News for Thursday, 20 November 2008

The last in this segment, Toshiba has announced a 500 GB 2,5" disk with a 9,5mm thickness. The company has put the accent on the silence of this disk that should have good durability thanks to new components, and a low power consumption;1,4W for reading and 1,7W for writing. Unfortunately the competition has already improved on this last point.
These products will arrive at December. For lack of real innovations one can at least hope for that they will be proposed at competitive prices.

Apple is now offering on the iTunes Store complete music albums for less than 7 Euros. The choice is large, from Leonard Cohen to Dire Straits. The offer might also include some local artists depending on the country. If you want to have a look to you local iTunes Store, follow the link: Your iTunes Store

Apple released a firmware update for its Apple TV. The new version 2.3 brings several improvements:

- AirTunes Streaming from Apple TV: Music can be streamed via AirTunes to Airport Express speakers or other Apple TVs in your house.
- Third-party Remote Controls: Apple TV can now learn other remote controls and use them in addition to the Apple Remote.
- Playlists: Playlists in iTunes that contain Movies, TV Shows, Podcasts, and Music Videos can now be seen on Apple TV.
- Music Volume Control: Support for volume control in Music.

Without being a huge revolution, those new features finally bring support for expected functions.

Despite the growing success of Mac (OS and hardware), Apple keeps promoting its products to further capture market shares, at least in USA. One of our forum members sent us a copy of a flyer distributed at the MGH and Harvard University:
It would be nice to have similar campaign launch worldwide...

NVidia unveiled new series of PCI-Express card not directly dedicated to 2D/3D display, but rather providing the raw power required for some specific computing task that can benefit from CUDA.

The card known as Tesla C1060 offers 240 streaming processor cores, 4 GB of GDDR3 RAM and scores respectively 933 and 78 GFlops in single and double precision floating point calculations.
If this card is currently not compatible with the Mac (OS or hardware), it might become one of the favorite friend of Mac Pro users as soon as Mac OS X Snow Leopard is released. Forthcoming Open CL might strongly benefit from such raw computing card. Of course, it has a price, around 1,500 USD. However, one could install several of them in the same computer if you have enough power to feed them. It is not possible in the current Mac Pro.