News for Wednesday, 3 December 2008

Hitachi is one of the most renowned plate-based HD manufacturers, but it does not have the knowledge and capacity to produce Flash memory chips required for SSD.
In order to offer its own SSD models, Hitachi signed a contract with Intel, which will provide the Japanese company with chips and interconnection technology. In summary, future Hitachi SSDs will be "Intel inside". On the long-term, such position will be difficult for Hitachi, and it seems that we will have choice in 209 between SSDs manufactured by many companies such as Transcend, Intel, Seagate, WD, SanDisk, Samsung etc. and Hitachi.
If some companies will have only SSD in their catalog (such as Intel or Transcend), Hitachi and other plate-based manufacturers will have to get their catalog organize and rationalize between standard HDs and SSDs.

First, a report from Julien:

Surprisingly, the iPhone simply disappeared from the FNAC online store, irrespectively of the category, Apple product, mobile phone or best selling product...
In addition the offer iPhone/FNACMobile 3 hours, also disappeared...

We investigated too, and indeed, despite some iPhone-related accessories, the FNAC online store looks like it never had the iPhone in its catalog...
For the time being, it is unclear: the FNAC is out of stock? Apple can not deliver enough units for Christmas? this is the consequence of a new dispute between FNAC and Apple France or Europe? a new iPhone is coming in January?

Couple of years ago, Apple and VirginiaTech collaborated to build the most powerful supercomputer based on hundreds of G5 Xserve (named System X). Following the Intel switch, Apple did not pursue too intensively the server market, even though Xeon-based Xserve were released.
However, VirginiaTech did not give up on the idea of Mac hardware-based supercomputer, and just finished connecting 325 Mac Pro together, each one powered by 2 Quad-Core Xeon clocked at 2.8 GHz. Named System G, this supercomputer delivers 22.8 TFlops, and is twice as fast as its predecessor. The primary goal is to demonstrate that supercomputers can be both fast and a more environmentally green technology. To speed up communication between each computer, VirginiaTech used InfiniBand (40Gbs) interconnect technology. This cluster will only be around the 100th position in the top 500 Supercomputer ranking, but the purpose of System G is to provide a research platform for the development of high-performance software tools and applications with extreme efficiency at scale.

Due to numerous delays, we simply forgot about this product announced in September by Steve Jobs, and supposed to be available in October. Well, here they are, at least on the Apple US Apple Store, the new Apple-branded headphones: 2-ways, sound insulation, microphone and remote. Nothing really special, but you will have to pay 79 Euro... rather expensive for a sound quality which can not compete with products from third-parties (Shure, Sennheiser, JBL, Etymotic, etc.)

With a date of November, comes something to fire up the Web. Apple has dared, in a note to speak about antivirus, and worse - advises the installation of protection software.
This note goes against at least one Get-a-Mac commercial and breaks a taboo that we all know extremely well as each viral alarm causes an outcry on the Mac forums.
The question thus arises. Is it necessary to have an antivirus software on a Mac?
If you are a paranoid sort, yes certainly. On the other hand, if one refers to alarms that have been seen since Mac OS X was released, not really. Without going into details, all attacks are in fact Trojan horses, which need a user password to act. Any person using a bit of vigilance will understand that there is a problem and will refuse to give it. On the other hand, some people may enter the password, and this will be the starting point of problems. In short, some will need this kind of software not to protect their system which is low risk running alone, but to protect the system from their own ignorance and their credulity.
Attention, this does not mean to say that under OS X that there will never be more pernicious attacks, all is possible since an operating system and its appendices are composed of hundreds of thousands of lines of code. Thus, if you have fears, adopt such an umbrella. You will have much less chances of getting wet in case of a sudden storm.
[Update] Apple seems to have withdrawn its note dring the night, proof that it caused a disturbance.

If you need to protect your data at all costs, Macway (a reseller based in France) has started to market external Storeva disks that require an authentication from an RFID key.

If one does not 'open' the disk using the RFID key after having connected it, the data, via the USB controller will be inaccessible and of course illegible.
These USB cases only will be available in 2,5" from 160 GB (89€TTC) and in 3,5" up to 1,5 TB (249€TTC).
They are provided with two RFID keys. However security does have its disadvantages, the loss of these two keys leaves the data encoded in 128 bits.
Note to finish: it is the RFID key that contains the encryption code. In the event of breakdown of the electronics it will be necessary to change the case for another identical one and then one can retrieve the data intact.
To get more information:
http://www.macway.com