Monday April 21, 2008
- A new subscription for the iPhone at orange.fr - Lionel - 20:11:20
According to iphon.fr, Orange will announce on April 24 a new subscription for the iPhone.
If you await a decrease in price, this is not for you; this new subscription is intended to the large-scale consumers and will offer 12h+12h communication, 1000 sms and 100h of connection to Wi-Fi Orange base stations for 149€ per month.
Obviously, the price of the telephone remains the same one, which certainly marginalises Orange at the European level.
[translation by crispin]
- Paypal does not block Safari - Lionel - 16:33:30
Last week, Paypal announced that they would begin to filter browsers that can access their interface to fight Phishing. Immediately, some had feared that Safari, which has no advanced features to protect users, from being ousted. Since then, Paypal has denied wanting to block Safari as a whole, however they would block older versions of the browser.
Yet Safari could potentially be locked out if Apple does not make a major effort in this area. The methods used by the "fishermen" are increasingly sophisticated and their messages are more convincing, not only for those people who are most credulous, but even audiences. It is therefore urgent that the fight surrounding this burgeoning phenomenon is increasing, especially for Apple, which continues to boast of the safety of the OS X platform. They should certainly resist becoming a prime target, for example, with an attack targeted at customers of the online Apple Store.
[translation by CliveAtFive]
- Western Digital Introduces the Velociraptor - Lionel - 11:16:13
Last week we were mentioning the new HD from Hitachi, bringing both speed and larger storage space (450 GB spinning at 15,000 rpm), and competing with the current Raptor offer. Well, Western Digital’s answer did not take long to come, as the company introduced today its new high-end and high performance HD, named Velociraptor.
Surprisingly, WD decided to use 2.5" plates in a 3.5" format enclosure, with a 1.5cm thickness. The space saved with 2.5" plates is then used by a system aiming to cool the core of the drive. Despite its small size format, the Velociraptor features 300 GB of storage space with transfer data speed reaching 120 MB/s and access time raging from 4.2 to 4.7 ms. As its predecessor, it spins at 10,000 rpm and sports 16 MB of cache. Its price should be around 300 USD and its availability is expected in May.
[translation by Linathael]
- 10 Gbits network cards for the Mac - Lionel - 09:33:31
The company Small Tree Communications markets PCI-Express cards compatible with Mac Pro and Powermac G5 that allow a 10 Gbits/s connection between them.
These products function under Leopard thanks to the driver provided.
It will however be necessary to look hard at the price, the tariff of these cards is between $1295 and $3495 for one with an optical connection.
The price of the routers is also high. Count on $12000 for one with 12 ports.
If you do not have this kind of budget, wait a few years so that this standard is common place. Compatible products will have a price 50 or 100 times lower.
[translation by crispin]
- PsyStar: the soufflé has collapsed - Lionel - 09:00:06
The Mac topic of the week was PsyStar and its clones of Mac. Several sites launched investigations of this company that appeared to have sprung up overnight.
The registered office seemed to be on the move, changing place regularly corresponding either to a house in residential zone, or at an industrial park where nobody had ever heard of them.
Also interesting is the vote of confidence by the site used for their online transactions, PowerPay. After checks by Powerpay, PsyStar was classified as suspect and the account suspended. The sudden rise of this company and the difficulty of identifying it physically makes one suspect, a posteriori, an enormous swindles.
This business seems now almost at an end, however PsyStar has given birth to any immense polemical which divided the Web and our forums on the possibility of buying a clone of Mac. Up to now, the Hackintosh existed; those which had cracked the Apple code profited from a leniency of Apple since the media took little interest in their work (contrary to the hackers of iPhone). Now they have been put under the lime light, it is likely to encourage Apple to react more strongly to these hacks in order to stop another PC assembler launching out on this potentially remunerative route.
[translation by crispin]
