News for Thursday, 27 March 2008

Source: XLR8yourMac

If a Mac OS X crashes with say a kernel panic ... often times the best thing to do is reinstall the latest Combo update. It will overwrite files and repeat stages of maintenance. In most cases, the problems will be solved.
Remember, however, that if you have the latest updates Airport and Time Machine, this lifeline will not be allowed.
In fact, these updates change the version number of Mac OS X, preventing combo update from working. Apple need to change these updates or release a new 10.5.3 which will allow this reinstall.
We take this opportunity to inform you that the latest Security Update we are talking about causes serious instability in some people's machines. We advise you not to install it while waiting to get a clearer picture.
We are also advising those who can not do without their machine for the time of a total reinstallation of MAC OS X to think about cloning their system. This solution is the most convenient for a very quick restoration in case of problems of this kind.
Do the clone before upgrading which will ensure a very simple backward migration, even in the event of major bug.

Hardware.fr has published the return rates of hard drives under warranty of a large online retailer. It involves hard drives which were in use between 6 months and one year.
The most reliable manufacturer is Seagate, which has a rate of return of 1.5% followed closely by Western Digital and Hitachi that are 1.7 and 1.8%. Samsung has a "good" rate of return of 2.5%.
Of course, these figures should not be taken litterally since they do not take into account returnsas a PC repair.
Thus, it certainly does not include problems with 2.5" drives with Seagate Firmware 7.01 that would have significantly increased the rate of failure of that brand.
We must also take into account that some series, or certain capacities have different failure rates.
Thus, reduced to only 500 GB drives, the failure rate and classification are different. Hitachi appears to be good this year with 2.5% return, while Western is far ahead with only 1.2% of discs failing.

One of the reasons against mass acceptance of the Blu-ray readers is the low production of laser diodes and the fact that they are not cheap.
The situation seems about to change in a positive way. Sharp has announced that it will increase the production rate at its factories; from April onwards they will produce 700,000 diodes monthly compared to 500,000 now. Of course this is only a start. For the price to drop significantly, it will need more factories to move their production to this new product. However this is not so simple: they either have to develop new production techniques or they must pay heavy royalties to those who have already mastered it.

Source: Super Talent

Super Talent have announced the upcoming release of a 256 GB 2.5" SSD.This will have an access time of 0.1 ms and i/o of 65MB/s reading and 50 MB/s writing.
Although described as the finest 256 GB disk SSD in the world, it will not go into our MacBook and MacBook Pro, its thickness is 12.5 mm.
Its price alone, around $ 6000, should deter the vast majority of people dreaming of an affordable SSD.

Apple has released, via the Software Update, a new version of the 2008-002 security update for Leopard (X 10.5.2, version 1.1): the client version (50 MB) and the server version(108 MB).

The update "Security Update 2008-002" is recommended for all users. It improves the security of Mac OS X. The earlier security updates have been incorporated into this security update.
For more information on this update, please consult the following website:
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=61798-frv(french)
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=61798-en(english) .