Thursday September 04, 2008

- Recall of 440 000 Sony Notebooks - Lionel - 19:11:02

Sony has just started the biggest worldwide recall ever: 440 000 units of Vaio laptops manufactured between July 2007 and August 2008 suffer the following problem:

some parts are likely to overheat and lead to a case distortion around the power plug and the LCD area. Concerned by his customer's satisfaction, Sony has decided to offer a free checkup program, with eventually component replacement, to insure all the notebook's parts are meeting the usual quality standards of the compagny.

Sony's once again under heating risks that where the exact same reason a recall of millions of batteries occured in 2006.

One can note the Vaios are top-of-the-range Japanese made computers (priced between $1700 and $4000) and that such big mistakes can be made even by those who pride high quality manufacturing.
to learn more about it:
support.vaio.sony

[translation by Goulwen]

- For Sony, the Blu-ray is the last format of optical disks - Lionel - 15:23:04

Source : http://www.xbitlabs.com

In an interview Taka Miyama, the manager of product strategy for Sony Europe said that he thought that the Blu-ray format would be certainly the last generation of optical disk; the problem is to propose in future a laser with a shorter wave length. The following generations of memory support will have a different format.
Of course, there is still a margin of progression on the level of Blu-ray by increasing the number of layers, but for beyond it will be necessary to turn to another thing which will not be compatible with the current discs.
There will be probably the choice between supports equipped with flash memory whose capacity continues to progress in an exponential way or the holographic cubes, already invented by authors of science fiction.
The supporters of Blu-ray should be reassured, probably Blu-ray will still be here in 2020.

[translation by crispin]

- Internet priority for television on Hulu - Lionel - 12:16:33

Trying to protect its content, last March NBC launched it's Hulu platform which allows Americans to watch its episodes online. Proof of its interest in advancing this new system of diffusion, NBC has decided to show exclusive videos and offer episodes of some series online a week before their television broadcast. In exchange, users will have to suffer through commercial breaks, just like on TV.
This test will focus on five series: 30 Rock, Chuck, Knight Rider, Life, and Lipstick Jungle.
If this initiative meets with success, it could accelerate the convergence between internet and television.

[translation by jwa]

- A success without precedent for Chrome? - Lionel - 07:43:59

The Internet buzz is only about Chrome, the new Internet navigator from Google, and the figures prove that it made a splash without precedent. According to Net Applications, it represented yesterday 1,48% of the market shares at 12:00 before stabilizing around 1%. It is too early to draw conclusions, however it is certainly a success without precedent for a beta (not yet available on Mac).

[translation by crispin]

- Bad capacitors also used in the computer industry - Lionel - 07:37:34

We give the floor to "Papy".

It seems well that the problem is more serious, indeed I have noticed this same series of condensers assembled on switch/hubs and on video cards. And the condensers swell as on iMac.

Attention, none of these photographs relates to an Apple product, but this discovery promises a difficult moment for us consumers, but also with the retailers who will have to manage the returns of these products.

[translation by crispin]

- News from the Mac mini front ? - Lionel - 07:30:24

One of our "sources" has indicated that he has more and more problems obtaining a supply of the Mac mini from Apple.
With a little bit of luck (but we have already said this many times) Apple could have finally decided to update this machine that we particularly appreciate.
It would find a new youth and would cause a new passion if it were equipped with more powerful processors Core 2 Duo and why not also with the GMA X4500 which would give a crack of the whip to the 3D graphics.
We will keep our fingers crossed.

[translation by crispin]

- Silicon always more pure - Lionel - 07:11:14

Source : TGdaily

All our processors are manufactured starting from silicon wafers. This must have an almost perfect purity, and that used in the electronics industry is 99,99999999%.
However, as the feature size of processor elements are further reduced, more is the risks that the impurities will disturb the operation of the processors.
A new manufacturing process of this silicon developed in Germany still will make it possible to divide the quantity of impurities by 5. It will be produced under conditions close to an absolute vacuum at a pressure of only 0,00000000000003 psi.
With this new generation of material, it will be not only possible to manufacture processors increasingly finer, but also to improve the yield. Indeed, there is always a significant waste in the production of the processors. With less impurities the yield will be higher.

[translation by crispin]