News for Friday, 9 May 2008

Intel has revealed a network card able to transfer 10 Gbits/s on standard Ethernet cables, of Category 6 or 6a thus making it easy to migrate a network of machines to this standard without having to recable again. The card makes it possible to maintain this flow with 55m of Cat 6 and 100m of the 6a, which is already very comfortable.
Of course, this standard, as always, initially will be reserved to the professionals having of the absolute needs for large flows, each PCI Express card costs $999. But in a few years, this standard should become the standard for professional computers, with the Mac Pro at the head.

Apple decided to offer an agreement to stop the process of a class action launched in Canada by a group of iPod owners complaining about a short lifetime of iPod battery. After one year of usage, the capacity of iPod 1, 2 and 3G batteries were dramatically reduced, and the overall experience of the iPod strongly affected. The group of iPod owners were suing Apple for having misinformed users about battery performances.
To avoid this legal action to go one step further, Apple agreed to offer to all Canadian iPod owners asking for compensation, a 45 CAD coupon only valid on the Apple Store. If it will cost Apple some money, at least it will most likely be entirely recovered via the online store.
If you want to read the settlement: http://images.apple.com/ca/ipod/settlement/settlement_agreement.pdf

Let's one of our forum members pikacube talk about an interesting Media Center application

A shot email to report about my "currently" favorite application: XBMC !
It quickly became THE Media Center application on Mac OSX, and has just been released in beta 0.5 including support for Apple Remote.
This application is derived from the Xbox 1, but has been nicely ported to the Mac with a "xTV"-like skin similar to FrontRow.
Even if it is not as intuitive as FrontRow, it features so many parameters and features that it is worth every minutes spent in learning and discovering how it works!

For additional information, please visit the official website: http://www.osxbmc.com/

Over the last years we have spoken about fuel cell batteries; however, in spite of advertisements by various manufacturers, they are not a hot news item.
Sony, however, has just assembled its product, that seems a sucess.

They succeeded in putting into a "box" of 5 cm x 3 cm a fuel cell battery running on methanol, and a Lithium Polymer battery that is used as a reserve for peak loads and all the management electronics. The product is able to provide an instantaneous power of 3W, which is still too little for a computer, but enough for a mobile telephone.
The idea to add a traditional battery is interesting, because it makes it possible to quickly deliver an energy already produced during the periods of rest, and this allows the reduction of size and cost of the part producing energy. Thus, a mobile telephone would see its battery permanently recharged during the night for periods of the following day.