To make this a bit less provincial:

Post #304,467 by Ashton 2/21/09 4:15:19 PM 2/21/09 5:04:11 PM Reply	To make this a bit less provincial: Who has more moxie in the consumer-Mega-$$ World: Sony + all those video camera mfgs or Apple Corp? And amidst Apple and non-A folk: raise hands if you have a video camera, editor or other -- with FWire. Multiply-self by [how many of those video gadgets Did they sell, past x years / sigma-$$ ?] Note: not arguing inferior/superior techno here; all Know what really gets to market (and why Muricans elected crap-VHS over the then-2nd-gen Super-beta; its demonstrably higher-res.) (Oh and.. my Super-Beta tapes work fine on my Sony SL-HF650. With occasional use -?- for probably another 20 years, if it came to that.) Mylar is one tough plastic. Especially compared to the dye-bugs eating home-recorded CDs, DVDs, etc. Longevity is just soo kewl, y'know?) SImilarly, whether or not Steve, the Decider-II? finds commercial reasons to dump the jacks; I suspect that all recent so-equipped HD-enclosures and all those cameras extant: shall have functioning electronics ~~ like all other electronics: indefinitely. (The HDs-inside may come and go, of course.) Maybe ya gots inside info; but I'd think that the Fate of FWire is apt to be much more about the usual arbitrary bizness finagling, not the techno; has it ever been otherwise? Daisy-chaining appears to appeal to the same folks whose only decent HDs were those very-fast but capacity-challenged SCSIs. Dunno, of course, how many big studios have jillions of HD boxes connected this way for their PBytes of cartoon graphics. Could they have a vote, too? Then too, for perspective: such matters may just evanesce.. depending on the length and duration of soup lines, don'tcha think? People may have to make their own music, maybe forming new Murican Colliery Bands .?. as the alleged 'Clean Coal' magic sends a slice of the 20% unemployed back to How Green was My Valley (but without Walter Pidgeon.) :-0 PS: My cute-tiny, <$100 400 GBWD-Passport backup HD arrived yesterday. Nice Sale @ MacMall. FW 400, 800, USB; already formatted w/journalled. Pop-in; install {with some trepidation til I saw it has also an Uninstaller} their er, 'Turbo-drivers'. Since this Mgr. seems to use only about 5 mb, guess it's OK. If it passes infant mortality, it can just sit there. Time machine began with ~23 GB to store. Drive barely warmed. Xfer speed (FW-800 + the fancy drivers) varied, natch, between original big files (near 500 MBytes/min) to as few as 200 -- apparently with heads picking up a few-K here and another few, 100 cylinders away? Academic WTF speed FW attained: TMachine has all the time in the world. 'Course if I wanted to stream a movie, not first copy to local-HD, etc. etc. . Edited by Ashton Feb. 21, 2009, 05:04:11 PM EST Expand All History
Post #304,471 by Another Scott 2/21/09 5:29:46 PM Reply	Keep an eye on it. Like everything, TimeMachine is not bulletproof. I heard a story yesterday at work about TM. The details that follow may be garbled, but the gist is: One of my colleagues' Mac is dying (it apparently has one of the nVidia cards with "bad bumps"). As you might expect, since the MacOS is so heavily tied to graphics, once the video card starts flaking out, the rest of the OS has problems. As such, many of the recent TM backups via a separate system failed without the user knowing it. His last good TM backup was over a month old. At times TM was trying to do a full backup rather than an incremental one, but still failing. The system disk is still accessible in TargetDisk mode, so nothing's been lost, but he will be without the machine for a while when it goes back for repair of the video system. This is nothing unusual, of course, with computer hardware. The lesson is, though, keep an eye on the logs, and don't assume that just because the power button is glowing that everything's Ok. TM can't do magic. ;-) Have fun! Cheers, Scott.
Post #304,475 by pwhysall 2/21/09 6:03:45 PM Reply	Yeah, that does sound garbled. The NVidia graphics card in my iMac failed last year. Thermal failure, so slow degradation to unusability. The filesystem on both internal and external disks was untouched. I'm not sure what is meant by "heavily tied to graphics". Like any modern OS, the front end (Aqua and Quartz) is fully hardware-accelerated (either 2D or 3D, depending on the available graphics hardware) but this has no bearing on things like the disk subsystem. That sounds like someone saying something based on an incomplete understanding - it sounds suitably technically plausible. That said, a failing graphics card could, I suppose, dump enough crap onto the PCI bus that the disk subsystem starts timing out operations. I dunno how segmented the PCIe bus is, and whether it segregates the data from different slots. I would imagine, though, that the PCIe stuff is separated from the SATA stuff. TM requires HFS+ to work. Unless you explicitly turn it off, you get this journalled, so you can be reasonably confident that if the OS says something worked and got written to disk, it did. TM is pretty quick to complain if things don't work - you get an error message dialogue box in the middle of the screen, so you don't have to look in the logs via Console to see if backups aren't working.
Post #304,476 by Another Scott 2/21/09 6:05:55 PM Reply	Thanks. :-)
Post #304,484 by folkert 2/21/09 10:25:45 PM Reply	Thanks... Was gonna write something similar. You beat me to it.
Post #304,498 by Ashton 2/22/09 3:39:54 AM Reply	Query re Quartz and such -- Greg, Peter? A similar (dumbed-down/wishful?) blurb, IIRC in MacFormat, while describing the likeliest strategy of Snow Leopard -- mentioned increased use of the graphics accelerator (another CPU-by any other name) to assist in functions other than purely graphics tasks. 'Strategy', that is: no new Toys in that release; concentrate on rewriting Finder and slimming-down, speeding-up, bug-fixing in the other included-aps. Specifically mentioned were some before/after sizes of various bits. So it seemed more than a what-if? piece. Know anything about this exploitation of all that video horsepower? Doesn't sound analogous to the old-time math-coprocessor add-ons which, if I grok sufficiently: merely got handed off some math which was otherwise left to the ap software to accomplish, more slowly. To me the concept sounds ~~ to the parallel-processing conundrum: not at all intuitive how you accomplish efficient use of n cores, especially in what seem to be serial/sequential processes (or say.. many things occurring on which you cannot close some loop -- not-to-say recursively.) I mean.. maybe some jelloware can think within those constraints, but it isn't what most dealt with to pass Computer Sci. Is it? Know any boffins on the bleeding edge? I, curious.
Post #304,499 by pwhysall 2/22/09 4:49:46 AM Reply	I hope so. And so do Apple. However, everything I know about this is on their Snow Leopard page: http://www.apple.com...cosx/snowleopard/
Post #304,758 by Ashton 2/26/09 11:45:57 PM Reply	One more Q on your graphics failure, please -- ..the NVidia graphics card ... does that imply an actual socket, or did they replace the mobo? Jeez, I'd hope that some parts of this assembly are socketed; a mobo is a Terrible thing to waste, one week after warranty expires. (Like to see some pix of inside this jewel. I noticed (and read) that the major heat source, the 'GPU', as the thermistor is labelled in iStat -- is the hottest of the 8 points monitored, and a spot I Should watch, when the ambient around here hits the mid-80°s F. One poster reported 90° C !! on his == that's military-grade hi-performance / lo-lifetime territory.) I want this gadget to last 6+ years, whatever insanely-Great new stuff will definitely be designed next, to seduce moi into a steady diet of Ramen.

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