News for Tuesday, 23 December 2008

All the owners of portables know the characteristic noise that the Superdrive makes when the laptop is started or woken from sleep. Since the 10.5.6 update, certain people are confronted with a bug that causes in a regular way (approximately every 5 minutes) this noise as long as the machine is in operation.
As always with the bugs of Apple, we are unaware of the reasons that certain machines are touched and others are not. Someone, however, has found a radical solution to regulate this problem. She erased the software "diskutil" that one uses via the terminal for commands on the functions of the hard drives.
Once this file was erased, all returned to order. This seems to indicate that an unspecified process in the machines comes to regularly question the Superdrive on its state and causes this noise. We however do not advise you touching Diskutil unless you are particularly sure of what you are doing and have made a backup of your system.

If Windows XP was the last successful version of Microsoft OS, it becomes now a real problem for the company as so many users and OEM refuse to drop it for Vista or any forthcoming replacement. Windows XP does not want to die.
Following the recent request from customers and OEM as well as computer companies, Windows XP lifetime has been extended by Microsoft till January 31 2009, however resellers will have the opportunity to stock licenses and have the right to sell them till May 30th 2009. We would not be surprised if Microsoft further extends the deadline for resellers when the current fixed date will be reached. At the end, Windows XP might survive to Vista, demonstrating the major failure for this version of Windows.

All CPU manufacturers are actively working on solutions for the post-silicon era. One of the current alternatives is the graphene (a single atomic layer of graphite).

As a proof that this solution seems promising, IBM announced to have built and used a graphene-based transistor at 26 GHz, a new record. Of course this is an achievement, but we are still far away from the manufacturing of an entire graphene-based CPU and even more from the mass production. For sure, we might now see the way that the IT industry will follow for the next quarter of a century when the silicon era will end, if it ever happens as its end has been announced so many times...

If you already tried to use a laptop outdoors, you will have noted that it is difficult, and even impossible to have a display that makes it possible to work as soon as the ambient light becomes stronger than the retro-lighting.
LG will soon present a solution which could solve this problem. The manufacturer announced a LCD screen that inside will function in a traditional way, by using the retro-lighting (system known as adaptive), however outside will adopt to a transmissive mode, in which the retro will be cut and the screen will be lit by the ambient light as if there was a mirror behind the screen.
This system presents another significant advantage. If the ambient light is sufficiently bright, the battery life of the machine will be increased since the retro-lighting is cut.
This screen will be presented at CES 2009 that will be held from January 8 in Las Vegas.
Alas, it is not known if such a system improves the situation for the brilliant screens outdoors, such as those that Apple imposes on us now in its portables.

As expected, Intel started to ship the new version of its flagship SSD, the X25-M. this new model features 160 GB storage space.

As we recently demonstrated in a recent test of the 80 GB X25-M SSD in a MacBook Pro, Intel currently owns the crone for the fastest SSD available on the customer electronic market. However, such SSD are not cheap and their extremely high performance level has a cost. The 80 GB model is currently available at 650 €, and the 160 GB model should be rather expensive too even if the official price remain unknown.
One will have to wait H1 2009 to see prices of SSD to significantly decrease, and most likely some years for those products to become available to the main users.

Apple offers an update for Mail via its support website (and not from the automatic software update panel). It seems that Mail might not be properly updated in the recent transition from 10.5.5 to 10.5.6.

For additional information, please visit the dedicated website: http://support.apple.com/downloads/Mail_Update