News for Tuesday, 4 November 2008

LG and Microsoft have announced that they signed a strategic partnership in order to propose new mobile telephones.
According to Steve Ballmer, " This protocol of agreement reinforces the relationship between Microsoft and LG and shows our engagement to deliver a more innovating mobile experience to our clients"
Apple does not have to worry about this alliance before one before some time, since one notes that the market of the mobile phones, or rather of the portable microcomputers is in a turmoil, not only at the level of the hardware, but especially for the software where there are 4 protagonists, Mac OS X Light, Symbian, Windows Mobile and Androïd.
Such a situation one can not recall in the computer industry for over 20 years.

Slysoft announced an update of its AnyDVD software that again makes it possible to circumvent protection implemented on the Blu-ray disks. After having circumvented successfully AACS, the software are now able to break the protection BD+ that was the joker for supporters of Blu-ray. This acts by creating a virtual machine capable of carrying out checks the legitimacy of the media.
One thus finds oneself again with the ball in the middle while waiting for the next update of protection and that of the software.
In order to add a little virtue to its endeavours, which is difficult given the nature of its software, Slysoft announced that its software is also able to deactivate the function BD-Live of the discs. Installed in the BD Profile 2.0 it makes it possible to recover online additional information. According to Slysoft, this function allowed, without any control by the users, the possibility of deactivating and also to download tens of MB and especially to provide to the studios information about the customers.
Of course, it is contestable whether they are able to deactivate it properly, and one also wonders what the studios could recover apart from the number of hours spent watching films. Slysoft also forgot that nobody can oblige the users to connect the network to their reader.

We usually do not like Xbench as a benchmarking procedure; however, we performed a test with the SSD-based MacBook Pro, and then compared results from those obtained from the Xbench database for a 320 GB 2.5" HD spinning at 5400 rpm, the default storage unit offered in the MacBook Pro.

As shown in those graphs, the SDD is performing very well for reading/writing small files, the task for which it really makes a big difference with e 2.5" HD. The SDD is so fast, that the size of folders and files are almost immediately displayed and do not slow down its performance. One can launch iTunes quickly even though the music library is large, and Entourage 2008 is finally responsive.
Last but not list, we run the application Monolingual to delete all files linked to languages not used on our MacBook Pro, the task was performance in the background at light speed, without impacting the performance of the SSD as we kept working with the notebook. Since we have installed the SSD, we have never seen the famous colorful rotating wheel of Mac OS X!
Since months we report that SSD will be a true revolution for the computer industry, and our daily usage of the unit installed in our MacBook Pro keeps demonstrating this fact

Yesterday was the end of the Intel Core i7 NDA, so the web was flooded with dozen of review and benchmarks. To make it short and without going into details, the new architecture convinced all reviewers and analysts, with on one side the ability of CPU to overclock one core in case all cores are not used, and on the other side the new version of Hyperthreading providing a way to benefit from all core power.
In summary, the new natively quad-core CPU and its dedicated architecture offers amazing performance levels, especially for multi-core-aware application. The new Mac Pro to be powered by Xeon Nehalem and this new architecture should deliver high performance level, and associated with Snow Leopard it should bring a synergistic software and hardware solution.

In our first review of the new MacBook Pro, we were reporting about the high CPU temperature (100-105°C max) when running CPU-demanding application such as Power Fractal.
We decided to repeat the test with a more user-oriented application by encoding video with HandBrake. Unlike Power Fractal which request 100% CPU load, HandBrake will "only" capture 92-97% of CPU usage. In such conditions, the CPU temperature will not cross 90°C. Despite being a rather high value, none of the CPU sent a high-temperature alarm. Fan speed moved up to 3650 rpm to stabilize the temperature, while remaining almost silent.
Of course, it wasimpossible to work with the MacBook Pro on ourknees, as the temperature of the enclosure is too warm, however, on the top part, in contact with hands, the enclosure remains cool.

Here is a little news to give those in need some dreams. The US Apple Store (and only this one) is closed.
Lately, often one finds that Apple closes its US store for minor updates of products which are reflected later to the rest of the world.
So this time, is it maintenance? Adjustments of tariffs? Mini Mac? We will know in a few hours.