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

Kaltxì ma smuk!

Avatar
Yeah... It's good... 'ish... NOT!

I saw it 3 times and I plan on seeing it two times more just this week. I'm a total bad-ass fan. So much fan that I even started to learn the Na'vi language, as you could see in the title of this post. I don't often speak about stuff other than technology here so you might think that I'm a complete geek which is in front of the computer 90% of the time, sleep 40% of the day, eat in front of is computer to boost its computer-time/usage, listen to anime, read manga and play D&D twice a week! Well you are completely right!

BUT! I also happen to be a big fan of music, movie production and constructed language, such as Na'vi. That's why I wanted to talk about a wonderful site called learnnavi (http://www.learnnavi.org) which have a growing community of Avatar fan but more importantly Na'vi speakers! I happen to be very active on this site, if you want to talk to me in Na'vi I'm on their forum, IRC and TeamSpeak channel whenever I'm in front/side/back/near a computer.

That's it! Want to learn Na'vi? That's the place.

A new Apple in 7 days
The next important thing is Apple's latest announcement. You might remember that I was going to get a new MacBook Pro when they'll release the core i7 ones. That might very well be the day! So stay tuned on that. I'm gonna post a little resume of the keynote and might very well post a review of my next little gadget.

See you soon! 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.

Getting back... In force!

SSD Benchmarks
I have a surprise for you. Ho well... It's not really a surprise since I've put that in the title and google analytics told me that there is about 91.89% of chances that you got here by googling "Apple SSD Benchmark". Anyway, I've run a couples of test and the results are just astonishing. Here they are:

And that's it, they're already gone! That's just how fast it is. I think the only way it could get faster is to boot directly from RAM! (Ho! That's giving me an idea...) No seriously here is some figures:

Boot time is just under 17 seconds on OS X 10.6.2 and under 25 for Windows 7. This is blazing fast. But that's just uninteresting suff. You see, when you boot your computer, you can go get a coffee or anything while it work. So this is hardly a time saver. On the other side, that next one is going to be of big help.

Safari's startup time is so small that you don't even care. In fact, I couldn't time it by hand. So, I went lazy and just didn't done it. You'll have to do with some words. There is simply no differences between opening Safari 4 and opening a new tab. That's how fast it is.

Photoshop CS 4, on the other side, is a bit slow. You have to count up to 4 before you can work in it. In fact, this is the slowest application that I've tested. There is just nothing slower than that. I think it pretty much guarantee a 4 seconds or less for just about anything.

Conclusion
If you can, get one... don't. As fast as it look, the Apple SSD cost a lot and has not much to offer. It doesn't support TRIM nor does it have a garbage collector. That means that it will keep on slowing as you use it down to half it's original speed. That's very bad for a $ 600 option (MacBook Pro 13") or even a $ 200 one (MacBook Pro 17").

By now, you've also realized that there is no way to get one in the Mac Pro without getting it out from a MacBook which mean it is now a $ 2000 upgrade. This is extremely costly, specially when you can get the Vertex for around $ 350.

That's it! See you next week for some other great news.

I saw a snow flake

And it's bad new
I have three very big project going on at school and the only thing I want to do next is kill myself. The bad new is not that I'll die, it's that I will not be able to write on my blog! I already switched to a 1-time-per-2-week schedule but it's still not enough. So, don't be surprised if you don't hear about me for a while.

On the bright side
Do you remember, about 4 months ago I did some benchmarks of the samsung in my MacBook Pro? If you don't, take a look here as it is like seeing the god of awesomeness. Anyway, here's the big new: In that post, I said that I'd try to move the SSD in my Mac Pro to see how it stand aside the RAID. Well... It's not going to happen today BUT... The SSD is now securely plugged in the Mac Pro with a handmade adapter built from the original Apple 320 GB HDD.

So as everything couldn't get better, I'll give you some early eyes-taken results that will make you lick your floor: safari open in half the time it was doing on the laptop and iTunes even faster. But wait! There's more! My iTunes library is stored on my server which leverage the old RAID array and is connected using a gigabit link and it is STILL faster than the RAID alone!

Anyway, I'll give some results when I'll have some time to do the benchmarks. Now, I've go to go coding...

Snow Leopard, yes but...

.. it's not that good
Hi everyone, I'm sorry if I let you in the dark for two weeks but I had a lot to do recently and didn't had much time write. Who knows, it might even get worse as time goes on. Anyway, I'm here to talk about Apple recently released operating system. Snow Leopard, as it is called, is a very nice OS. It does have a lot more punch than his predecessor 10.5 but I'm not here to talk about stuff that you already know.

Core upgrade
Apple rewrote a very big part of the os with snow leopard and that's nice for performances but, they also introduced an incalculable number of bugs. Nothing major but all of those things just keep on bothering you until you want to kill yourself. That's what I'm going to talk about. The way Apple bunched 10.6 to release it before Windows 7.

First, Exposé. They did a lot with it and the new version is gorgeous; if you don't have a MacBook. If, like me, you do, well, you'll want to punch yourself in the face each time you use those wonderful 4 finger gestures. There's a glitch with them that cause Exposé to stick and render it unproductive. If you bring Exposé and close it using your trackpad without lifting your hand of it first, shit will happen. It will get stuck in the mode you activated and the only way to get your windows back is to do the inverse gesture! It's a very easy thing to solve and could take about ten minutes to fix but it look like it didn't make it in 10.6.1 released just one week after the official release.

Next, Stacks. Finally, we can walkthrough a folder hierarchy without open a finder window. This was a long awaited feature but... It's buggy too! It work very well until you have a stack of a network volume. Here's what happen. First if the volume is not available and you click on it, it will display a transparent interrogation mark which is great but, if you click on it a second time, they stack up! Indefinitely! If the volume finally came online, they'll stick there! They don't even go away! Well that's most of a graphical problem and is indeed pretty minor. But still, it's just the start. As you'll use this stack, you'll realize that some obvious feature doesn't work. Deleting a file for instance. Yup, you can't delete a file from a network volume stack. Don't ask me why but dropping them in the Trash Can does nothing.

Finally, Upgrade. OS X was always stated for it's upgrade capability. I decided to test it, just for fun. I installed 10.5 and then upgraded to 10.6. No change in the settings, no app installed. And guess what. After one week, half of my icons doesn't appear, VMware fusion icon display as 512x512 pixel of garbage, spotlight sometimes refuse to listen to my keyboard, and I'll pass over random freeze (not kernel panic, just complete computer lockup) and random application crash.

Ho, I just forgot! There's also a keychain issue with the clean install that can get you locked up from your own computer. The only solution, if it is a solution, is to make your way to the keychain application and reset your keychain password.

Moral
OS X 10.6 is a great operating system. It does work faster and has some new interesting stuff. On the other side, don't, ABSOLUTELY DON'T try to install it as an upgrade. You'll want to punch yourself so bad that you'll actually do it before doing a clean install.