33:11

Source: PC Inpact

The hot topic of private copying in France and how it is managed is still in the news.
It is now several weeks since the manufacturers refused to serve on the Albis commission which is responsible to fix the surcharge.
The digital rights owners seemed to have the idea of officially taking decisions unilaterally, but a few words from the Prime Minister last week put them in a cold sweat: "The decision making process in respect of remuneration for private copying needs to be addressed in order to have an objective and transparent procedure ".
Taking advantage of this proposal, manufacturers suddenly took interest and made proposals for reforming this "institution".
In essence, they focused their requests on two points:
-- They accept a broadening of the tax base if they obtain in exchange a significant drop in the levy on each product, and especially its calculation based on the value of the product and not the capacity,an obsolete metric -- a single audio/video file could see its size vary by a factor of more than 10 depending on its encoding format.
-- More troublesome for rights owners, manufacturers want this fee passed not by a committee but by the parliament.

Knowing they no longer have the wind in their sails the rights owners will certainly be forced to release the ballast, if they want to maintain adequate financial return. They will be more quick to do so to try to prevent private copying being challenged in court. A defeat would put them in a very delicate position.

[translation by jeremy]

- The Mighty Mouse, the mighty failure from Apple ? - Lionel - 09:13:08

Supplied with all desktop Macs, the Mighty Mouse is perhaps the Apple product manufactured in the largest quantity.
Yet, as shown by a poll in which more than 9000 readers responded, it is far from well received.
43% of you have decided to replace it with another mouse.
Of the 57% who use it, more than a third have problems with the ball, which is dirty.
And it is certainly a big black mark for this mouse. Over time, the ball eventually stops working. Its cleaning is delicate and dismantling the mouse requires breaking a seal and then reglueing.
Of all Apple products, it is certainly one that requires most urgently to be reviewed and corrected. And it may soon be the case if we are to believe a patent recently made public. It describes a mouse in which the ball will be replaced by a mini touch pad, which would remove any soiling problem.
One can assume that Apple will make that as a second button, making it invisible and giving the Mighty Mouse the appearance of the first mouses.
If Apple sticks to its habits, it initially would be sold separately with or without wires before eventually be offered bundled with Mac computers.
Note that if a new mouse appears, there is little doubt that it will abandon its grey robe to take the appearance of aluminum, which has become the standard for Apple.

[translation by jeremy]

- 4K video on a DVD - Lionel - 08:44:08

Source: TGdaily

If you find that Blu-ray with its 1080p does not have sufficient definition, RED has a player that been much talked about recently for the 4K camera which accompanies it.
The RED-Ray Player is a very special DVD player. Although based on the good old red laser it allows video of 4K (4096 x 2048), 2K (2048 x 1024) and 16:9 4K (3996 × 2160). It is also compatible with other formats, 1080p, 720p and 480p. Blu-ray and HD DvDdiscs are not supported.
Of course, we must have a monitor capable of displaying such a resolution, and a good collection of DVDs which store an entire movie in this format, or wait until flashcards have such a high capacity, as it can also use them.
This product is not intended to only make brief demonstrations of what can be achieved with the RED camera....

[translation by jeremy]

- The ATOM PC uses 1/3 power of Intel Core Duo - Lionel - 08:24:02

http://www.vr-zone.com got its hands on a configuration of the ATOM desktop using a processor and the motherboard that accompanies it. If the site does not speak the performance achieved with this CPU running at 1.6 GHz, it has nonetheless measured its overall power consumption, and it is very low.
The machine has consumed only 39W, despite the use of a 3.5" hard disk at 7200 RPM and a 5.25" burner. An Intel Core2 Duo E6400 draws between 87 and 164W (see tomshardware:truth-pc-power-consumption).
While we should not expect a great performance, this type of machine could find its place largely among many individuals or companies that only use office applications and the Internet. Such a choice, on a large scale would be beneficial for the control of global warming.

[translation by jeremy]

- Explosion of iPhone sales in England - Lionel - 08:04:46

Following the drop in prices of the iPhone yesterday, a reader told us that Carphone Warehouse sold 3750 units in a single day instead of the usual 200.
To give a figure for comparison, the Nokia 2310 sold only 1250 units during the same day.
Knowing that each device comes with a subscription, it is excellent business for O2, which proves that Apple would have a real interest in allowing all telephone operators to subsidize their own sales of the iPhone.

[translation by jeremy]

- The iPhone bug that lets you travel - Lionel - 08:00:44

Source: PC World

The term security vulnerability make most people's hair stand on end, yet it was recently discovered in at least one case to be amusing.
Researchers have managed to change the data of the location system of the iPhone to fool the device and thus to tell the owner that he was in a place radically different from where he actually was.
For location purposes, the iPhone is not using a GPS chip. It uses a database maintained by the company Skyhook . The latter uses vehicles that pace up and down major cities and detect Wi-Fi networks and note their location. When seeking an iPhone's position, it will find Wi-Fi terminals around and interrogate the database to deduce its location.
Scientists have managed to send to the iPhone a false SSID (network name) boundary, making it seem it was elsewhere.
Note that you can do the same thing by logging onto the site Skyhook and saving your base Wi-Fi in another country ...

You will understand the practical use of this vulnerability is virtually zero, especially since it would happen to be the owner of the device who is communicating the wrong information. This kind of thing is certainly much less likely to happen than to see the American military modify the information from the GPS network.

[translation by jeremy]