Friday September 26, 2008

- Streaming: An agreement between the major studios and broadcasters in the US - Lionel - 16:36:58

Since many months a battle has raged between 'online radios' and those having the commercial rights to what was being broadcast. The latter wanted to obtain more money for the broadcasting of their titles, going as far as halting certain radios. This solution helped no-one, an agreement has been found.
In exchange it right to diffuse the musical contents of the major studios the broadcasters will return a royalty equal to 10,5% their incomes, a percentage that seems to satisfy all the parties.
This agreement relates to only the diffusion of content and does not give any right to recovery of the music for use at a later time.

[translation by crispin]

- Could It Be Dangerous to Work with a Mac Pro?! - Lionel - 15:50:43

About one year ago, we were reporting on our French website (macbidouille.com) that some Mac Pro owners were complaining about a weird and irritating smell coming our of their Mac Pro when it was switch on. We did not hear about this issue anymore, and Apple did not communicate about it, as defective parts were simply exchanged apparently.
Today, an article published in one of the leading French newspaper (http://www.liberation.fr) might bring this story back to the front page while bringing embarrassing information for Apple.

A scientist from the CNRS (National Center for Science and Research) was affected by this strange smell coming from his Mac Pro. As Apple could not fix the problem, he contacted Greenpeace to get the vapors analyzed by an independent laboratory. Results are surprising and might place Apple in a difficult position, while potentially igniting a scandal. Indeed, vapors were identified as toxic, harmful and among the compounds identified, there were styrene, benzene and other derivatives. All those chemicals are known for being highly toxic, and the benzene has been forbidden and is use is strictly controlled due to its carcinogenous properties:

This material is a known carcinogen. The risks of using it in the laboratory must be fully assessed before work begins. TLV 10 ppm. Short-term exposure may cause a variety of effects, including nausea, vomiting, dizziness, narcosis, reduction in blood pressure, CNS depression. Skin contact may lead to dermatitis. Long-term exposure may lead to irreversible effects. Severe eye irritant. Skin and respiratory irritant.

Beside the irritating properties of those chemicals, some are suspected of contributing to leukemia for people being exposed for a long period of time. Of course, this analysis will have to be confirmed by another laboratory, and the detected amount to be controlled and compared with the TLV defined by the respective MSDS, but Apple can not remain silent and will have to identify how such chemicals could end up in a Mac Pro.

[translation by Linathael]

- Toshiba Introduces New 1.8 - Lionel - 09:09:23

Toshiba just introduced new series of 1.8" HDs marking a new evolution for such physical storage format. With capacity reaching 250 GB, those new models overlap with the current storage space available in 2.5" HD.
HDs from the MK**29GSG series will make use of 2 disks for reaching 160 GB and 250 GB of storage space, while spinning at 5400 rpm. Those models are dedicated to ultra portable notebook, aiming to offer large storage capacity while draining only 1.2 W in seek/read/write mode. Toshiba expects to compete with SSD models not able to offer such storage space. Unfortunately for MacBook Air owners, those HDs features a SATA interface and are 8 mm thick. Apple really needs to quickly upgrade its MacBook Air offer in order to adapt its storage unit to the current standard format in the field; otherwise, owners will be left without any chance for upgrading their notebook in the future.

[translation by Linathael]

- Price-Fixing Agreement between AMD/ATI and NVidia: Part III and the End - Lionel - 09:08:08

In July and at the beginning of September, we were reporting about the legal action launched in USA and dealing with suspected price-fixing agreement between AMD/ATI and NVidia. Among documents provided to the court against AMD/ATI and NVidia, there are copies of emails exchanged between NVidia senior vice president of marketing, Dan Vivoli, to ATI's president and chief operating officer, Dave Orton. Both companies have decided to negotiate an agreement to stop the current legal action for avoiding having to pay higher financial fee. Both companies agreed to pay 850,000 USD which will be used to offer compensation to US customers having purchase a graphic cards from one of the 2 companies between 2002 and 2007.
If one consider that this agreement marks the need of this legal action, it will bring both companies deeper in the "red", as AMD is struggling to compete with Intel CPU (however current GPU are doing very well), and NVidia is still dealing with the issue linked to defective manufacturing process affecting millions of GPUs that could cost the companies more than the 250 millions USD originally budgeted.


[translation by Linathael]

- [Rumor] Apple Is Working Hard on its Pro-oriented Applications - Lionel - 09:07:33

It has been a long time we did not include this specific sign between brackets in a news title; we obtained some interesting information from our sources. If Adobe is currently on the stage under the light of news networks after the release of its Creative Suite 4.0 (CS4), Apple is working very hard to update its Pro-oriented video applications. The different versions of Final Cut applications should be updated in couple of months (January?) and among new features, it should include:

- Native support and management of .R3D files (Apple recently made a demo of such function)
- One will be able to generate DPX sequences to transfer them to Cinema Tools
- Final Cut will be able to work in 12- and 32-bits.
- Apple will implement support and management tools for stereoscopic images.

Color 2.0 will support the same function, as well as a new feature named "Color decision list". Later one, with Snow Leopard and computational power linked to GPU resources, the new version of DVD Studio Pro and Disk Studio should be released. If the support for HD-DVD will be dropped, it will manage Blu-ray natively and will require a power hardware (Mac Pro with several cores). Due to the requirement of Snow Leopard, it will only work on a Mac Intel 64-bits.

[translation by Linathael]

- Class Action to Target Spore and its DRM - Lionel - 09:06:23

As one could have expected it in USA, a Class Action has been launched against Electronic Arts, targeting specifically the DRM system used in the recently launched game, Spore.
The legal action aims to demonstrate that the company fouled customers by hiding or underestimating limitations linked to DRMs implemented in Spore. It will also demonstrate that those DRMs require additional CPU power, and send personal and private information to EA servers without letting customers know about it.
Undersigned claims for having the game paid-back as well as financial compensation. If this game is a true success, it might also become a nightmare for its editor...

[translation by Linathael]

- Dell to Adopt LED Backlighting for all Notebooks by 2010 - Lionel - 09:04:59

Source : TGDaily

Dell announced that all its notebook models will feature LED backlighting in 2010. f the technology is current more expensive than the conventional one, it drains les power while being more environment-friendly.
Apple is already using LED backlighting on all MacBook Pro and MacBook Air, while MacBook models are still using standard backlighting technology.

[translation by Linathael]