News for Friday, 4 April 2008

Yesterday Apple announced that iTunes is now the #1 music retailer in the United States, based on sales in January and February 2008. iTunes has managed to capture a 19% percent market share, beating Wal-Mart's 15%, and Best Buy's 13%. This is the first time a purely digital retailer has surpassed brick-and-mortar music sales. This has been quite a jump for Apple, who only just passed Amazon's market share values in July of 2007. This upward trend of digital sales is sure to stay, as is the drop in the sales of physical media.

Source: Clubic

With its Santa Rosa platform, Intel tried to convince us of the usefulness of Turbo Memory technology (ex Robson) which uses a flash memory module placed on the motherboard to speed up the processing of certain data. In fact, the presence of 512 MB or 1 GB modules did almost nothing, apart from a higer cost. It has therefore been set aside by the manufacturers of laptops.
Intel did not abandon it, and should in the future propose an improved version (1.7 -- proving that the changes are not dramatic). It will provide a few new things such as support for larger memory cards, 2 or 4 GB and the ability to choose the software or process that will use it.
Maybe the arrival of DDR 3 in the coming laptops will help impose this technology. Indeed, the price of memory cards with this standard will be much higher than those with DDR2. So the Turbo Memory may yet be of interest in (partially) offsetting the lack of RAM.

Source: Hardware.fr

Chartered Semiconductor is a company that has worked with IBM for a long time to improve the smoothness of semiconductor burning. They participated in the establishment of the burning in 90, 65, 45 and 32nm.
The company announced that it had contracted again with IBM to participate in the development of etching in 22 nm scheduled to be launched early in the next decade.
The closer one gets to the quantum barrier, and we are almost theret, the higher the costs of R & D as well as those of toolmaking.
The founders hope in the future move to 11nm. After that, it is the unknown, one that will require radically altered manufacturing technologies for chips, about which not much is known.

Hynix is one of the major manufacturers of memory chips in the world. Their products are often in the machines sold by Apple.
Since late 2007, the company has switched the production of its products to 66 nm and has met with big problems. They wasted almost 10% of production, which is very significant, almost 30 million memory chips per month.
Hynix finds itself unable to honor its contracts. This situation seems to be sufficient to cause what all manufacturers of RAM hoped for, namely a rebound the price of their products.

Source: TGdaily

At the beginning of computing, the display was managed by the central processor. Much later, we started to see accelerators targeted at professionals and the general public. They have evolved and have become the video cards that exist today.
According to Ron Fosner a specialist in the field at Intel, the rapid increase in the number of processor cores and power output could encompass dedicated video cards in the future.
That assertion was illustrated during the Intel developer forum -- a demonstration was given generating a scene rendering very complex graphics without any graphics card.
Of course, this point of view is Intel'sand is certainly far removed from what Nvidia might think. It must be said that the manufacturer of processors is preparing its Larabee technology which will precisely use many cores to render high quality video performance.
It can be presumed that in every core a specialised portion will be added aimed at rendering video. Thus, the more powerful and multi-cored a machine is, the more rapid 3D will be rendered. This would be a good way to boost high-end products and force them to a more rapid renewal of computers.
The PC World will join that of Mac users who were forced to change machines to upgrade their video card ...

A report from Eric:

the touch screen of my iPhone suddenly stopped working, so I called Orange to get it repair. I have been informed that similar failure cases have already been reported and that my iPhone will be replaced. However, they do not have iPhone in stock anymore, neither potential shipping date! So I will have to go back to my old BlackBerry...

With such as report coming couple of days after the dramatic price cut applied on the iPhone in Germany by T-Mobile, let us think that the rumored iPhone 3G could be indeed released soon, as early as beginning of May. We doubt that Orange can not provide iPhone due to higher than expected sales, they might simply run out of their 100,000 units stock, and Apple could not refill their stock due to the transition to the iPhone revision2.

As announced previously, the Dev Team iPhone released the the PwnageTool application for Mac OSX. It will allow users to unlock iPhone by modifying in depth the Bootloader in order to bypass protection and update procedures which were giving nightmares to hackers and limiting the interest of unlocking the iPhone due to official firmware update. It is now possible with such tool to unlock the future beta version of the iPhone firmware which will be supplied with the SDK.
This is a true achievement, and a quite amazing amount of work performed by the http://www.iphone-dev.org/, and they really proved with the PwnageTool application that they have reached a knowledge level that would make them fully competent to work with Apple's Developers to further unchain the power of the iPhone. They have unveiled the protection measures set up by Cupertino to lock and control software development of the iPhone. We are curious to see what will be the answer from Cupertino for disabling the PwnageTool application.

This small update (6 Mb) is for the Graphite and Snow Airport devices, and improves their reliability with Leopard.

The AirPort Admin Utility for Graphite and Snow for Mac OS X 10.4 or later software supports the original Apple AirPort Graphite and Snow (Dual Ethernet) Base Stations. This update provides compatibility for Mac OS X v10.5 or later.
The newer AirPort Utility (v5.3.1 or later) should be used for Time Capsule, and AirPort Extreme or AirPort Express Base Stations.
System Requirements:
• Mac OS X v10.4 or later
• Wireless network access requires a Macintosh computer with AirPort or AirPort Extreme card
• WPA2 support requires a Macintosh computer with an AirPort Extreme card
For the latest information on AirPort software, check Software Update in System Preferences or the following Apple websites:

• 
  Apple Airport Express website
  
• Apple Airport Extreme website
  
• Apple Support website
  

Apple has just posted a small update for Keynote (version 4.0.3, 20.5 Mb). It is meant to improve performance when working with large presentations

This update addresses performance and stability issues when working with large documents.
Users must have Keynote 4.0.2 installed on their computer to install this update.