Yes! The newly announced refreshed Macbooks and Macbook Pro are due to NUS and NTU soon. As stated in NUS tender website, sales start on 3 November.
The New Macbooks!
The newly designed Macbooks and Macbook Pro are made of an aluminium unibody. Come with LED-backlit LCD glossy screen and NVIDIA GeForce 9400M graphics chipset, which is 5 times faster than the Intel X3100 Integrated Graphics chipset.
For the Macbook, only the 2.0 Ghz model is available. 2.4 Ghz Macbook Pro is available too.
The new Macbooks come at at attractive price of S$2,142 for the Macbook and S$2,942 for the Macbook Pro. Price stated without 7% GST. It comes with 3 years warranty, Microsoft Office 2008 and Adobe Creative Suite CS3.
As Creative Suite 4 is released, it seems it’s a bit outdated. You can hold on for a few months to grab the new CS4 if you do not need a new Macbook yet.
Once again, it is the time of the year where freshmen are troubling which laptop to buy during the matriculation fair.
Fear not. Look out for the various recommendations here, for each category of laptop that is offered in the matriculation fair.
Recently, ultraportable laptops such as the ASUS EEEPC and MSI Wind have taken the laptop since by storm. With their small size, they are able to be put inside your bag without signficant burden.
This year, the tender has offered a few ultraportables. Let’s take a look.
There are several changes to to specifications of the laptop lineup after 7 months since the last update. Most of the 2.0GHz laptops have upgraded to 2.2 Ghz. However, I will highlight the biggest changes in the lineup.
Top of the list is the Fujitsu E8410U, featuring the new Intel Core 2 Duo T9300 @ 2.5 GHz with 6MB cache, previously was 2.0 Ghz with 4MB Cache. This laptop runs on the new Intel Santa Rosa platform with the new 45nm mobile processor. This is currently the fastest laptop available in the list. On top of the change of processor, there will be 2GB of RAM and 250 GB HDD, instead of 1 GB RAM and 160 GB HDD.
What is disappointing is the missing of the ultraportable Macbook Air. Although the Macbooks are generally more expensive than the retail/online price from Apple, it is still worthwhile to get as Adobe CS3 and Microsoft Office (2008, hopefully) are bundled together. If you are a Mac fan, you will have to wait.
For the incoming Freshies in AY08/09, you might find this a small preview to what you can expect when you matriculate in July.
If you have keep up with the news regarding the crackdown on anime downloaders via the popular Bittorrent protocol, you will have seen horror news such as a 9 years old kid with his parent paying a huge payout to avoid court case.
The online communities such as Hardwarezone, VR-Zone and SGCafe, have exciting discussions on this issue.
Well, we all know that downloading copyrighted materials off the Internet is against the laws. Japanese animations, anime in short, are not available to the Singapore public or the anime community as readily as possible due to time lag in language translation and importing issues.
One of the companies here in Singapore, which holds the licenses to many animes, has started their operation to crackdown anime downloaders (most of them are young children and teenagers).
In my knowledge, anime has not infested this small red dot a decade ago. But in recent years, anime has become one of the hottest stuffs among the teenagers. In today’s broadband technology, it will take about an hour or less to get hold of the latest episode of anime just few days after the actual airing of the anime in Japan. All these are the commendable efforts from the fansubbers. Most of them works without monetary gains.
Official license holder in the country, usually produces the same anime with subtitles, in series. That means, the release might lag up to few months. Another concern is the quality of the videos and the accuracy of the translation. Many complained that the subtitles from the local distributor is of sub standard. There are a few examples published online.
The distributor need to consider the fact the anime can propagate into Singapore community is not due to chance. It is through words-to-words, man-to-man, over several years. If the distributor is taking this chance to earn quick bucks from the community, instead of building a strong long-term plan to satisfy the anime community, the short-sightedness of the company is really very short. What a company should do is to build a long term relationship with the community, instead of squeezing money out of the community. The aftermath of this incident is certainly to be a nasty one.
I just touched on the open beta of Lineage II for South East Asia, and I will give a short review on the game.
Since this game was developed in year 2004, graphics technology was outdated. With your GeForce 6 series or Radeon 9000 series, I guess you can turn on all the details.
Secondly, the interface of Lineage II was similar to many “free” MMORPGs such as Silkroad Online. You can get used to the interface straight away if you are a WoWer before. The interface also lacks the attractiveness, the buttons do not have colours.
Game experience is ok, as they are not many players currently, the latency is not very high.
Overall, it is a game that might attract the non-WoWer. However, it is still on a beta stage, things can be improved.
