News for Thursday, 11 December 2008

The Open Handset Alliance who organises all the industrialists interested in Androïd and its developments announced the arrival of 14 new members, AKM Semiconductor Inc., ARM, ASUSTek Computer Inc., Atheros Communications, Borqs, Ericsson, Garmin International Inc., Huawei Technologies, Omron Software Co. Ltd, Mobile Softbank Corporation, Sony Ericsson, Teleca AB, Toshiba Corporation and Vodafone.
There are some among this crowd who will give to this operating system for mobile phones initiated by Google, a new strength and very strong developmental perspectives.
Of course, Apple which has its OS X and Nokia which pushes Symbian do not form part of this group and will defend tooth and nail their solutions compared to that of Google. Microsoft, who continues to defend its in-house system, is not a partner either in spite of the significant decrease of its market shares. In the long term, Windows Mobile will be certainly the first impacted by Androïd. Indeed, since Microsoft do not manufacture telephones, they will have to convince their partners not to go to Androïd whereas Nokia and Apple have another lever at their disposal, that is the telephones that they manufacture and market under their own brand.

A new Apple's patent has now been released and might let us imagine how the interface of Mac OS X might evolve in the future:


The finder is described as a 3D environment with windows, files and docks that can be organized on different layers in the depth of the finder (a bit like depth of field in photo).
However, this is not entirely new, and it strongly remind us a project developed in 2002 by MacWarriors under the name 3D OS X:

You could browse through files and folders hierarchy of your HD in 3D. It is unclear if a Finder in 3D would use a true 3D technology or the more classical subjective 3D system, but it looks to be the future.

Hereafter is an "illegal" photo of what should be the future GeForce GTX 295.

This card should only be unveiled beginning of 2009, but we already know that it will be powered by 2 FT200 GPU in order to increase its raw computing power.
As shown on the photo, it sports 2 DVI Dual Link ports and a HDMI output.
Of course, as Mac users, we would be happy if Apple and NVidia could work together to offer a Mac version of this card for the future Mac Pro and the forthcoming Snow Leopard. Such GPU raw computing could be perfectly used with Snow Leopard and OpenCL, offering better video and graphic rendering for our Macs.

Apple proposes updates of the SMC and EFI for new MacBook, MacBook Pro and MacBook Air. The first improves the sensing and accuracy of the MagSafe Power Adapter indicator light, and the battery charge indicator lights and the second improves the stability of the machines.
They are available via the software; first apply the EFI update, then update the SMC.

In spite of its first defeat against Apple, Psystar has not given up hope and sets out again on the attack by modifying its arguments. They are centered around two points:
- That Apple’s Mac OS EULA abuses copyright law (misuse doctrine) and is being used to block competition
- That Apple is using the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) as a form of paracopyright, going beyond the protection offered by copyright.
Other points are raised in the detail in the documents provided by Psystar to the courts. They reproach Apple of having intentionally added to Mac OS X code in order to pose problems if one tries to run it on non-Apple hardware…
In short, they make fire of any wood they find to obtain a win in a business that looks rather bad for them. But they have hardly any other choice. Either they manage to obtain win, or their company will have to put the shutters up.

Even though many thought that the price of the random access memory had reached a floor, the economic crisis has opened a trap door into which the components seem to fall without end.
In one month, chips of DDR2 have plunged by another 50%. On several occasions, we thought it will be difficult to go down much lower, the manufacturers all losing colossal sums to sell their products at this price.
It will be soon possible to inflate our machines of the maximum of memory, even for the Mac Pro for ridiculously small sums.