• My writing
  • First up, a battery charger? La Crosse BC-700 Review: A Battery Charger That Does Not Suck
  • I urge you to See W. Curtis Preston’s Backup Central Live!
  • I was looking for The Best Network Card For VMware ESX Home Lab Machines
  • From my Network Computing blog: Unified Storage: What Is It Good For?
  • I was amazed to see the result of my HP Photosmart printer series: The Power of Negative Publicity
• Other great links
  • Chris Evans wrote a solid piece for Datamation: Virtualization and Storage: Overview, Vendor Solutions
  • Matt Simmons talks about dealing with storage: I’m here to shard data and chew bubblegum…
  • Alex Popescu’s 5 Approaches to Scalable Storage Solutions led to Jeff Darcy’s Introduction to Distributed Filesystems
  • Xangati talks Field Day: Running Comprehensive and Deep at Tech Field Day #5
  • And then there’s Wireless Field Day, courtesy of Andrew von Nagy: Shamrockin’ the Wireless Industry
  • Greg Ferro continues spreading the word on FCoTR: Presenting Silvano Gai With FCoTR Button
  • Howard Marks takes up the topic of specialized hard disk drives: Yes, Virginia, RAID Drives Are Different
  • Howard was spurred by Simon Gallagher, among others: Home Labbers beware of using Western Digital SATA HDDs with a RAID Controller
  • The continuing saga of Google Chrome and H.264 takes a weird turn: Microsoft adds H.264 support to Google Chrome
  • Simon Long fights the good fight, presenting solid technical info: VMware View Desktops: IDE or SCSI? BusLogic, LSI Logic or PVSCSI?
  • A key topic in storage is the balance between performance and capacity, as noted by Xiotech: Performance and Capacity Tradeoffs and the Rise of a New Class of Storage
  • An amusing infographic: The United States of Shame (CHART)
  • Kevin Houston takes on Cisco UCS: What Cisco Has to Do to Win the Blade Server Market
  • Finally, Jeremy Gaddis is back with Bypassing the Internet Kill Switch

Subscribe to my Google Reader feed or follow me on Twitter to see these in real-time.

© sfoskett for Stephen Foskett, Pack Rat, 2011. | Back From the Pile: Interesting Links, February 4, 2011
This post was categorized as Enterprise storage, Personal, Terabyte home, Virtual Storage. Each of my categories has its own feed if you'd like to filter out or focus on posts like this.

Mac OS X 10.6 "Snow Leopard" deliveries begin on August 28!

Although Apple’s web site clearly states that Snow Leopard “Delivers on August 28th,” it is unclear if other sources will be so punctual. We definitely expect Apple Stores to have plenty of stock on Friday morning, but what of Amazon.com pre-orders? Will they also deliver on Friday, or will those of us who pre-ordered there have to wait a few days for this undercover upgrade?

Who Gets What

Snow Leopard is really a major jump forward in terms of advanced hardware and software integration. It brings Grand Central, OpenCL, full 64-bit mode, and QuickTime X along with Exchange support and many tweaks. But many of these features are highly hardware-dependent, so not all Mac users will get everything.

Here’s a cheat sheet I put together based on Apple’s documentation:

This table is based on the following facts:

1. Snow Leopard only supports Intel-based Macs. PowerPC Macs need not apply.
2. Booting Snow Leopard in 64-bit mode requires 64-bit EFI, and many pre-2007 Macs have only a 32-bit EFI. You can check your Mac (and help me fix my table) by typing “ioreg -l -p IODeviceTree | grep firmware-abi” in a Terminal window. If it says “EFI64″, your system is capable of running 64-bit Snow Leopard (though it can still run 64-bit apps). But Snow Leopard defaults to 32-bit mode on ALL Macs other than the Xserve at this point, and no one is sure why!
3. Grand Central Dispatch requires a multi-core CPU. This eliminates the original base-model 2006 Mac Mini, since it used a single-core CPU.
4. OpenCL requires newer Nvidia or the ATI graphics chips. This leaves out many pre-2008 models and some iMac and Mac Pro configurations. Check Apple’s list if you’re not sure.
5. QuickTime H.264 Hardware Acceleration only works with the Nvidia 9400M chipset. This leaves out many pre-2008 machines and even the latest Mac Pros, though they probably have enough horsepower on their own.

Finally, if you’re excited about the new Microsoft Exchange support in Mail.app, iCal, and the Address Book be warned! In order for any of this to work, your server must be running Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 Service Pack 1 Update Rollup 4. And most companies still aren’t updated that far!

Update: Check my follow-up post on 64-bit Snow Leopard for more about this controversial aspect!

I’m Updating!

I held off on Amazon and placed my own order this morning with Apple. I’m with Mark Twomey:Upgrading to Snow Leopard is a safe day-1 activity. Most of the updates amount to new under-the-hood features and the OS has been through round after round of testing. Unlike the massive shift from Tiger to Leopard (which I missed, being a late switcher), Snow Leopard ought to be a lesser upgrade.

Why make the update at all? Here are a few of my reasons:

1. It’s cheap: Just $29 to update a single Mac, or $49 for up to five. Compared to Microsoft’s (expired) “limited-time-only” (and incredibly complicated) Windows 7 upgrade, Apple sets out a red velvet carpet.
2. It’s easy: There’s just one version of Mac OS X, and any system running OS X 10.5 “Leopard” can update to full-on Snow Leopard. There are no editions and no conflicts updating from 32-bit to 64-bit (like Windows 7).
3. It future-proofs your (Intel) Mac: Mac developers have a long history of quickly leveraging new OS X features since Mac users have a long history of quickly upgrading. Snow Leopard adds cool stuff like Grand Central and OpenCL that my Intel- and Nvidia-based Macs ought to be able to leverage. See below if your Mac can use these, too!

Sure, there aren’t any amazing features like Time Machine to set the world on fire. But the Snow Leopard update is still a slam-dunk for any Intel-based Mac user! My Late-2007 MacBook Pro will get everything but H.264 acceleration and my 2009 Mac Mini is all set to go!

Updated with Mac Mini and Xserve information. Keep the suggestions coming and test that EFI! Picked up, colorized, and reused (with permission) by the excellent Ed Bott in his ZDNet column!

Note: Some of these links include affiliate codes that help pay for this blog. For example, buying an Amazon Kindle with this link sends a few bucks my way! But I don't write this blog to make money, and am happy to link to sites and stores that don't pay anything. I like Amazon and buy tons from them, but you're free to buy whatever and wherever you want.

© sfoskett for Stephen Foskett, Pack Rat, 2009. | Mac OS X 10.6 “Snow Leopard”: In Our Hands August 28!
This post was categorized as Apple, Personal. Each of my categories has its own feed if you'd like to filter out or focus on posts like this.

It amuses me to think of the statistics:

• We have 11,284 tracks stored, including 279 Christmas songs and 549 kids songs!
• Most songs were ripped using LAME at the VBR3 setting in joint stereo
• This music library takes up 58 GB of storage on my NSLU2/Firefly server
• The jewel cases take up six large cardboard boxes, but the original discs take up just two fat CD storage books

We’ve quickly adapted to a hierarchical model for home music distribution.  The main server has everything, so our two Roku Soundbridge players play directly from it.  But we also use iTunes on three machines, and have imported a subset of the music to each based on personal preference.  From these iTunes implementations, we sync a sub-subset to our iPods – a 40 GB click wheel, two iPhones, and two Shuffles.

Although our TiVos can play MP3 files over the network, we don’t bother.  It just seems wrong to turn on the TV to listen to music…  Similarly, we don’t use Windows Media Player for much of anything, even though it’s compatible with the Soundbridges and media server.

We listen to a lot more Internet Radio than I thought we would, too.  Sometimes we’ll even tune in WKSU over the Internet rather than hoping for good FM reception.  And I’m listening to WBUR a lot again, too.

I’ve also started to rip DVDs to watch on the iPhone, and am storing these on the NSLU2 too.   Add in the iPhone versions created automatically by TiVo Desktop Plus, and I’m amassing a large collection of H.264 media.  In fact, I’ve already got 50 GB of H.264 video stored up there!  Makes me want to go get an Apple TV so I can easily watch it at home.  Is the end of the DVD coming soon, too?

© sfoskett for Stephen Foskett, Pack Rat, 2007. | No More CDs
This post was categorized as Apple, Personal, Terabyte home. Each of my categories has its own feed if you'd like to filter out or focus on posts like this.