Stan's List

There are flaws, but Apple was right to rush their Intel Macs to market, Tom Yager of Infoworld opines in a piece republished at LinuxInsider.

Yager road tests the Core Duo MacBook Pro and iMac and is happy to see that Apple hasn’t farmed out the, er, farm to Intel. As with the PowerPC G5 Macs, Apple designed the mobo, but left the processor to IBM. Similarly, Intel does heart, but Apple does the brains with the MacIntels. As Yager notes, the iMac, Mac Mini and MBP are “assembled from best-of-breed components selected by Apple, leaving Intel to supply primarily the CPU and chipset.” More …

CDR Info reports that double-layer HD-DVD-R (quite a mouthful) is due to hit the shelves in the third quarter of this year.

The move represents a first strike on the part of the HD-DVD consortium. Apple has put its eggs into the Blu-Ray basket, along with main developer Sony, among others, including most Japanese consumer electronics manufacturers. PC companies have largely opted for HD-DVD, which uses Microsoft’s .wmv format for video and the AAC subset of QuickTime for audio.

Build 412 is available for download. Use the “Check for Update” feature in RealPlayer 10.1, or the direct download. If you get the message that you have the latest version, you will have download the full version. A reminder, RealPlayer 10.1 is a Universal Mac OS X application. The hope is Build 412 fixes the crashes in Universal Mozilla’s Firefox and Camino Web browsers.