Issues around the Apple campus

A proposal [architectural] backward, reminiscent of the Pentagon in 1943 as well as architecture firms in the suburbs in the years 1960/1970," the architecture critic of the Los Angeles Times, Christopher Hawthorne, looks tough enough on Campus 2, Apple unveiled the project in early June by Steve Jobs at Cupertino City Council.

Ultrabook

In recent days, the great wave of Ultrabook. Acer, Lenovo or Toshiba have recently introduced models that inspired quite frankly the MacBook Air. If the ultraportable Apple will have competition in the coming weeks, manufacturers embark on this segment timidly. According to DigiTimes, no more than 50 000 models were produced to deal with the initial application. It must be said that the market for personal computing is at half mast. In addition, some manufacturers may have learned the lesson of the iPad. Many had produced large quantities of tablets and currently have the greatest difficulty in selling them.
Most of these models will arrive on the market next month. Intel, which firmly believes in the concept, planning a conference on the subject on Sept. 14. The semiconductor giant has well resolve the various problems relating to technological Ultrabook and hopes to quickly find new partners. Intel's goal is ambitious, but for now seems out of reach: ensure that by the end of 2012, the share of Ultrabook represents 40% of mobile phone sales to the general public. Intel is also disavowed by one of its partners, Asustek, which estimates that this target will be missed. On the other hand, Asian society already promised that the next generation of Ultrabook expected in April 2012 will be sold cheaper. These models will feature architecture Ivy Bridge. Anyway, it's a funny way to advertise the current generation.

Samsung v Apple

Apple may expand its folder that contrasted with Samsung in Australia if she agreed to disclose sales figures of the iPad in England and the United States. As a reminder, September 26, Justice Annabelle Bennett of the Australian Federal Court in Sydney to hold a hearing at the request of Apple. Having dithered, Samsung has finally shifted to the September 30 launch in the country of his Galaxy Tab 10.1. The judge advised Apple to report sales figures of the tablet in two countries where the Galaxy Tab 10.1 is present (in the US sales, announced in England) to assess to what extent this was actually an impact on sales. But this is by no means a requirement and it also rejected a request from Samsung to force Apple to do so. Because it is confronted with a possible commercial reality of the claims of lawyers who feel that Apple's "remarkable similarity of the product from Samsung in terms of functionality and appearance" inevitably affect sales. In contrast, Bloomberg said, Samsung's lawyer argues that clients first choose an OS "People want an Android product, so they will buy a product Android. It has no effect on sales of Apple. " Does Apple will follow the advice of the judge? She has a habit in its quarterly results report the sales figures of its iPad. But only as a global figure consolidated, and never by large regions or even less for each country.

iTunes Match

A spokesperson for Apple was keen to clarify at All Things D-shaped correction of all media - including us - with iTunes Match described as a listening service streaming. Match iTunes would use a local cache: pressing the download button triggers not playback of a song streaming pure remote, but downloading a song in AAC format 256 local pieces read as it is downloaded. Streaming requires a constant connection to the server, the file being downloaded piece by piece. With icloud, Apple does things differently: the 256 AAC file is downloaded in its entirety in the local cache, allowing in particular, as long as the connection is good, start playing immediately and to move forward through the song without waiting for buffering. This system is also more easily deployable on a large scale: concurrent connections for streaming could bend mobile networks and degrade the user experience. But in the end, no matter: the same way that most users do not know about Specify its elaborate system of P2P (and time of Hadopi and shortcuts coarse it entails, it is better that they know nothing about), most users do not care about the precise operation certainly not Match iTunes. Apple is indeed everything that his system is like the hardcore streaming from the perspective of the user. While the song is downloaded in the local cache, switch to airplane mode and you cannot read it. Apple can be dispensed to provide a system for managing the size of the cache: it denies the existence of the local cache. While the song is downloaded in the local cache, it will be seen as downloaded by the system if the user has explicitly pressed the download button. While technically there is only one step - download the song - Apple separates for the user to listen and download, to facilitate understanding of the system. Music "rises" in the cloud of your iTunes icloud automatically; you can play a song directly in the cloud or to "descend" to your iPhone or your iPhone by pressing a button. Never mind the semantic and technical discussions are certainly important for a fringe of users, but are similar to all other pinailleries - provided that the system works.

Virtualization with Parallels Desktop Lion 7

First, it will be recalled with Leo, Apple allows users to virtualize its system software provided of course that it is run from a Mac. Previously, the Apple brand store for this possibility to edit "Server" Mac OS X Parallels Desktop is the first virtualization solution to allow it (without having to tinker) but there is no doubt that VMware and Oracle exploit this feature very soon in their respective software. Installing OS X Lion is simple, but slow. Parallels Wizard starts the recovery partition and prompts you to install Mac OS X 10.7 on your virtual machine. The biggest problem with this approach is that it is better not to hurry. The installer must before starting his work to recover the archive to install OS X Leo. It is not without problems for those who have acquired the USB Mac OS X 10.7. Despite a good ADSL connection, the installation process has taken two to three hours. After the installation is completed, the virtual machine restarts. Then, like any virtual machine, you are prompted to install the Parallels Tools. The application mounts a disk image on your desktop. You just have to start the installation as with any software. As with any virtual machine, Parallels allows you to set a range of parameters: amount of memory, graphics acceleration, storage ... As with any Windows virtual machine, you can also exchange files between your Mac and Mac virtualized. In performance, the results are quite honest. Your Mac is more powerful and more RAM you have, the better it will be. It should be noted that the coherence mode that allows you to melt the windows of Windows applications on your Mac can not be activated, but the interest of this feature with Mac OS X is very limited. 2010 on a MacBook Air Core 2 Duo 2.16 GHz with 4 GB of RAM, performance is completely honest. As always with virtualization, we feel the limits of this process as soon as you begin to make sustained use of the graphics processor. On the other hand, the fan of the MacBook Air can be heard more than usual. Out of curiosity, we tried to install Snow Leopard in a virtual machine. In this case, the application displays a short message reminding that Apple does not allow the virtualization of this version of Mac OS X. It is not officially unofficially making do, it is always possible. In any case, it is unfortunate for those who depend on it for one reason or another Rosetta. Recall that a demo version of Parallels Desktop 7 [260 MB] functional for 15 days is available for download.