News for Monday, 9 February 2009

According to Nikkei business, Pioneer will announce on February 12 its intention to withdraw from the market of flat screen televisions completely.
Initially, the company had announced its intention not to manufacture screens and to use those of Panasonic. But since, the economic crisis and the increase in the value of the Yen, this activity became far too competitive.
Pioneer will centre itself towards other less competing and more lucrative activities.

At the end of last week the owners the iPhone in the United States were entitled to an update not relating to directly the operating system of their telephone, but the adjustments related to the operator AT&T.
The only notable change found by MobileCrunchis the presence of a new logo operator.

This implies that this operator will launch out soon in the famous FemtoCell technology that will allow the customers who want to put up a mini antenna in their residence able relay GSM to their mobiles and communicate using DATA.
There are several advantages with this technology:
- It allows cover without problem inside buildings, even in white area.
- In spite of its low power, equivalent to that of a Wi-Fi terminal, it allows on the telephone to use a fraction of its maximum power to communicate with the network.
- It can operate using the economies on the communications that come as part of VoIP and to have DATA transfers maximized by internet connection.
- The operators can use these cells to develope a network with lower costs in the very dense zones.
SFR has worked officially with this kind of thing for a few months, and we would not be astonished that Free.fr also makes use of this technology. Indeed for them, this is an excellent means is of minimizing the development cost of their 3G network. For the customers there will be of course also a notable interest. They will be able certainly to use their mobile on their premises or via a Freephone network without having to pay the cost of a mobile communication.

Apple AppStore is a huge success, and demonstrated its potential not only on short term but also on the long term, bringing revenues to the company thanks to the growing pool of compatible devices (iPhone/iPod Touch). As usual, other manufacturers decided to copy this successful system, and after Microsoft and Nokia, it is now Samsung that will launch its own online application online store at the end of the month (http://applications.samsungmobile.com.
Samsung as other companies will have to demonstrate that their solutions are viable and attract customers, offering high quality application at competitive price. They will also have to convince developers to invest in their platform, as most of them moved to the iPhone platform, and some of them made quite a lot of money with this ecosystem. IPhone-developers are currently heavily recruited and this is not a field where one can record unemployment.

Last Friday, Psystar was authorized by the judge to modify its filing against Apple, and to add additional data/claims:
- The Licensing contract makes abusing usage of copyright to block competition
- Apple makes too much use of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) to strengthen its copyright, and makes much too broad claims.
Apple quickly reacted, claiming that Psystar could not modify its legal documents as the issue is already being considered by the justice. For sure, it gives a bit more time to Psystar to make some business... from the result of this legal action will depend the future on Mac clones...

According to a forum member from Insanelymac, the last beta version of Snow Leopard features the latest drivers dedicated to the ATI Radeon HD 4800 series.


It shows that apple does not plan to move to a NVidia-only source for its GPU, and this is a good news at ATI is well known for delivering the best drivers for Mac support, especially for OpenGL-based applications
It will be interesting to compare OpenCL performance of such cards with those available from NVidia. Indeed, NVidia is supposed to be leading the pack concerning GPGPU. With the release of Snow Leopard, choosing the right graphic card might become a bit of a nightmare, as 3D performance will not be the only parameter to consider, and GPGPU-based gain might be worth a deeper look at.

The Unibody portables now form part of the standard equipment of Refurb. On the program:
- Macbook 2,4 GHz with 1299€ (- 200€)
- Macbook Pro 15" 2,4 GHz with 1529€ (- 270€)
- Macbook Pro 15" 2,53 GHz with 1919€ (- 330€)
Attention with the 17" model that is of course of the former generation, the new one has not yet started to be delivered.
@ Le Refurb

Since the firmware update of the iPhone, certain people encountered problems with iTunes; it hangs during synchronization. Apple proposes a means of fixing the problem rather easily:
- Launch iTunes (iPhone or iPod touch not connected)
- In the menu Store, click on " Withdraw access authorization to this computer… " and return the password requested.
- In the same menu, authorize this computer again and enter your identifier and password for the iTunes Store.
For the vast majority of the cases, the problem will be solved. Some were obliged to validate " buy" of a new free software to really complete this fix.

HP has published a warning note to the owners of LaserJet and Color LaserJet printers. A fault in the firmware of certain models would allow pirates to get at the files in progress of printing or in the list waiting to be printed. The printers concerned are the following ones:
HP LaserJet 2410 having a firmware prior to the 20080819 SPCL112A 

HP LaserJet 2420 having a firmware prior to the 20080819 SPCL112A 

HP LaserJet 2430 having a firmware prior to the 20080819 SPCL112A 

HP LaserJet 4250 having a firmware prior to the 20080819 SPCL015A 

HP LaserJet 4350 having a firmware prior to the 20080819 SPCL015A 

HP LaserJet 9040 having a firmware prior to the 20080819 SPCL110A 

HP LaserJet 9050 having a firmware prior to the 20080819 SPCL110A 

HP LaserJet 4345mfp having a firmware prior to the 09.120.9 

HP Color LaserJet 4730mfp having a firmware prior to the 46.200.9 

HP LaserJet 9040mfp having a firmware prior to the 08.110.9 

HP LaserJet 9050mfp having a firmware prior to the 08.110.9 

HP 9200C DIGITAL Sender having a firmware prior to the 09.120.9 

HP Color LaserJet 9500mfp having a firmware prior to the 08.110.9
It is fortunately possible to make a firmware update from Mac OS X even though the operationis a bit experimental since all that is needed is to send the file via ftp to the printer.