Friday June 06, 2008

- IBM will start micro-watercooling - Lionel - 20:20:26

Source : CDR Info

Water is a much better coolant than air. For this reason water cooling systems are used by those which want to push their processors to their limits.
In the past (a thing that is regretted today), Apple used such a system to cool certain Powermac G5. More recently, IBM launched servers with water cooling, and considers it as a solution for the future. Indeed, as the density of the components increases with the miniaturization of the transistors, the surface of exchange between the CPU and its cooling system decreases and this complicates things. Further in the future, one should manage to pile up the layers of silicon to further increase the number transistors for the same surface area.
Thus the engineers of IBM decided to create mico-channels of 50 microns thick between components. They will then circulate the water in the interior of the silicon so that the generated heat can be removed.
Of course, this type of system needs to surmount many obstacle, to start with the purity of the fluid which must-being preserved or risk of blocking these tiny channels, and also to have pipes resistant to corrosion and a pump working at high pressure in order to force the water through these tiny passages, but according to IBM, all this is possible.
We wish them to have more success than Apple in this field…

[translation by crispin]

- Microsoft: there is no gain in waiting for Windows 7 - Lionel - 19:49:33

Source : Ars Technica

Despite the incredible figure announced by Microsoft for the sales of Vista, this system is far from creating unanimity in PC world. Described as too heavy, too greedy, constraining… it has difficulty being accepted, especially by the companies which balk at migrating their stocks of machines, which also implies changing the oldest models.

For this reason Microsoft has pushed back the date of abandonment of after sales service of XP and continues to sell licences of this OS. Recently, in order to inflate the sales of Vista, they announced that it would be henceforth possible to buy Vista, and to downgrade to XP at no cost.

Another factor also plays to discredit them, the announcement of a too early date for the release for Windows 7 in 2009. A number now hesitate to go for Vista and prefer to await the next version.

Of course, this wait-and-see policy does not please Microsoft who has launched a charm campaign for Vista. Their new argument is rather amusing. Windows 7 will be closer to Vista than XP is to Vista. To upgrade now to Vista will thus make it much easier the eventual transition towards Windows 7.

They have even produced a PDF giving the 5 good reasons to migrate towards Vista in the professional world.

Of course, this helps to a certain extent the business of Apple which proposes today, more than ever, a coherent alternative with Mac OS X. But the big winner could in the final analysis be Linux. Indeed, the current fashion is with EEE type machines, based on not very powerful but cheap components. However, most of these products are sold with Linux or to a lesser extent with XP. Vista is well too demanding for these systems. Note that OS X cannot be used here either.

[translation by crispin]

- eBay condemned for counterfeit - Matrix - 15:43:06

Last Wednesday the High Court of Troyes judged in favour of the luxury group of Hermes who had brough an action concerning the sale of counterfeit bags on the eBay.

eBay and the net surfer user of its service were both recognised as guilty and are ordered to pay 20.000 euros damages. Ebay must also display this judgement on its portal for 3 months.

The position of eBay in preceding business had been presented as: " only as someone offering storage; intervening neither in the contents of the advertisements, nor in the payment and the delivery of the articles sold on its site". The justice which had granted a decision on this line of defence has now changed his position.

This judgement could make jurisprudence in other lawsuits in which eBay is engaged, in particular those concerning the groups LVMH and Dior Couture and in which the requested compensations are respectively 20 million and 17 million euros. The decision should be delivered at the end of this month.

[translation by crispin]

- Intel and NVidia Talk about the Nehalem - Lionel - 09:12:41

Source : RegHardware

In addition to its GPU, NVidia is also developing AMD and Intel compatible chipset. To obtain a perfect compatibility, NVidia needs to negotiate and sign agreement with Intel in order to get access to specifications as well as having the right to make business with it and compete with Intel-branded chipset.

As indicated in the previous news, the future generation of Intel CPU, aka Nehalem, should provide a real boost in performance, the memory controller so NVidia needs to sign a new agreement with Santa Clara founder to be ready to offer new Nehalem chipset right on time for the launch of this new CPU. But it seems that Intel is not really willing to give it so easily.
Intel would like to make a deal: opening Nehalem to NVidia in exchange to a license for the SLI technology which allows 2 to 4 graphic cards to work simultaneously. So far, NVidia always refused to sell such technology license to Intel, and only ATI/AMD granted a license for the similar cross-fire technology to Intel.

Both companies are becoming more competitors than partners over the last few months with their respective announcement that CPU or GPU have no future. Of course, if Intel could get a license for the SLI technology, we then could finally expect to see this technology ending up in our Mac Pro; it would for sure boost graphic rendering. But then, the Crossfire is theoretically available for us too, and Apple never decided to ask Intel to develop such motherboard. The current discussion could also be a way for Intel to become a major player in dedicated GPU by implementing the SLI technology with its own GPUs, while maintaining its shared memory graphic chipset market in parallel.

[translation by Linathael]

- Rapidweaver 4.0 Is Available - Eric - 09:11:47

The beta test period is now over, and Realmac Software has now released the new version of Rapidweaver 4.0. Announced as a major update, this new version of the successful webdesign wysiwig application on Mac receives a mixed review from our team members. While Ars Technica wrote an extremely positive article based on the preview, I and other in the team were not so enthusiastic.

The interface has been revised to fit with Leopard, but long time Rapidweaver users will not be lost, as most of the changes are invisible. The main one is the file format which is now in .xml, providing a better compatibility of data with third-party applications which could better interact with Rapidweaver. In summary, this version looks like a transition, illustrated by a new interface and changes in the code, probably to allow Rapidweaver to be ready for future evolution. The update is free for users owning a 3.6 license; otherwise it will be charged 30 USD for owners of RW3.5, and 79 USD for the brand new version.

- Intel Nehalem Really Impressive - Eric - 09:11:03

Anandtech managed to get their hands on a Nehalem sample, the future evolution of Intel CPU to replace the current Penryn in couple of month. They run comparison test between a 4-core Nehalem clocked at 2.67GHz and a 4-core Penryn Core 2 at the same frequency. The Nehalem is respectively 28% and 44% faster for DivX and x264 encoding, and obtain a 24% higher score with Cinebench R10.

Such performance gain can be assigned to the new architecture but also to other improvement:
- For the first time in Intel CPU, the memory controller is integrated in the processor. As a consequence, the memory bandwidth is doubled when compared to the Core 2 Penryn, and the memory latency decreased by 40%
- The Nehalem support the Hyperthreading technology which allows creating 2 logic cores per physical core. One can then maximize the CPU load on each core.
- The Nehalem features a large L3 cache, while the cache L2 is now faster.

One should also mention that such test will also benefit from the SSE4 instruction set which are known to be highly optimized for each new processor for multimedia applications. On will have to wait for additional tests to better evaluate the real gain in everyday usage.

In summary, in couple of months, the first computer based on Nehalem should arrive, and we should experience the same boost in performance when we moved from Core to Core 2. Another reason for Pro users requiring huge raw crunching power to replace their hardware when those models will arrive.

- 8 USD to Exchange the Battery of your iPhone - Lionel - 09:10:08

The first iPhone purchased will soon be celebrating their first anniversary. If the device is aging well like a good wine, some owners due to an intensive usage might have already notice that the battery charge does not last so long anymore. Of course, Apple had anticipated it and charges 70 USD for having the battery exchange to a new one.

If you do not want to pay such a high price, or can not afford to be iPhone-free for couple of days, then you could be interested by a battery kit as the one available from Dealextreme. It will then only cost 7.29 USD to get a new battery, including the tools required to perform the exchange. Of course, one needs to perform the operation carefully, and for this purpose, dealextreme is providing a step-by-step tutorial as a video: http://video.gearlive.com/video/article/q407-replace-iphone-battery-tutorial/



[translation by Linathael]

- Apple loses the legal process concerning the vertical lines - Lionel - 07:47:27

En Last February, we had spoken about a legal procedure launched by one of our readers against Apple. He had two iMacs, both affected by the famous problem of vertical lines that affected many readers.
The judgement was given yesterday. Apple was condemned to refund this reader for two computers. We will reconsider in detail the judgement, but it is very interesting on several points:

- Dominique, our reader, did not need to get a detailed technical evaluation (this would have been very expensive) to put forward the latent defect.
- For that, the judge agreed to regard the testimonies made on discussion forums as evidence of the extent of the problem.
- The judge qualified that this problem that affected the iMac but also the Powerbook was intrinsic to the manufacture of the machines, in short, a latent defect opening up the right to this refund.
Note that the procedure was made by a local judge, and that there is no right of appeal. Apple can only go to the court of appeal, but this would be very expensive.

Although jurisprudence in France is not amissable in the United States, those which are also affected will be able to try this procedure to obtain a judgement in their favour. To recall, you can only defend yourselves. Our reader prepares a guide in order to help you. Those which are affected by the defective lower memory slot in portables, or by a leak of watercooling in their G5 will be able to follow suit and to win.

[translation by crispin]