New mac ends up being a Pad

Yes, I followed the crowd and got an iPad.
I'm telling you, it is the best computer you will ever have. It is as portable as a netbook, as easy to use as an iPhone and as capable as a notebook. I thought you might like to know my opinion about this one so here it is, iPad 3G 64 GB review!

This might sounds a little bit weird coming from me but I do not indent to talk about all its good points anymore than I already did. That's what everybody talk about and we all know what they are already. So, let's bash the iPad to make sure you know everything there is to be known about your next purchase.

Ok, we already know it's awesome, now what?
After playing with it for two days, I've found two major bugs and one funny glitch. All of those are local to the Canadian iPad and might not be in the other configurations. The two bugs are in fact not even related to the iPad directly. You might never notice them unless you use an external USB, Bluetooth or dock keyboard and Rogers services.

The first one is a very weird problem. You'll use your keyboard like you do everyday and suddenly, an app or a website will prompt your for your password. You type your password and hit enter expecting everything to work correctly but then... Wrong password. Type it again and you'll notice that the accented characters on the keyboard as well as various alt-key shortcut doesn't work. As I said, you might never notice that since it only happens in passwords fields and requires your password to use accented or some very specific special characters. However, if it still happens to you like it happened to me, simply type the letters with the virtual keyboard and you are good to go.

The second bug is related to our wonderful cellular network here in Canada. --Where is that sarcasm punctuation mark when I need it.-- The iPad is advertised as letting you upgrade your plan from nothing to 5 GB per month anywhere you want, anytime you want. That is not true. If you have no data plan, the 3G logo will still appear in the status bar but you will not have any internet access... not even on the Rogers website. It means that you can't buy a 3G plan without any access to a WiFi network. Good luck buying that plan the moment you need it stuck in the woods with no WiFi kilometres around you.

Last glitch only appeared in Things (from Cultured Code) so far but is still a bug with the operating system itself. If a popup window appear over a toolbox, rotating the iPad will cause the toolbox to rotate face the wrong direction. It only happens in that particular case which so far only Things have been using them in such a way.

Wrap-up
So far, that's all the bad things I've found about my iPad. Next post will be about how to protect your iDevices with some very good products. See you all then!

Understanding flash on OS X

First of all
No, I am not dead. I just don't like to say stuff that no body want to read anyway so I kept my mouth (keyboard?) shut for a little while.

Second
Next review will be about whatever thing I'll buy next. It will probably be an iPad or the new rumoured MacBook Pros. I can't promise anything about this though.

Third, the reason of my post...
As many of you probably heard of already, iPhone OS 4 is coming soon and some of us, like me, already have the beta installed on their phones. Seriously, it is the best operating system I even seen on a phone since smartphone are in the market. There's a lot of stuff in it that apple didn't told you which can theoretically bring iPhone OS 4.0 up to par with any DESKTOP operating system out there. That's just how great it is.

Unfortunately, all that we seem to ear about it these days are bad stuff... which is kind-off strange actually. A big majority wanted multi-tasking. Now that they've got it, all that we can read is stuff like: "I don't really care about it, I would have preferred Flash that this." Yes, this article is dedicated to you, people that doesn't have any sense of mobile device logic.

Flash, a plague to avoid
The first reason why anybody would want to avoid Flash like a plague is about stability issue. Here's a nice one, while I've been writing this article, look what popped on my screen!

See, it managed to crash while doing nothing! That little thing made me wonder so I started to investigate on was could be the reason of this crash. After running a little software called Shark, a performance analyzer tool that come with Xcode, I discovered somethings that should have remained buried. What it does it that is detect cache miss (moments when requested data is not available in cache and need to be pulled from an other cache level) in the L2 processor cache and list them.

I have exported the report to a text file and I'm providing it for you to read on this link. It is very easy to understand. The numbers to the left are the numbers of call to a function, the gibberish in the middle is the memory emplacement of the function and the text at the right is the name of the library that provided the function. Now keep in mind that this report was requested during a normal writing session. I have music playing in iTunes and a couple of software is running. Notice anything strange here? First process in the list is the mack kernel (or the OS X subsystems if you prefer). It represent roughly 14.2% of the entire cache misses which is normal. The second one though... I expected it to be iTunes since it is doing realtime audio playback and require frequent access to the processor cache but... no...

In fact, Flash Player represent 51.7% of all the cache miss that happened during this session. Basically, it means that half of the calls that the required my computer to access the RAM during the 10 seconds of profiling happened because of the Adobe Flash library. This is a very good reason to consider it like a plague as it use as much CPU time as a virus! In fact, flash player used 1 minutes 32.24 seconds of CPU time in 4 hours of not using it. As a little comparison note, iTunes only caused 4.4% of the misses and used 9 minutes 23 seconds of CPU time in constant playback during the last 4 hours.

So, what does it mean? It means that Flash is not only very hungry CPU wise but also memory wise. It also show us that it is not optimized at all and keep on doing more and more request to the system memory.

Touch is the future
Based on what we can see today, people consider touch screen devices as the way of the future. It does have a little futuristic sense to it but believe me there's nothing impressive in them as they were in use since a good 10 to 20 years! Why am I talking about this? Because Flash is the complete opposite! Flash applications are generally built with a point-and-click interface so around 90% of them doesn't work at all on a touch based device like the iPhone. There's no way to access the various menus of the interface because you need to point at them and not click or tap on them. As a result even if you could run Flash on a touch based device like an iPhone, you would not be able of using it as it was not designed for this kind of usage.

Some websites like LinkedIn doesn't use Flash and still have some compatibility issues with a touch based interface because they try to limit their content to the size of the screen and use scrollbars to let you access the rest of it instead of thrusting the web browser and letting it do it's job.

Flash on the iPhone?
No way! Never! Not because it sucks performance wise and would drain your battery faster than light, but for the same reason I don't want an HP Slate. It was not designed to be used with touch in the first place.

Pleasant deception

Apple event
Well. Like I thought, the last Apple keynote was indeed a very interesting one. Unfortunately for me, it didn't bring me the new MacBook Pro's that I expected which means that I'll have to wait a bit more to get my hand on those magnificent new laptops. On the other side, you might remember that I said a while ago that I was planing on buying a Netbook to fill the gap between my MacBook Pro and my iPhone. I am not anymore and I'm pretty sure you know why.

iPad, the hidden capabilities.
When Apple presented the iPad, they said that it has to excel at some key points to be useful and gain market share. They so much focused on them that the keynote even got a little long at some points. What really interested me in the iPad is what they didn't told us. For instance, how many of you heard of the Optimus Maximus keyboard? Well probably not much. Here's little link to present the product. The company that make it also have a concept called the Optimus Tactus. By now, you should have spotted the price of the Maximus which is 2 000 USD. Now guess how much the Tactus would cost! Exactly! Too much for anyone to buy! NOT! In fact, anyone can buy it! You just need to get an iPad and install a simple application.

This is how it works, this iPad isn't about replacing a Netbook. It's about a whole new bunch of possibilities. I'm planing to get the 64 GB wifi model. I don't need 3G because I have my iPhone for that, same for the GPS. I'll buy the two docks. One for my desktop to hold it close to my monitors, and the second one will always be in my backpack. With this setup, I have an awesome student notebook and a nice third monitor for my desktop. As a little plus, I also get an environment friendly and very capable device on the go.

The iPad is all about finding your way to use it. You might buy a 16 GB WiFi model and stuck it to your fridge. That way you always have your recipes, phonebook, morning journal, weather, etc. close to you. Try to tell me that you never dreamt of that. I'll never believe you.

Conclusion
Where everyone see an oversized iPod Touch or a device that can't compete with a laptop, I see a lots of possibilities, fun and futuristic setups. On that word, I'll return to my hometree.

Kìyevame ulte Eywa ngahu

Every one apart me is a bloke

And you can't argue with it!
No! You can't argue with me about it and even if you want to try, and the only reason why you would want to do such a thing is that you don't have a clue what a bloke is, then first go to this link to learn what it really means.

Now more seriously. Here's the little backstory about it. I own a company based in Québec named "Centre de Solutions Informatiques Inc." or C.S.I. for short. Our team is based on developers and hardware crack that follows 63 technology related RSS feeds that publish around 1 280 news a day. We are basically pure and polished specialist in computers and we're endlessly learning and improving ourselves. Technology is everything we like, everything we do and everything we live for. We're so enthusiast that, as I said, we've started a company. Yes! That's how bad we are infected.

We've taken a big time looking at the market and I can assure you that in our current service zone, there is just no one that will do a better job than us for better pricing and better time. To do this analysis, we used the latest technology in marketing which is... ours beloved clients! We actually used feedbacks from our clients to build our price tags. Anyway, enough advertising and here comes the story.

One bloke in the see
I (not we) currently deserve personalized services to 2 company and around 25 persons. That's in fact rather good. But in the end, every single one of my clients keep on... deserting me! Yes! I have absolutely no idea why, but every time they've got a problem, they first call me, I then friendly give them consulting and they finally go off like they suddenly knows anything about the computer world, which they obviously don't, and make an ash of it.

This annoy me so much that it made me write this post just so that I could cool down instead of bashing through the head of one of them that did it an other time just a day before I'm writing this. I will not go into the details to respect his privacy but, he actually made Windows XP installed on an Intel Core i7 computer! Now, if you're a bloke about computers, which I'm not, you'll already scream at him because you know that Windows XP just can't handle a dual core correctly. And this is not a dual core, it's a quad with hyper-threading which make it even more difficult. You need at least Windows Vista or Windows 7 to handle all of that power correctly but WAIT! Their's more! This computer is actually... the latest iMac.

I'm not joking. This is true, I swear that this is true! Now I'll show you an other time that I'm not a bloke in this kind of stuff. You see, Windows XP has horrible power saving features. In fact, it doesn't support half the the power saving features that are on that brand new computer. Now you're probably already laughing at me saying that this is a desktop computer and that it doesn't need power saving features! WRONG! Let me show you my point with a simple table:

Component	Avg. consumption
CPU	85 watt
Memory	25 watt
Motherboard	15 watt
Graphic card	135 watt
Hard drive	5 watt
Monitor	50 watt
Total	315 watt

Now that look pretty normal, isn't it? Nop; This is enormous! I have a server which has a very similar configuration to that and it's doing 80. My Mac Pro is averaging 145 watts and it has 10 GB or HUNGRY fully buffered DDR2 memory and two old and not very economical Xeon 5400 series CPUs. That's without counting the supercharged 8800 GT that benchmark like a 9800 GTX!

So, not only does he's iMac now require a nuclear power plant to run, it also require an earth-sized power supply; which it hasn't. The 2009 iMac has only a 365 watt power supply. Now you're still laughing at me saying that 315 is smaller that 365. Well... Yes it is... But, this PSU only has 85% efficiency which move its maximum output to 5 watt less that the average needed. This could cause a problem.

Windows XP will basically kills my client's computer. That's how simple it is. By the way, if you're interested, putting Windows Vista in it would decrease the consumption to 175 watt which is 45% less. That's without saying that the performance would increase as Windows Vista is much better at handling multiple CPU cores.

The result
Not only this guy had an horrible services that will rot is computer on the mid/long run. It will also cost him 100 $ more to run his computer at the end of the year that it costed him if he installed Windows Vista in the first place. And here's the interesting part: I didn't even mentioned OS X yet. And here's why: I'm not talking about dual booting or anything. The guy actually removed OS X 10.6 and put Windows XP in place claiming that it was a much lighter and faster operating system!

That basically means that my client, who decided to bought a Mac to give it a try, will not even see what OS X look like. Not to mention that OS X has even better power management capabilities than even Windows 7. Running Slow Leopard, that computer actually get down to 95 watt on average use which would save him 160 $ a year just in electricity.

The point
Every single one of my clients do that every single time. They always end up in my office begging for help to solve the issues that caused the idiot that they went to in the first place. And they do that, even when they are old friend of mine. I have absolutely nothing agains competition, in fact I even found it sporty, but when all the competition there is is that... I'd prefer to kick them in the face with a very, very big hammer.

Conclusion
That's exactly why me and two of my friends started this company. We are so sure about this that we're planing, building... no... it became hand-crafting, swinging and then throwing that hammer to their faces ourselves the best we can possibly do. We believe that average computer knowledge here in Québec sucks and we think we might just be what the province need to get up on its feet an finally learn how to appreciate that latest gadget that came out without having to ask the vendor how to turn it on.

IPREDator

A TPB company
The Pirate Bay announced a while ago a new service called IPREDator. It's a VPN (Virtual Private Network) service for the rest of us. VPN's are generally used by big company to help away workers keep in touch with their work documents. By using a VPN connection, they can have the same access as they normally have in house but kilometers away. IPREDator is the same kind of service but not for managing your home documents. It was designed to give you an private and 100% secure internet access. It uses industry-grade 128bit encryption to assure you that no one, not even your IPS, will be able to peek in your data transfers.

This is specially useful if your ISP is using a proxy or if it's limiting peer to peer transfer speed. The idea is to tunnel every internet communication through the VPN and access the internet from a unlimited internet access in Sweden. And it work quite well actually! I've been beta testing the IPREDator service for three days now and I think this service as a great potential.

What does beta means?
It means that if you try IPREDator, you'll experiment everything that a beta is. Slow, buggy and somewhat limited. I had a lot of issue accessing some websites and very slow speed. In fact, it literally split my internet access in half. But, on the other side, I can't complain since it do it's job. My IPS normally limit P2P traffic at 25 KBps between 18h and 2h30. When I enabled the IPREDator service, I got a lot of speed back. I jump from 25 KB to 250 KB witch is pretty good.

As I said, this service is currently in private beta and with reasons, I doubt that it wouldn't blow up if everybody could try test it right now. If it don't it will just be slower and slower. Let's give TPB some time to make it work well before starting to use it every day.

Windows 7 just hit RTM... and P2P

Not even one day after Windows 7 was officially released as RTM with build 7600 , it is now easier to find on P2P network than Windows Vista. Many people already installed it and every one, and I mean every one, can't be more happy with this release. It seams that Windows 7 will be a very big seller on October 22th when it will get in store. Who knows, it might even be a bigger release than the iPhone 3G S gave us not even two months ago.

For the record, RTM stand for Release To Manufacturing which means that the actual version is the one who is currently being burned to disks. This version is 100% identical to the one you'll get on the official release. You might wonder why they are waiting so long for this? Well it is because hardware makers are slow to react and need time to write drivers because they generally ignore the time where given on the beta version.

Link to the original article: http://windowsteamblog.com/blogs/windows7/archive/2009/07/22/windows-7-has-been-released-to-manufacturing.aspx

Intel Core i7, Part 3 : Power management

As the title of this post said, I will not talk about required electrical power to sue the processor nor what kind of power management feature it has since there is not much new except in the Turboboost technology. Instead, I'll talk about calculation power. What make those CPUs as fast as they are. You know... processing power management.

Super powers
Yes, those new processors are really fast but what about their super powers? You didn't know, didn't you? Intel made a deal with some super heros to provide the new Core i7 with super powers like :

• Turboboost Technology - A real-time dynamic, per core, overlocking technology.
• Wide Dynamic Execution - A technology that enable to dispatch up to 4 instructions per clock cycle per processing unit.
• Hyperthreading - An other technology that enable the system to fetch up to two times more instruction in the processor.
• Integrated memory controller - Help pushing data real fast into the processor.
• Advanced Smart Cache - Cutting in fourth the time it take to do about every memory access.

Power at work
Those technologies give a big boost at speed make the processor way more powerful than before. Let's start with the first one, Turboboost. It analyze, in real time, which core is idle and which are overloaded. It then cut off power to those who doesn't need it and reroute it to the one that are struggling by overclocking them for up to 30% of their original speed. This technology gives a big performance boost for single threaded application that does not benefit from additional core's presence. The second one, Wide Dynamic Execution, is a technology that will peek at your processor activities using techniques like data flow analysis, speculative execution, out of order execution, and super scalars to execute up to 33% more instructions per clock cycle on each core than before. On older Intel architecture and AMD Phenom architecture, the processor could only handle 3 instructions in the same clock cycle. This technology push that to four and will help on getting more data processed at faster rate in the CPU. Finaly, hyperthreading, which was on the older Pentium 4 HT processors, is coming back with some enhancements. It can now double the amount of data to process in the clock cycle in one core. For those who don't know/remember how it work, we can say that it try to fill blank and thus unused quarter of CPU clock by filling them with an other thread.

Power to fill
While all those technologies get super processing power to the CPU they made it harder to fill with data. That's where the new Integrated memory controller and Advanced Smart Cache technology come in place. Those two little guy help at fetching data in the processor up to three times faster than on the previous processors by using a faster connection to memory and three channel instead of two and the second one make data closer to every core of every processors thus nearly dividing by four the latency needed to check if a core is working on the same data as an other. Those little thing contribute on the 45% performance improvement over the older Penryn generation.