News for Saturday, 5 April 2008

Last Thursday April 4, Bill Gates was at the annual conference of the Inter-American Development Bank in Miami.
A question posed during a seminar about the philanthropy of company, the cofounder of Microsoft answered that a new version of Windows, the 7th with the name, would be released during 2009.
Initially it was foreseen for 2009, then pushed back to 2011 and then supposed to come out in 2010, Windows will apparently be released next year. Microsoft is not accustomed to advancing its release dates... What can this reversal of date mean?
Windows Vista, released at the end of January 2007, did not have an outstanding success, its sales more due to OEM licences than deliberate adoption by the users, this announcement reveals the very negative perception of Vista. Indeed, if one looks back to previous Microsoft releases, one finds a certain similarity concerning the transition between Windows 98 and Windows XP, two systems with uncontested commercial success. To calm the shareholders and satisfy "Windows addict", Microsoft released Windows ME in September 2000, a heavy and not very reliable Windows 98 version. Releasing Windows 7 "only" two years after Windows Vista would prove that Vista is nothing other than a stop-gap version released to calm the investors... Moreover certain functionalities initially advertised to be part of Vista have not seen the light of day, such as the file system WinFS that will appear in Windows 7.
For us, Mac users, the release of a new Windows system is without interest. However, with the enormous development and financial resources of Microsoft, this Windows 7 could become a real competitor of Mac OS X in term of stability and user interface. This would endanger the weak interest to switch to a Mac that has been seen these past years, since the dissatisfaction felt by the PC users could cease.
Such a situation would act as a brake to Apple as it struggles to increase its market share. How would Cupertino react when faced with such a situation?

Source: http://www.iphone-dev.org/

A few days late, the iPhone Dev Team has posted its Pwnage tools.
They allow the iPhone to be unlocked by dramatically changing their Bootloader to delete the routines for checking updates that raised problems for hackers with updates from Apple.
Thus, it is possible with these tools to unblock the beta version of the next firmware of the iPhone which has been proposed with the new SDK.
Disregarding the problems posed by hackers to Apple, we admire the skill level that they have acquired since the release of the device. They finally understand all the most secret intricacies. Of course, we are also curious about how Apple will react. They have in fact lost all control over a device intended precisely to be carefully controlled.

Source: LA Times

Apple Inc is currently at war with the City of New York, known in the United States as the "Big Apple".
The ... bone of contention is the Apple symbol. This is the logo used by the city in an advertising campaign urging people to be energy efficient and use recycling.

Apple believes it is too close to its own logo, and will cause "consumer confusion resulting in damage and injury" to Apple, and "cause dilution of the distinctiveness" of Apple.
The city of New York contends that the logo will not be used on items offered by Apple, such as mugs, plates ...
(Yet, the mugs with the apple exist:) But they certainly do not represent the heart of their substantive trade.

Apple continues to slide the MacBook Core duo in amongst the other machines in the Refurb shop. Because they are sold at the same rate or slightly less than Core 2 Duo machines, avoid these "bargains"!
Indeed, apart from the fact that their processor is less powerful, they are also not compatible with 802.11n, which is a big flaw.
Attention also, tariffs remain a difficult jungle to understand and some MacBook Core 2 saw their prices rise.
However, it remains possible to get a bargain, as long as one is careful.
@ The Refurb Store

Most of you remember Gigadesigns. In 2003 the company marketed accelerator cards for the PowerMac G4.

Today, after having disappeared from the shelves of retailers, their website has also closed.
It must be said that the move to G5, and then quickly to Intel killed the market for accelerator card on the Mac (G4).
We want to thank them for giving us so much fun under the hood and for giving a new lease of life to our Mac for a few years.
They now join a museum of brands that have disappeared, who made us dream with XLR8, MacTel and to a certain extent Powerlogix who now have a few accessories of not much interest.