gmane.comp.macosx.general

synching machines...

Jean-Christophe Helary — 2012-05-18T08:40:57

I sent my iMac to Apple for repairs and in the meanwhile used a "spare" MBP that I loaded with the Time Machine backup of the iMac.

Now, I'd like to update the contents of the iMac without having to reimport the whole account and the GBs of data it has.

Is there a relatively simple way to do that ?

Jean-Christophe Helary
----------------------------------------
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Re: I now have twice as many CPUs!

John Stalberg — 2012-05-11T05:19:14


On 9 maj 2012, at 20:14, steve-/i4b6VsH6KJl57MIdRCFDg< at >public.gmane.org wrote:


If hyper threading is implemented and is on, the logical cores should be seen regardless of the amount of work. Your virtual cores svould have that behaviour that they aren't maxed out as often as the phisical cores. If they were, hyper threading would be a miracle, making one core become two cores in every sense. Hyper threading can in some cicumstances increase performance close to twice physiclal, but it can also degrade performance. It depends on the work at hand. HT makes sense when looked at work on avarage and for some special cases HT is better to turn of.

Those who are using virtual machine software have to bear in mind the difference between physical and logical cores. Physical cores is fundament

Re: I now have twice as many CPUs!

John Stalberg — 2012-05-11T05:00:35


On 9 maj 2012, at 20:14, steve-/i4b6VsH6KJl57MIdRCFDg< at >public.gmane.org wrote:

If the

Re: clean out the dust! It can get expensive if you don't

objectwerks inc — 2012-05-09T19:34:41

On May 9, 2012, at 10:54 AM, LuKreme wrote:



The Apple ATI Radeon 5770 showed up today.  My Mac Pro is a 2008 (early) (3,1) model* and the new card was easily installed.  It only uses one of the auxiliary power leads (the previous Nvidia Quadro 5600 used 2) so probably uses less power overall.  If the power supply has become marginal, the lesser load of the new card should help.  Though I don't think the power supply was the main part of the problem.  If it had become marginal, removing the ATI Radeon 2600XT card and the (pretty much unused e-sata card) should probably have allowed the Nvidia card to run alone, at least for a little while, due to the lesser strain of one less video card.  (or maybe not)

The new card works fine in conjunction with the ATI 2600 XT card.  I run 4 displays (2x30" Cinema, 1x24" Cinema, and one older 20" 1600x1200 Viewsonic I happened to have from an older system no longer used) so the 2 cards are somewhat needed.  The new Radeon can drive 3 cards but not 4.

Given that the ol

Re: I now have twice as many CPUs!

2012-05-09T18:14:55

on 2012-05-09 9:02 Dinse, Gregg (NIH/NIEHS) [E] wrote

(logical) cores, as opposed to the user having to decide (and possibly make a 
choice in some preference panel)?

it is automatic, not user-driven, but i don't know the mechanism; it's possible 
that energy saver settings would have an effect


i use iStat Menus, and on my quad-i7 laptop, i often see some activity in the 
four secondary "cores", but they don't seem to "max out" like the four primary 
cores do on some tasks

i jumped from 10.5 to 10.7 at the same time i went from core2duo to quad-i7, so 
i haven't seen how these CPUs might behave in iStat in previous versions

Re: clean out the dust! It can get expensive if you don't

LuKreme — 2012-05-09T16:54:48

Jason may be right that the power supply is failing, but as another data point my 8800 failed in much the same way in my MacPro, and my computer gets pretty regular dusting. It also seemed to be a heat issue, and I also had two video cards.

I replaced the 8800 with a 5750 and everything has been fine since. At the time, I was told that the problem was probably caused by running two video cards, but there was no evidence that was the case. The 5750 is powerful enough to run both displays without effort, so I don't run the second card any more, however I've heard that on the MacPro1,1 the card misbehaves if you try to use three displays. My desk isn't big enough for 3x24" displays. So I've not tested this.

Modern computer parts are pretty good about shutting down before they damage themselves, so I'm not sure your dust was the cause of failure necessarily, though the repeated heat issue could have been.

Re: wireless network connectivity weirdness

LuKreme — 2012-05-09T16:42:58

Is this your own Wi-Fi connection or are you talking about connecting in coffee shops or other places? I know that often trying to connect to other Wi-Fi networks either fails or appears to fail or take several attempts but I don't have any problems with connecting to trusted known Wi-Fi connections.

Re: I now have twice as many CPUs!

Dinse, Gregg (NIH/NIEHS) [E] — 2012-05-09T16:25:02


Hi Vince,

My mistake.  I was using the old (free) version of iStat Menus, so perhaps they added the hyperthreading support in the newer (non-free) version.  Or else I just did not have that feature turned on.

Thanks,

Gregg

Re: I now have twice as many CPUs!

Vince LaMonica — 2012-05-09T16:17:58


This is not new in Lion - my Snow Leopard Core i7 iMac reports the same sort of findings. Note that iStats may not have been up to date when you had it installed on Snow Leopard and at one point it did not support hypertreading. There is also a preference in iStats to not report it as well, I believe.

I have a 4-core Core i7 under SL which shows up as 8 CPUs in iStats under SL: http://vjl.li/b8

/vjl/

Re: I now have twice as many CPUs!

Dinse, Gregg (NIH/NIEHS) [E] — 2012-05-09T15:02:02


Hi Steve,

Thanks for the information.  That is interesting and it makes sense (i.e., trading off higher clock speeds for more parallelism).  Did you get the impression that Lion decides when to activate the extra (logical) cores, as opposed to the user having to decide (and possibly make a choice in some preference panel)?

Although I always see 16 bars (in iStat Menus or MenuMeters), usually only every other bar moves above zero.  So, my guess is that typically only the 8 (physical) cores are being used, but the other 8 (logical) cores can be activated (automatically) if a task can benefit from parallelism.

Thanks,

Gregg

Re: I now have twice as many CPUs!

Bruce Carter — 2012-05-09T14:46:46

On 5/9/12 10:39 AM, "Dinse, Gregg (NIH/NIEHS) [E]" <dinse-2XFgUKPXbSpMoaxIXIz5eg< at >public.gmane.org>
wrote:



The short answer for me is, I don't know.  Poking around the web a bit
indicates that the hyperthreading doesn't show unless the system is under
load, but I have no first hand experience to verify this.

Re: I now have twice as many CPUs!

Dinse, Gregg (NIH/NIEHS) [E] — 2012-05-09T14:40:36

My Mac Pro has a pair of quad-core CPUs, but both iStat Menus and MenuMeters show a bar chart with 16 bars rather than the expected 8 bars.  Is this a Lion thing?  There were only 8 bars under Snow Leopard.  Why does Lion seem to think I have 16 cores?

You have 8 physical cores, but each core can do two things; it can
pretend to be 16 cores, 8 physical and 8 logical.

My MacBook Pro will attempt to only use the physical cores normally,
turning on the logical ones only in very high usage, so I'm guessing
that they are not as fast as real cores.

On 9 May 2012, at 10:29 AM, Bruce Carter wrote:

I believe that is due to HyperThreading.

Hi Michael and Bruce,

Thanks for the information.  Is this new in Lion?  I'm sure I only saw 8 cores displayed in Snow Leopard (and earlier).

Does Lion actually provide a benefit from HyperThreading (and logical cores), or is performance the same and only displayed differently?

Thanks,

Gregg

Re: I now have twice as many CPUs!

2012-05-09T14:42:58

on 2012-05-09 8:30 Michael_google gmail_Gersten wrote

Wikipedia has a detailed article on how this works; i don't remember all the 
details, but basically it trades off higher clock speeds for more parallelism, 
so whether to activate more cores depends on the task

Re: clean out the dust! It can get expensive if you don't

2012-05-09T14:36:32

on 2012-05-08 18:09 Nathan Sims wrote

over the last several i have had three video cards toast themselves without the 
help of any layer of dust; a couple in PowerMac towers, and the last to go has 
been the NVidea circuits within my older MacBook Pro; the latter is a widely 
documented problem; apparently thermal stress weakens solder joints; many 
people have successfully, but often temporarily, patched the problem by masking 
off all but the video part of the mobo and blasting it with a heat gun; i've 
been nursing mine with the fans set high and avoiding heavy OpenGL; display is 
still glitchy but it only freezes once every month or so

i think there is simply a tendency to underdesign them, possibly intentionally

Re: I now have twice as many CPUs!

Michael_google gmail_Gersten — 2012-05-09T14:30:20

You have 8 physical cores, but each core can do two things; it can
pretend to be 16 cores, 8 physical and 8 logical.

My MacBook Pro will attempt to only use the physical cores normally,
turning on the logical ones only in very high usage, so I'm guessing
that they are not as fast as real cores.


This message may have been spell checked by a laptop kitten.

Re: I now have twice as many CPUs!

Bruce Carter — 2012-05-09T14:29:57

I believe that is due to HyperThreading.

I now have twice as many CPUs!

Dinse, Gregg (NIH/NIEHS) [E] — 2012-05-09T14:20:55

Hi,

My Mac Pro has a pair of quad-core CPUs, but both iStat Menus and MenuMeters show a bar chart with 16 bars rather than the expected 8 bars.  Is this a Lion thing?  There were only 8 bars under Snow Leopard.  Why does Lion seem to think I have 16 cores?

Even Activity Monitor seems confused.  It only shows 1 (cumulative) bar in the icon, of course, but yesterday when I was doing something intensive, the activity panel showed a percentage over 1000%, so it also appears to be acting as if I have 16 cores (or else the percentage would never exceed 800%).

I doubt that any of this is important, but I am curious.  Any thoughts?  Thanks,

Gregg

wireless network connectivity weirdness

David Cake — 2012-05-09T13:14:00

I have quite a few problems connecting wirelessly with my laptop, lots of minor weirdness. But the most persistent one, easy to workaround but annoying is this— quite often, I connect to a new wireless network, the normal wireless network login dialogue box appears, I fill it in and hit connect, it spins it wheels for a few seconds (and wireless signal indicator does the 'up and down' thing), and then says 'Connection failed', then a few second later the connection appears to be working fine (wireless signal strength indicator stabilises, network prefs pane shows it has acquired a dhcp IP), but the dialogue box is still saying failure to connect. I then hit cancel and it goes away.
But sometimes it repeatedly fails, and I have to keep trying it eventually it works. 
Anyone know what this might be? Nothing particularly useful in the console logs. 
Cheers
David

Re: clean out the dust! It can get expensive if you don't

objectwerks inc — 2012-05-09T02:09:08


Sent from my iPhone

On May 8, 2012, at 7:50 PM, Arno Hautala <arno-mkieixxH3ob2fBVCVOL8/A< at >public.gmane.org> wrote:


Now that worked.

Re: clean out the dust! It can get expensive if you don't

Arno Hautala — 2012-05-09T01:50:57

At this point, I'm thinking Jokes 101.

Re: clean out the dust! It can get expensive if you don't

Jason Kersten — 2012-05-09T01:08:03

On May 8, 2012, at 6:20 PM, objectwerks inc wrote:



FWIW, I had a nearly identical set of symptoms on my early 2008 Mac Pro w/ 8800GT earlier this year.  After going through many of the same troubleshooting steps you did I eventually ended up replacing the power supply in January and haven't had a lick of trouble with it since. From poking around the Apple support boards, it seems these symptoms are indicative of a power supply on its way out (bummer too, at ~$280 a pop). It's possible the Quattro card may have been stressing a marginal power supply, in which case you may see these symptoms return...

-Jason