Mhackintosh blog

It is not entirely clear what technology the trademark “Magic Trackpad” is meant to apply to and whether it would be some aspect of existing trackpads using in Apple’s notebook computers or if it would be some other device offering trackpad functionality.

A trademark is not related to any technology, patent, or anything else. A trademark is a reservation on it’s own, in one or more class of product or service, enabling the registrant to use it at will.

Trademark like iMac, iPod, Apple, Core i7, anything could be associated with them by their owner, it’s no technology or patent-related in any way. Example might be Apple changing iMac internally from PowerPC to Intel Core Duo, iPod as an hard-drive music player with a screen and rotating wheel used for a thumb-drive without hard-drive screen or wheel, Core i7 describing as welll 4-core 8thread processor or 2-core 4thread mobile processor, and so on…

A Trademark should just be considered as is, just a word, logo or sentence usually used to give confidence to customers or even trying to fake reality

PS: In fact, I think that this is related to the “Magic Mouse” trademark, that was not owned by Apple, needing to rename their “Magic Mouse” to “Apple Mouse” last year. They probably don’t want the owner of “Magic Mouse” trademark to be able to use “magic” with a trackpad. Vengeance?

I have a desktop quad-core packed of memory (8GB) and hard-drivesss (2×1TB for system in RAID-0, 2TB for video and another external 1TB for TimeMachine, and a second external 2TB for Videos). I also have a MacBook Pro 17″ with 500GB hard-drive, that is enough for my usage (Music, Photos, LAMP development, CUDA & OpenCL development), backuped on my TimeCapsule. And I began to use both for my work.

Now I need a complete solution to be able to sync them, sync my iTunes songs and playlist, sync my new photos and my Adobe Lightroom libraries and photo-processing, as well as my work documents. Work projects are “naturally” synchronized using my own Subversion server, or the SVN servers of the companies I work for. Nothing to worry!

I have a Dropbox account to synchronize some of my work, and shared documents with my co-workers, the easy way. It is text document, so with a free account that offers 2GB of backup and sharing space, it’s largely enough for that purpose.

But for my Music and Photos, I need approximately 250GB, and there’s many reasons I could not use DropBox or another internet-backup software:

1. they don’t offer plans for this storage capacity (and it’s growing with photo shoot sessions and new Music!)
2. if they will it will cost me an arm (probably around $300/Year, $900/3Years and hard-drive for 500GB is under $100 in USB2)
3. to backup 250GB using my Cable connection with 100KB/s (1Mb/s) upload link will take me ONE FULL MONTH with my computer on
4. my cable provider (Videotron) will charge me for each GB transferred after the first 50, it will cost me more than a MacPro to backup and sync!
5. To backup a photo session before editing and removing unwanted pictures (says around 8GB) will take me one full day! Stupid!

So what I need is not an Internet-based backup and file syncing, they offers too little storage space, my cable link is too slow, my provider too expensive, and it would be totally impossible to use it effectively!

What I need is a folder synchronization, using my home wifi network (AirPort), between my 2 Macs, at 100Mb/s (10MB/s) that is 100X faster than my Internet connection, free, that work flawlessly in the background. And if possible, handle my iTunes playlist synchronization too, because Music is a great part of my life!

I took time to find and check, and found 2 utilities, one that you might consider if you have backup needs (I don’t, I use TimeMachine and TimeCapsule to backup and have versioning), it’s ChronoSync ($40), targeted to power-user, with a cool (but 10$) ChronoAgent to ease backup & sync remotely without an Administrator account.

But the one that seems targeted for me is Martian SlingShot, simpler to use, designed to publish content from one Mac to many others, and moreover to automagically sync content between 2 or more Mac, even with iTunes integration

I am doing a test run of this cool application and begin to love it. Will probably buy the Martian SlingShot application, you just pay once whatever the number of Mac you own, it’s great. And perhaps send them some ribs for their barbecue!

I just bought an used (3 month old) Kingston SSD Now! 64GB SSD, for $130. It was a great SSD when launched, but for now, it’s under average on write speed, even largely under hard-drive speed, not talking about my RAID-0 2×1TB 7200 rpm system disk, but really actual when talking about read speed, with 220MB/s.

I would like to test a SSD for Mac OS X system, applications, and a bunch of usual files, including Windows and Linux Ubuntu VM, to see how it far compared to hard-drive, especially 2 hard-drives grouped in RAID-0. You have read many many benchmark, I suppose, and me too

I am not equipped to bench it, and anyway it doesn’t interest me. I would like to see if an average (by today metrics) SSD could do a difference in day-to-day use of Mac OS X, and what will be the feeling I have with it, compared to physical hard-drives in RAID-0, on a fast Mhackintosh (4×3.4Ghz, 8GB, GeForce 8800) extensively using firefox, mail, VMware fusion, Parallels, NetBeans (Java-coded tool I use for PHP development), MySQL database and more than that Adobe Lightroom for my pictures as a photographer.

Let’s playyyyyy!!!!! I will come back next week with more than MB/s, a feeling, a human report, maybe some advices!

The early 2010 MacBook Pro, expected this month, or at worse in march, will be equipped with Core i5 and Core i7 Mobile CPU, that are dual-core with 4 threads (Intel Hyperthreading technology). But I don’t bother 4-threads or even 4-core laptop at this point.

My equipment

I own a Mhackintosh desktop, with 4-core at 3.4Ghz, 8GB RAM, 2×1TB hard-drive in RAID-0 for system, music, photos, 2TB for video storage, GeForce 8800 GTS (CUDA & OpenCL development!), internal Blu-Ray/DVD; I also have a MacBook Pro 17″ dual-core 2.8Ghz, 4GB RAM, 500GB 7200rpm hard-drive with GeForce 9400M and GeForce 9600M GT (also CUDA and OpenCL development!).

These are great computers, and there are tasks that are really heavy for my laptop, such as Full-HD video encoding. I just confy them to my desktop under OS X or Windows 7, so my laptop is mainly used with netBeans (Java), MySQL, PHP, Adobe Lightroom or Photoshop, and many many open browser windows with FireFox, Safari or Chrome.

Heavy tasks are not the matter…

This is the point, not what is an heavy task, but what slow me when I want to have things done. Full-HD video encoding doesn’t slow me, albeit it’s the heaviest task I do: I put my desktop computer at work during the night, and forget the task, or even in daytime, using my laptop instead. So it’s not a matter of how heavy is a task, it’s more a matter of slowdown I encounter on my work, or how many time a task takes me to be completed.

What is slowing me down on my laptop?

On my day to day use, there’s many software that are slow, many of them because they are mono-threaded, as FireFox or Adobe Photoshop (main tasks are mono-thread, some rare filters multi-threaded), some other because of physical hard-drive being painfully slow, such as launching my applications on the morning (Mail+FireFox+Safari+NetBeans+…), browsing a huge photo library on Adobe Aperture (that is multi-threaded!), …

So we have 2 categories of slow-down: mono-threaded applications (or essentially mono-thread) and hard-drive bandwidth limited applications.

What could I do to make them faster?

For mono-threaded applications, you could just put a processor with higher frequency (or efficiency at same frequency), but to add core or thread won’t help, they don’t even use correctly a dual-core CPU, they usually are 32bits instead 64bits! Maybe the best is to choose a multi-threaded compatible application, or wait for the application to be optimized or rewritten?

For hard-drive bandwidth limited the solution is simple, put a faster hard-drive, but I have done that with an upgraded 7200rpm instead basic 5400rpm hard-drive. If rich, simply drop an SSD instead, it will do the job really faster. Just I couldn’t do that for my photo libraries, there’s no 512GB SSD available there! (And if it was, I couldn’t afford it)

Why I don’t bother 4-core or 4-thread mobile CPU?

It’s because there’s hard-drive bandwidth limited application where faster CPU won’t help in any way, and the other applications I am already awaiting dual-core support from them. A simple good support of my Core2 Duo mobile CPU will boost them with 60% to 90% faster speed, and it’s enough for me, at least now.

If application like FireFox or Photoshop CS4 were optimized to 64bits, it will offers me a 10% direct boost on performance, as stated by GeekBench. 10% is going from 2.8Ghz to 3.06Ghz equivalent for free!

If they were rewritten to support multi-threading on my simple dual-core dual-thread Core2 Duo, I would expect another boost ranging from 50% to 70% more. With the 64bit-support it will be a total 60% to 90% boost on performance, that will change my life as a Mac user!

I don’t care hyperthreading or 4-core new MacBook Pro, I just need correctly written 64bits multi-threaded applications to have my *ACTUAL* laptop flying high! And having 4-thread on Core i7 or even a 4-core Core i7 QM won’t help, these mono-threaded poorly written applications will just use 1-core, 1-thread, and leave more of what I paid for (Intel CPU) useless!

So, please Mozilla, please Adobe, rewrite your applications, go to 64bits Cocoa, multi-thread your code, make our actual laptop shine and reveal their real power!

This is the score of my MHackintosh on XBench, mainly due to use of 2×1TB hard-drive on RAID-0 as startup disk, offering a better balance between hard-drive speed and quad-core 4×3.4Ghz CPU speed! It’s registered under name “blog.mhackintosh.com”

Notice that average Mac Pro score 163.73 on XBench (including some hackintosh!), so my under-1000$ PC is largely faster than a majority of 2500$+ Macs!