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News & Opinion
Rumor Roundup
Tech Trends
Products & Services
Software
News & Opinion
Maximize Your Older Mac's Performance
MacFixIt's Topher Kessler says if you have an older Mac system that
seems to be on the slowish side, a few upgrades can help you get the
most out of it.
He suggests that first you should a look at how much RAM you are
using on a regular basis using the Activity Monitor utility. If the
Page Out frequency is high and the Swap Used count is regularly in the
hundreds of megabytes or gigabytes in size, then the system is
regularly writing memory contents to the hard drive to free up physical
RAM for other purposes.
In such cases Kessler says, your use of the system is regularly
demanding more RAM than is installed, and you should look into
purchasing a RAM upgrade.
Another component that is a major contributor to slowdowns is the
hard drive, especially in instances where you are low on memory and the
system writes memory contents to disk. Replacing the conventional hard
drive with an SSD can speed things up.
Publisher's note: We have always recommended memory as the biggest
way to improve performance, followed by a faster hard drive - or a
hybrid hard drive or SSD. While there are lots of SATA SSDs for
Intel-based Macs and G5 Power
Macs, you may not be aware that there are
3.5" and 2.5"
SSD solutions for older Macs that use IDE/ATA drives, particularly from
Other World Computing. OWC has also done extensive testing of Macs over
the years and has often found models that will work with more system memory (RAM)
than Apple officially supports. dk
Link: Maximize Your Old
Mac's Performance
Fusion Drive Hack for Older Macs
Blogger Patrick Stein notes that since Apple has announced the
Fusion drive, people have wondered if it's possible to use the Fusion
drive on older machines with a SSD and HDD.
Stein observes that the Fusion drive uses a core storage VolumeGroup
as can be seen in this Apple support
document
He's posted a tutorial on how create a roll-your-own Fusion
drive.
Publisher's note: It appears that you need OS X 10.8.2 or later, so
this isn't an option for "older" Macs that can't run OS X 10.8
Mountain Lion. For older Macs, the best option is probably a hybrid
hard drive, such as Seagate Momentus XT, which combines a fast hard
drive with an intelligent SSD cache. dk
Link: Fusion Drive on
Older Macs? Yes!
Recent Apple Keyboards Easily Damaged by
Spills
The Register's Alistair Dabbs says that if you think a little spilt
tea on a keyboard is easily cleaned up, and you have a recent aluminum
Apple keyboard, think again. With these 'boards, sticky keys are not
the problem associated with spills so much as dead keys. He notes that
while big, old clunky traditional keyboards once had massive key caps
punching switches, and even a few years ago, had some kind of rubber
membrane for keyswitches, lifting the key caps on an Apple keyboard,
reveals precision bits of moving plastic with raw metallic surfaces
showing through. Spilt beverages will hit metal almost immediately,
with strong potential for killing the key.
"What on Earth are companies such as Apple thinking?" queries Dabbs.
"Anyone would think they had deliberately designed their peripherals to
be irreparable, forcing you to buy replacements more frequently than
was previously necessary." And, no; running the keyboard through the
dishwasher doesn't fix it.
Link: A Bitter Spill to
Swallow, or 'How to Smeg Up Your Keyboard'
ARM: Why Moore's Law Is Becoming Irrelevant
MIT Technology Reviews senior IT editor Tom Simonite reports that
ARM's CEO, Warren East, says power-efficient chips for mobile devices
(such as Apple's A-series system-on-chips) will move into desktops,
laptops, and servers.
ARM is the Cambridge, UK-based company that licenses the
energy-efficient processor designs used in many mobile devices,
including Apple's. While these chips were once considered significantly
less powerful than the Intel x86 processors found in desktops, laptops,
and servers, Simonite says Microsoft is exploring a switch to ARM
technology (already found in the Microsoft Surface RT) for traditional
computers, suggesting that ARM technology will soon shape more than
just mobile computing. Apple is also rumored to be planning an eventual
shift away from x86 to A-series processors in its laptop and desktop
Macs.
In the interview, Mr. East says that Moore's Law, which predicts the
rate of improvements in computing power, is becoming irrelevant, and
that in future it will be more and more about efficiency, not only for
mobile devices and PCs, but perhaps even more so for servers.
Asked to comment on the recent Bloomberg report that Apple is
considering switching its laptops and desktops to ARM-based chips, Mr.
East declined, saying you'd have to talk to Apple about that, but
contends that in general there's no intrinsic limitation in the ARM
architecture that prevents it from being at the high end of
performance, and noted that the ARM microprocessor was not designed for
mobile in the first place, but ran a computer (the Acorn
Archimedes) with a windows-based operating system called RISC-OS, and it's perfectly
capable of supporting keyboards and mice.
Link: Moore's Law Is
Becoming Irrelevant
How to Share Your Mac's (or PC's) Optical Drive
with Another Computer
Mac.Tuts+'s Bruno Skvorc explains how you can share the optical
drive from one computer with another OS X machine - or even
cross-platform to a certain extent, allowing you to use your Windows
box's optical drive through your Mac - with DVD/CD Sharing an option
supported in OS X since version 10.4.
Link: How to Share a
Mac's Optical Drive
Rumor Roundup
New iMac May Be Delayed Until December
Lionel of the French site macbidouille.com says he's learned from a
commercial source that Apple has delayed the release of the new iMacs announced in October.
Release of the 21.5" model had been scheduled for November 27, but
Lionel says it's possible now that it could be well into the December
holiday season.
The report says that Apple seems to be having more problems than
expected with the new manufacturing process for these iMacs, which pass
through a system of aluminum welding under high pressure, a technique
that is used to assemble the wings of some aircraft, such as the
Airbus A380.
Not good news for Apple, whose Mac sales were disappointing last
quarter, with the iMac being a model that would normally be a strong
holiday sales performer.
Link:
Apple: pas d'iMac avant la fin de l'année (French-to-English
translation via Google Translate)
Tech Trends
Hard Drive Storage Density Could Increase Fivefold
from University of Texas Research
PR: The storage capacity of hard disk drives could increase
by a factor of five thanks to processes developed by chemists and
engineers at The University of Texas at Austin.
The researchers' technique, which relies on self-organizing
substances known as block copolymers, was described this week in an
article in Science. It's also being given a real-world test run in
collaboration with HGST (formerly Hitachi Global Storage Technologies)
one of the world's leading innovators and manufacturers of disk drives,
now a a wholly owned subsidiary of Western Digital Corporation.
"In the last few decades there's been a steady, exponential increase
in the amount of information that can be stored on memory devices, but
things have now reached a point where were running up against physical
limits," says C. Grant Willson, professor of chemistry and biochemistry
in the College of Natural Sciences and the Rashid Engineering Regent's
Chair in the Cockrell School of Engineering at UT Austin.
With current production methods, zeroes and ones are written as
magnetic dots on a continuous metal surface. The closer together the
dots are, the more information can be stored in the same area. But that
tactic has been pretty much maxed out. The dots have now gotten so
close together that any further increase in proximity would cause them
to be affected by the magnetic fields of their neighboring dots and
become unstable.
"The industry is now at about a terabit of information per square
inch," explains Prof. Willson, who co-authored the paper with chemical
engineering professor Christopher Ellison and a team of graduate and
undergraduate students. "If we moved the dots much closer together with
the current method, they would begin to flip spontaneously now and
then, and the archival properties of hard disk drives would be lost.
Then you're in a world of trouble. Can you imagine if one day your bank
account info just changed spontaneously?"
There's a quirk in the physics, however. If the dots are isolated
from one another, with no magnetic material between them, they can be
pushed closer together without destabilization.
That's where block copolymers come in. At room temperature, coated
on a disk surface, they don't look like much. But if they're designed
in the right way, and given the right prod, they'll self-assemble into
highly regular patterns of dots or lines. If the surface onto which
they're coated already has some guideposts etched into it, the dots or
lines will form into precisely the patterns needed for a hard disk
drive.
This process, which is called directed self-assembly (DSA), was
pioneered by engineers at the University of Wisconsin and the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
When Professors Willson, Ellison, and their students began working
with directed self-assembly, the best anyone in the field had done was
to get the dots small enough to double the storage density of disk
drives. The challenge has been to shrink the dots further and to find
processing methods that are compatible with high-throughput
production.
The team reports that it has made great progress on a number of
fronts. They've synthesized block copolymers that self-assemble into
the smallest dots in the world. In some cases they form into the right,
tight patterns in less than a minute, which is also a record.
"I am kind of amazed that our students have been able to do what
they've done," says Prof. Willson. "When we started, for instance, I
was hoping that we could get the processing time under 48 hours. Were
now down to about 30 seconds. I'm not even sure how it is possible to
do it that fast. It doesn't seem reasonable, but once in a while you
get lucky."
Most significantly, the team has designed a special top coat that
goes over the block copolymers while they are self-assembling.
I've been fortunate enough to be involved in the experimental work
of the top coat project from its inception all the way to our final
results," says Leon Dean, a senior chemical engineering major and one
of the authors on the Science paper. We've had to develop an innovative
spin-on top coat for neutralizing the surface energy at the top
interface of a block copolymer film."
This top coat allows the polymers to achieve the right orientation
relative to the plane of the surface simply by heating.
"The patterns of super small dots can now self-assemble in vertical
or perpendicular patterns at smaller dimensions than ever before,"
comments Thomas Albrecht, manager of patterned media technology at
HGST. "That makes them easier to etch into the surface of a master
plate for nanoimprinting, which is exactly what we need to make
patterned media for higher capacity disk drives."
Professors Willson, Ellison, and their students are currently
working with HGST to see whether these advances can be adapted to their
products and integrated into a mainstream manufacturing process.
Other industry collaborators are Nissan Chemical Company, which
partially funded the research, and Molecular Imprints, an Austin-based
company cofounded by Prof. Willson that is a pioneer in nanoimprint
lithography.
Link: Computer Memory
Could Increase Fivefold From UT Research
Products & Services
Seagate Backup Plus Family of Hard Drives Named as
CES Innovations 2013 Design and Engineering Award Honoree
PR: Seagate Technology plc has announced that the company has
been named an International CES Innovations 2013 Design and Engineering
Awards Honoree for the Seagate Backup Plus family of external storage.
Products entered in this prestigious program are judged
by a preeminent panel of independent industrial designers, engineers
and members of the media to honor outstanding design and engineering in
cutting edge consumer electronics products across 29 product
categories.
First introduced in June of 2012, the Seagate Backup Plus family of
hard drives are newly designed external storage devices, which work
interchangeably with both Windows and Apple computers. These new drives
deliver new features to protect, share and save nearly every aspect of
ones digital life. Backup Plus drives come with a hassle-free Seagate
Dashboard software for one-click local backup making it easier than
ever to eliminate excuses about backing up ones most valuable digital
content. Additionally, Seagate Backup Plus products are the worlds
first external hard drives to provide backup for content on social
networks, such as Facebook and Flickr. Storing a local duplicate copy
of photos from social networks is now as easy as backing up files on
your computer, providing additional peace of mind that nearly every
aspect of one's digital life is safe from loss.
"Seagate is thrilled to have been recognized by the Consumer
Electronics Association for our latest offering of external storage,
Backup Plus hard drives," says Seagate vice president of Marketing
Scott Horn. "This prestigious award helps underscore the important role
storage plays in everything that people do today. Backup Plus storage
illustrates that simplicity in design and function to address consumer
needs is a true example of innovation."
The Innovations Design and Engineering Awards are sponsored by the
Consumer Electronics Association (CEA), the producer of the
International CES, the world's largest consumer technology trade show,
and have been recognizing achievements in product design and
engineering since 1976.
Seagate Backup Plus portable and Seagate Backup Plus desktop will be
on display in The Venetian at the 2013 International CES, which runs
January 8-11, 2013 in Las Vegas, Nevada. Honorees will also be
displayed at CES Unveiled: The Official Press Event of the
International CES from 4-7 p.m. on Sunday, January 6 in the South Seas
Ballroom C at Mandalay Bay.
The Innovations entries are judged based on the following
criteria:
- Engineering qualities, based on technical specs and materials
used
- Aesthetic and design qualities, using photos provided
The products intended use/function and user value
- Unique/novel features that consumers would find attractive
- How the design and innovation of the product compares to other
products in the marketplace
- Products chosen as an Innovations honoree reflect innovative design
and engineering of the entries.
- Examples may include the first time various technologies are
combined in a single product or dramatic enhancements to previous
product designs.
Innovations 2013 Design and Engineering honoree products are
featured on the 2013 International CES website, which lists product
categories, as well as each product name, manufacturer information,
designer, description, photo and URL.
Software
Pixelmator 2.1.3 Adds New Color Management with
Soft Proofing
PR: The Pixelmator Team has released Pixelmator 2.1.3, a
significant update to its beautifully designed, easy-to-use,
inexpensive yet powerful image editing application developed
exclusively for Mac OS X. Pixelmator provides the tools needed to
create, edit, and enhance still images. Version 2.1.3 introduces an
entirely new and simplified Color Management tool redesigned to keep
image colors perfectly consistent throughout all devices and a Soft
Proofing feature.
Pixelmator 2.1.3
The brand new Soft Proofing feature comes in handy for controlling
image colors more precisely. It lets you quickly and easily apply
different color profiles to images so you can get an idea of how the
final outcome, such as the printed image, might look. This is great
news for anyone willing to preview images in CMYK colors.
Full sRGB standard support makes all image colors inside Pixelmator
look better as well. The sRGB color standard is widely used on most
devices that we come across every day, such as digital cameras,
scanners, or even the new iPhone. This means that the colors of images
edited in Pixelmator will look perfect outside Pixelmator and across
all Apple devices.
Additional features include the new Color Management look, enhanced
PSD file format support, improved Automator actions, Spanish and
Italian languages added, and more.
Pixelmator 2.1.3 is available from the Mac App Store at a
promotional price of $29.99. For existing Pixelmator customers who
purchased the app from the Mac App Store, the new update is free.
Link: Pixelmator
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