Monday February 25, 2008

- A few free gigs of music - Lionel - 14:10:52

Like other years, the South by SouthWest festival offers free downloading of its music.
This year, they offer no less than 3.5 gigabytes of music via BitTorent via the following link:
SXSW_2008_Showcasing_Artists-Release_1.torrent
You can also retrieve the pieces from previous years on the links here:
http://hewgill.com/sxsw/
There is enough to fill an iPod quite legally and without having to pay anything.
For more information about the festival:
http://sxsw.com/

[translation by jeremy]

- Another attack on Yahoo! - Lionel - 14:07:30

Source: Branchez-vous

If the number of players (and spectators) of the Internet market welcomed the decision of the board of Yahoo to oppose its acquisition by Microsoft, the decision has not made everyone happy. Of course, MS was itself angry to be rebuffed, and Bill Gates was forced to take the floor to say that his company did not need to absorb Yahoo to see a good future.
But another attack could pose serious problems to the search engine. It comes from two American pension funds who blame (the board of) Yahoo for having failed in its duty by refusing this windfall (or at least refusing to offer it to the shareholders). To get a quick deal, Microsoft had proposed a value of $ 31, well above the market cost which was then $ 20.
However, the sole purpose of pension funds is to build wealth for their members, in order to guarantee their pensions. If they manage to get a judgment against Yahoo, they put the company in an even more precarious position, making its ambitions of independence even more difficult. PS: the share price of yahoo jumped to $30 after microsoft's offer.

[translation by jeremy]

- Hollywood backs Blu-ray - Lionel - 13:52:47

Since the end of last week, and without any surprise following the withdrawal of Toshiba from the race, the 6 Hollywood majors are now behind the Blu-ray format. Paramount, which had caused a sensation by announcing its exclusive support to HD-DVD (for $ 150 million, shared with Dreamworks), has been the last to takthe leap and certainly one that will have the most to lose.
The balance seems to be swinging in France too, where we start to find HD-DVD players below € 100. This is not the same for movies which the majors do not want to let go on the cheap. This will certainly happen later in brokers' stores, far away from the eyes of the consumers.

[translation by jeremy]

- RAID 0 in a Mac Pro - Lionel - 10:22:25

In today's computers with multiple processors and ever greater quantities of memory, the hard drive becomes an increasingly important bottleneck. It may be tempting, therefore, to combine the performance of multiple disks as we do CPUs to improve the overall performance of the machine. By default, the Mac Pro supports software RAID 0. It is a protocol in which the machine will distribute the writes simultaneously, and reads simultaneously on multiple drives in order to accelerate IO (striping).
We have tested with the fastest hard disk at this time, the Samsung Spinpoint F1 with 32 MB cache. Our tests showed that this disc, without Raid, is capable of reaching sustained speeds of 105 MB / s for reading and 96 MB / s for writing (excluding cache), which is well above what other currently marketed SATA disks can achieve.
To highlight the disk performance, we used the SpeedTools Utilities and its software QuickBench 4, which has the merit of providing reliable and reproducible results.
We tested configurations RAID 0 with 2, 3 and 4 disks. To ensure that the system does not interfere with the tests, we started on a SATA disk installed in the unoccupied optical bay of our Mac Pro (machine in early 2008 to 3.2 GHz with 8 GB of RAM).
To begin, here are the results obtained by reading:


For starters, we can see the impact of cache, and the effect of a RAID disk array. the more the disks, the greater effect on the long rates, with a 16 KB with one disk to 50 MB disk with 4 (these enormous differences can be attributed to the fact that it did not have time to flush the buffers between two tests).


For writing, the effect of the cache is even more obvious. Obviously, a good part of it is because of cache..

In order to gain a clearer view on rates, we made a last test on a folder of 400 Mo. It has been repeated many times. We saved the best results:


Of course, the cache still has an impact, at least at the beginning of the copy. This effect is as important as increasing the number of disks.
But you can see that the RAID 0 software for Mac OS X is particularly well optimized and allows impressive data rates ,easily exceeding 400 MB / s reading and writing, to the delight of the video professionals, for 4TB Raid volumes

RAID 0, however, has an impact on other performances, such as access to very small files. This can be seen especially on reading tests in the first graph. The flow of reading files ofm less than 10 MB is slower with 4 discs than with 3. Because the RAID loses a little bit of time to go pick this information from 4 discs, and this time lost could not be caught up with the extra disk (one fetch across 3 disks gets the required data, adding a 4th disk just increasese the overhead).
Today, given the modus operandi of Mac OS X, the amateurs will be at ease with RAID 0 with 2 disks, which will make their machine fast and allow them to have other internal disks for backup . Indeed, RAID 0 increases the risk of losing data. If a single hard disk fails, everything is lost. We must therefore ensure even more safeguards.
Professionals will use a RAID 0 of 3 or 4 discs for specific needs that require significant very fast transfers.
Finally, we touch on the Apple RAID card. On paper it seemed ideal for all uses. However, we had such poor performance from it, we have appointed a member of the Team to test new Raid arrays on a different Mac Pro. Once it is completed and correlated with our current results, we will publish an article on RAID in a Mac Pro, citing these results but with further comments.

[translation by jeremy]

- Low stocks of MacBooks - Lionel - 10:08:06

For some unknown reason that maybe could be a sign of imminent renewal - the stocks of MacBooks have fallen to their lowest.
Tech Data, one of the two wholesalers charged to provide the retailers that do not pass via Apple do not have any model in stock, and this is quite exceptional.
However stocks of the MacBook Pro remain in good supply, which may explain the delay that Apple has taken to evolve this range.

[translation by crispin]