News for Wednesday, 8 October 2008

Would you be interested to know about Apple staff music choices or current favorites? Do you plan to investigate based on music choices what type of employees are working at 1, infinity loop? Well, Apple made it kind of public by adding Apple staff favorites to iTunes radio, as shown below:

Vodafone UK unveiled on its website the brand new Blackberry Storm. Hereafter are some photos of the new handheld:


It looks familiar, is not it? So familiar, that we thought that Apple licensed out its iPhone Os to Blackberry... We bet it is only Vodafone UK trying to surf on the iPhone mania wave to sell Blackberry. It looks like the iPhone, it might taste like the iPhone, but it is NOT the iPhone.
[update]
We receive confirmation that above captures were used for the promotion and have now been pulled out from Vodafone UK website. For sure Apple might not like it at all. Below is the true BlackBerry interface:

The new version of VLC 0.9x is now available. The version 0.94 brings some bug fixes, however it requires hardware supporting Quartz Extreme.
For additional information please visit: http://www.videolan.org/developers/vlc/NEWS
To download VLC: http://www.videolan.org

It is not a secret that AMD that is chronically losing money and does not have the means of a a face-to-face fight with Intel which surfs from success to success.
The company has announced a new turn that is without precedent for a chipmaker of this size; the selling off of its production factories.
This business is somewhat convoluted since these factories will pass under control of a new entity where 44.4% will be held by AMD and 55,6% by ATIC, an investment fund based in Abou Dhabi. In exchange of these shares in the company, with the provisional name of TFC (The Fondry Company), AMD, among other things, will get rid of 1,2 billion dollars of debts on its production equipment.
ATIC is also engaged to invest several billion in the next years in an evolution of the production equipment.
Thus, disencumbered by this large part of its problems, AMD hopes to be able to focus itself on R&D of processors and to make up its delay on Intel.

Apple is regularly updating the list of unsupported hardware, indicating that such computer can not be service anymore, and one will not find spare parts. As illustrated by this PowerMac G4 Cube, not being to replace dead pieces does not necessarily mean it can not be useful anymore:

So, the probably most beautiful and compact hardware released by Apple, has now found a new usage.

There are several technologies allowing wireless data transfer between 2 devices. Scientists from the Boston University's College defined a new solution:

The technology is based on the light emitted by low voltage LED. According to specifications, the data transfer speed can reach 1 to 10 Mbits/s, not enough to compete with Wi-Fi, but more than enough for allowing other devices to exchange small amount of information without requiring the use of a high frequency cloud to transfer couple of KB of data.
This is the most interesting point of this technology, one does not need any special infrastructure, and in addition, the range is limited inside the building, so no risk of getting data stolen due to the lack of security on a wireless network.

While a persisting rumor indicates that the future MacBook could use a NVidia chipset, much more powerful than the Intel GMA currently available, another rumor announces than NVidia might stop chipset development next year. This might be linked to several parameters:
- With the Nehalem, Intel completely modified its controller architecture on motherboard, especially for memory management now directly supervised by the CPU. If performance wise it is a huge gain, in term of design and manufacturing it is more difficult to carry out.
- AMD pursues a similar strategy, and the acquisition of ATI, make it difficult to justify for NVidia to develop AMD-specific dedicated chipset, aka nForce.
- Last but not least, the emerging and promising GPGPU might make the current field of GPU completely modified. NVidia will need very powerful chips to make the difference with Intel, a performance level which has nothing to do with the one available from chipset.
If the NVidia chipset in future MacBook is not confirmed yet, it also makes sense if one consider that the Nehalem will required deep modifications on the motherboard and architecture. So, in 2009, Intel might be the only source of graphical chipset for Apple, or one could now imagine for which purpose Apple acquired recently a chips/chipset design company.

Often one speaks (maybe too much) about repression, Warner is now trying a radically different approach to try to stop hacking in South Korea. The Major will henceforth propose their films with legal downloading even before their release in DVDs. They thus hope to attract people, who prefer not to spend their time unearthing these films on the Web, to no longer await their official provision.
This proactive step rather than repressive is interesting and raises many questions.
Is this the only case where the Majors are interested in what their consumers would really like?
It is true that some individuals will continue to pirate in any event, but are there those that would return naturally to the correct and legal way if an acceptable alternative were proposed to them? The iTunes Store proves that one can already, at least partially, answer yes.
But to change the distribution of films in France will be very difficult since the system has became complex with several stages that take incompressible times between the release of the films at the cinemas, the release in DVDs, and to Canal +, to unencrypted on TV and to finally in VOD…