News for Saturday, 8 November 2008

Rambus, a company that we have a very particular disaffection, has lodged a request with the International Trade Commission to prohibit the marketing in the United States of the graphics chips and chipsets of NVidia that it accuses for violating several of its patents.
The ITC now has a month to answer this demand. Once again, RAMBUS, that lives primarily from what we will describe as a racket, deposits with prolifically many patents and then arranges to squeeze the maximum payments. Even though the company has already gained such lawsuits, it also often was under accusing eye of the judge for its "borderline" processes.

All started when Apple announced that they had attracted Mark Papermaster from IBM where he worked with the development of the Power PC chips. He was offered the post of senior vice-president with the responsibility of the future developement the iPhones and iPods.
Immediately, IBM reacted and filed a complaint, asserting that Papermaster violated a clause in his contract according to which he does not have the right to work at a competitor during one year (a traditional clause in the high tech field).
A judge of New York has just ordered Apple to immediately put an end of any activity by Papermaster within its company. Apple will certainly appeal this decision, but it will take time, which is a bad blow for them after the surprise departure of Tony Fadell who held this position before.

VLC continues to evolve quickly in its new version 0.9.x.
We are now at 0.9.6 and we are getting close to the 1.0.
To see the changes made for this last version:
http://www.videolan.org/developers/vlc/NEWS)
To download the software:
http://www.videolan.org/

In the words of Philippe:

The emails functioned since today on SFR, (but not via wifi) but only for the unlimited subscriptions. It is enough to go in "regulation/general/network/cellular data network" and to fill the field "access point" with " sl2sfr" and put nothing in the other fields.
One can then activate the push mode in adjustments/New data.
At home this functions even if the push does not have a completely operational air.
I even activated for the occasion a new service for sending mail: " mail.sfr.net"

SFR shows its interest for the iPhone and (especially) its users. It is much truer in the last two months, those having bought a iPhone at Orange will be able to SIM unlock it for free.

Now one knows the time that Microsoft will reveal its new version of Windows; it will be in mid 2009, very in advance on the first calendars that had been released. If one puts aside the hurry of the giant to cross off Vista, this date also coincides with the probable release of Snow Leopard; this should be at the time of the next WWD, which will be held in the summer of 2009.
This promises to be a beautiful free-for-all for us, as Apple will not be the only one to criticize its competitor. As recently proved by the remarks of Microsoft and their campaign aimed at regilding the badge of Vista, Mac OS X is now regarded as a serious enough adversary to be criticized rather than ignored.
On some part, this renewal of competition is a good thing. After having forced Microsoft to move, it will ensure the same with Apple; they will have to exceed once more in order to make a clear difference with its competitor.

Many companies under the aegis of Intel and of its inexhaustible funds were launched in the technology, Ultra Wide Band, that has the goal of offering wireless products with a very large bandwidth, with a range of a few meters. There was the case, for example, of Wireless USB.
But Intel abruptly announced that this technology no longer interests them; this provoked a cascade of voluntary liquidations of the Start Ups that lived on this development. WiQuest Communications closed its doors on October 31, and another, Stonestreet also has just closed.
However, all is not lost, certain companies will be able perhaps to remain and propose innovating solutions and especially standards, because one finds already devices using their own standards, since certain flat screen televisions already have all the communication done wirelessly.

Since its lack of success on the new-born market of SSDs gave a bad moment to the leaders of Sandisk at the time of the announcement of their latest results, the company now seems to want make itself the standard during 2009.
They announce a new technology that in the long term is able to multiply by 100 the speed of the random writings to these disks, a weak point currently.
To arrive at this result, they did not seek to improve quality of the memory chips, but used another interesting approach. Currently, while writing a traditional hard drive with data, it also will write in its catalogue the location in which they are stored.
Sandisk decided to attack this aspect and proposes to modify it. These disks, thanks to powerful algorithms, will make it possible to optimise the placement of the data so that it can be accessed as fast as possible.
In addition to this function, Sandisk will propose a multichannel system that is completely asynchronous. It will be, for example, possible to read on one of the memory chips the data while writing on another chip.
The company seems so sure of itself that it tries even to impose to the other manufacturers two new standards.
- one is called vRPM is supposed to give the SSD disks a rotation speed equivalent so that one is able to compare them with the traditional disks. One could for example have SSD with the vRPM of 2000 rpm or more.
- the other, the LDE wants to be a new standard making it possible to measure the reliability of the disks. It would replace the MTBF that is not too meaningful with its millions of announced hours.

Eizo has announced the production of its first screen equipped a Displayport connector.

A diagonal of 24" that has a resolution of 1920x1200, it is able to displaying 96% of the Adobe RGB spectrum. Also note that it can be rotated and operated in portrait mode.
Alas, it will be impossible to connect it on one of new the Apple portables, since the company (Apple) omitted to propose, even as an option, an adapter mini Displayport to Displayport, which in our opinion is unacceptable and transforms a standard into non standard.
We are to even ask whether the use of the name Displayport is on the edge of legality.