News for Tuesday, 9 December 2008

Even though the APR (Apple premium resellers) had obtained for a long time the promise from Apple to be able to market the iPhone, this option was unceasingly pushed back and until now they did not have the right to sell it.
Things could finally change in the next few days. They have received publicity material, posters,etc at the place of sale in order to make the promotion of the telephone.
With a little luck, they will receive the iPhones very soon, and will have little extra to propose for the end of year festivities.

Luc Besson, the French movie director known for many of his films and anime (5th element, Nikita, etc.), decided to fight against piracy, but unlike to promote DRM or all kind of technology restrictions for the customer, he wants to change the way and the schedule currently followed by a movie from its release in cinema till its availability on TV.
Currently in France, from the day the movie is shown for the first time in cinema, the schedule is as follow:
- 6 months later, available on DVD/BD media (renting or purchasing)
- 33 weeks later, movie available on VOD
- 9 months later, movie available on private TV channel, pay-per-view offer
- 12 months later, movie available on private TV channel
- 24 months (or 18 months), movie on free/public TV channels if they contributed to its production
- 36 months later, movie on all free/public TV channels
Luc Besson wants to shake this schedule, break those layers of distribution, and he offers to make the movie available on VOD as soon as its life in cinema has ended. If such offer might indeed compete with illegal downloading from P2P networks, it will of course not please companies making money by distributing movies on physical media. This offer could help local systems to unify worldwide to avoid having one country having more relaxed regulations preventing homogenous online movie offers. Currently, we are paying premium price for movies on DVD and BD media, in order for Hollywood studios to sell identical products around 1 USD in China or India…

Maxime as many of us could not resist and purchased a MacBook Pro. Of course, he wanted to enjoy the manufacturing work as well as the finishing layer. The enclosure includes at least 2 clear spots were the aluminum seems to be attacked or removed:


He also noticed that the finishing layer around the speaker's grid is removed or damaged too:

We would most likely not talk about this problem if it was the only cases reported, however we received similar information from different MBP unibody owners. If it does not seem to affect many MBP, it is not negligible.
In addition, in most reported cases, the MBP lower gate, while MacBook does not seem to be affected by the problem so far. Let's hope that Apple will quickly refresh and improve the frequency and level of its quality control in order to avoid any samples featuring such defects to be shipped.

As reported by HMBT, the forthcoming update Mac OS X 10.5.6 should fix 103 bugs currently present in Mac OS X. This would include miscellaneous graphics corruption issues, issues with DVI and display recognition, poor syncing services, printing PDF from Mail, and several MobileMe syncing problems. Of course, most of those bugs are not directly affecting most users or linked to specific applications.
This update should be made available for download in couple of weeks.

Thanks to its success and issues faced by NVidia, ATI announced that its Radeon HD 4870 will be cheaper and its current price of 199 USD for the model featuring 512 MB of VRAM should drop soon. This price cut arrives right on time to compete with the release of the 55-nm engraved and faster NVidia GeForce GTX 260.
As usual, Mac users will have to look at such models as spectators till Apple finally change its policy regarding graphic cards, maybe things will evolve with Snow Leopard.

In its edition of December 8, the economic newspaper Les Echos starts again the debate on the health of Steve Jobs. If though the article avoids the voyeurism that we have already seen on the web, it questions the capacity of Apple to continue without its charismatic chief and takes stock of 3 potential successors, Tim Cook, Jonathan Ive and Scot Forstall.
There is nothing new, this subject largely having already been treated during these last months.
The breaking news which we succeeded in obtaining, it goes as well as possible even if his daily life is far from easy. The true risk; is not that something will happen to him, but rather the consequences of his operations give him the desire for retreating more and more from public life. He will gradually yield the reins of power to his lieutenants while keeping a critical eye on their work. But this transition largely begun some years back.

The United States is certainly the champions in the West for penalization of illegal downloading, the Majors do not hesitate to pursue thousands of net surfers who have contributed to the dissemination of music via P2P networks. But in fact, these judgments, with sometimes incredibly heavy fines (a few hundred thousand dollars) have not succeeded in damming up the phenomenon.
An initiative launched by Warner and with the approval of the RIAA could offer the universities and their students a shelter. It would act quite simply with the students paying a royalty(as part of their tuition fee) in exchange they could download, without fear of legal action, all the music they want. Several universities are very interested by this proposal which will also avoid to them having to install and manage heavy filtering of the internet.
In short, these students will have soon the possibility (one does not know if they will have the choice) to adhere to a system of global licensing. We suppose that if this life size test is validated by all parties, it will be then proposed beyond the universities.
So for a long time we have been hostile to a global license, however we wonder whether it would preferable to the future which Hadopi prepares for us. (Hadopi is a French initiative that has a graduated response to piracy leading to 3 times and you out),