Apple cencorship

UPDATE: In what appears be the first move toward censoring discussion of the issue, Apple Support has locked the discussion thread Bought new iMac 20" Faded Screen, which began on August 7 (the day the new iMacs were first sold) Compare Prices on iMac 20" Computers. The thread had, until it was locked earlier this week, served as the major focal point for discussion of the gradient color issue that continues to trouble owners of 20" and at least some 24" 2007 iMacs.

The discussion thread had seen a recent surge in activity since it was mentioned in the article below, and since the beginning of the holiday shopping season. From August 7 to November 18, a 95 day period, the thread chalked up an impressive 15,000+ hits, an average of about 158 hits per day. However, in the time since then, November 19 to December 10, a period of only 21 days, the thread gained an additional 9000 hits, an average of about 429 hits per day.

Further exacerbating the censorship matter, new posts regarding the gradient color issue are being deleted and replaced with error messages, as seen in this example: iMac Screen Gradient - What's the next step? (we captured a screen shot of the post before it was deleted). Apple has not replied to any of the posts regarding the gradient color issue in its Intel-based iMac Display support forum, or for that matter, even acknowledged the existence of such an issue.

Futuremark's 'Vantage'

Introduction

We’d been expecting it sooner (3DMark06 is more than two years old now and DirectX 10 and Vista have been out for over a year), but only now is Futuremark lifting the veil from its latest 3DMark - sporting the name "Vantage" instead of the expected "3DMark08." As with each edition, we’ll do a quick presentation, since the philosophy of this benchmarking program hasn’t really changed (any more than its inherent problems), and we don’t see any more need to use it than we did for previous versions. As we’ll see, drivers optimized specifically for 3DMark are already available (Nvidia is making its ForceWare 175.12 beta available today for the occasion), and the test scenes use a rendering engine that isn’t used by any game (even if that is the direction in which the company wants to move with its Futuremark Games Studio).

3DMark’s goal has always been to simulate the demands future games will make before the fact and to determine the resulting hierarchy of graphics cards. However, it has failed in that goal, as the results of 3DMark06 show - it favors AMD cards over Nvidia’s and does not offer reliable benchmarks for most current games. Not to mention 3DMark’s rendering, which hasn’t evolved and is still "cartoonish." But despite all that, it remains the tool both manufacturers and overclockers use. So let’s see what this new version is made of and what scores the current crop of cards can attain.