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• External Dell Display doesn't work with MacBook Pro (2011) after Thunderbolt Firmware Update (1.0 and 1.2)

  - by tom

  Today two Thunderbolt Firmware Updates (1.0 and 1.2) became available for my MacBook Pro (Early 2011). After installing both, my external monitor, a Dell U2713HM, does no longer work. The system detects the display, but the display shows only black. An Apple Thunderbolt display works fine and a MacBook Air can use the Dell monitor without problems. My MacBook Pro can use the Dell monitor just fine when I boot from a USB stick. Therefore, clearly the Thunderbolt Firmware Update seems to be the problem. Does anyone have the same problem? Any solutions or workarounds? I guess there is no way to remove a Thunderbolt Firmware Update once it's installed, right? Update 24.10.2013: Is there no one else with this problem? In the meantime I tried three different cables – none worked. My colleague with the same generation MacBook Pro also can't use my display after installing the firmware update. All colleagues with MacBook Airs and newer MacBook Pros (all didn't receive the firmware update) can use the display. Update 29.10.2013: Wow, ok today my new MacBook Pro Retina 13' (Late 2013) arrived. Guess what, I cannot use the display with it. Only HDMI works – not with the full resolution.

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• Intel présente une technologie qui pourrait bien mettre l'USB 3.0 au placard : Thunderbolt permettra des transferts jusqu'à 100 GB/s

  Intel présente une technologie qui pourrait bien mettre l'USB 3.0 au placard : Thunderbolt permettra des transferts jusqu'à 100 GB/s Mise à jour du 25.02.2011 par Katleen Intel vient d'annoncer Thunderbolt : une nouvelle technologie pour relier les machines et les périphériques, qui était en cours de développement depuis des années. En 2009, elle avait déjà été annoncée sous le nom de Light Peak. La système est sensé permettre des transferts à des taux deux fois plus rapides que l'USB 3.0 (soit à 10 Gb/s). Si ces chiffres vous paraissent bons, sachez qu'ils sont largement en dessous du maximum théorique que peut fournire cette technologie, puisque Intel utilisera au départ des fils de...

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• Network and Storage Devices Throughput Chart

  - by zroiy

  With all of the different storage and network devices that surround our day to day life, understanding these devices data transfer speeds can be somewhat confusing. Think about trying to identify your weakest link in the a chain that starts with an external USB hard drive (or a flash drive) that's connected to a 802.11g wifi router, can you quickly come up with an answer of where's the bottle neck in that chain , is it the router or the storage devices ? . Well, the following chart should give you an idea understanding different devices, protocols and interfaces maximum throughput speeds. Though these numbers can fluctuate (mostly for worse, but sometimes for the better) due to different kind of factors such as OS overhead (or caching and optimization) , multiple users or processes and so on , the chart can still serve to provide basic information on the theoretical throughput different devices and protocols can get to.. Enjoy.  Link to the full size chart   References:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sata#SATA_revision_1.0_.28SATA_1.5_Gbit.2Fs.29http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usbhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usb_3http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/802.11http://mashable.com/2011/09/21/fastest-download-speeds-infographic/http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thunderbolt_(interface)http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9220434/Thunderbolt_vs._SuperSpeed_USB_3.0  Icons:http://openiconlibrary.sourceforge.net/gallery2/?./Icons/devices/drive-harddisk-3.png      

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• Mac OS X: pushing all traffic through a VMWare VM [closed]

  - by bj99

  I want to set up an Astaro (Sophos) UTM in a Virtual Machine. The Setup should be at the end the following: Cable Modem (one IP adress) | [Ethernet] Sophos UTM (running as VM [VMWare Fusion 5] on the MacMini) | [WIFI] Airport Express v2 (for sharing Local Network to wireless and wired clients) 1)| [WIFI] 2)| [Ethernet over Thunderbolt Ethernet Adapter]* Clients MacMini (Local File Server) *To have the Mini also protected behind the UTM So the setup process for the UTM works fine, but then the problems start: I just have one external IP (from my cable modem provider)== So if I put the VM in briged mode my Internet connection drops, because the MacMini also has its IP adress. If I put the VM to NAT mode the Mini itself is not protected by the UTM So: is there a way to hide the en0 interface(Ethernet) and the en1 interface (Wifi) from the MacMini, so that they not even appear in System Preferences Network section but are available to the VM? That way the Mini must connect to the en2 interface (Thunderbolt adapter) to make any Internet/LAN connection and I just use the given single IP from the Cable Modem. Thaks for any suggestions... Sebastian

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• How can I force Parallels' networking to obtain an IP through a wireless router?

  - by RLH

  Here is my setup. I have a Macbook, Thunderbolt display and an Ethernet connection plugged into the Thunderbolt display. During the day, most of my network use can (and should) operate across the ethernet associated with my display. However, I also need to be able to connect up to a wireless router. This hasn't been a problem on the Mac OS X side, but the program that I need to run on the router has to obtain an IP address from the wireless access point. Considering my current setup, how can I leave it so that I can access the internet in OS X, yet have my Window 7 instance running in Parallels, get it's assigned IP address from a wireless router that my Mac is also connected to? I've fiddled around with the Parallel's network settings for an hour, and I can't get Parallel's to see the router, even though my Mac is certainly connected to it.

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• Mac OS X: pushing all traffic through a VMWare VM

  - by bj99

  I want to set up an Astaro (Sophos) UTM in a Virtual Machine. The Setup should be at the end the following: Cable Modem (one IP adress) | [Ethernet] Sophos UTM (running as VM [VMWare Fusion 5] on the MacMini) | [WIFI] Airport Express v2 (for sharing Local Network to wireless and wired clients) 1)| [WIFI] 2)| [Ethernet over Thunderbolt Ethernet Adapter]* Clients MacMini (Local File Server) *To have the Mini also protected behind the UTM So the setup process for the UTM works fine, but then the problems start: I just have one external IP (from my cable modem provider)== So if I put the VM in briged mode my Internet connection drops, because the MacMini also has its IP adress. If I put the VM to NAT mode the Mini itself is not protected by the UTM So: is there a way to hide the en0 interface(Ethernet) and the en1 interface (Wifi) from the MacMini, so that they not even appear in System Preferences Network section but are available to the VM? That way the Mini must connect to the en2 interface (Thunderbolt adapter) to make any Internet/LAN connection and I just use the given single IP from the Cable Modem. Thaks for any suggestions... Sebastian

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• Macbook Pro 2011 compatibility

  - by ldx

  Hi there, I'm planning to a buy a new 13" Macbook Pro, the one that was just released this week with the Thunderbolt port. The question is, has anyone given it a shot with Ubuntu (10.10 or 11.04 alpha)? I'd be especially interested whether temperature sensors/fan control, external displays via the displayport and 3D acceleration (for Compiz or some simple 3D games) via the integrated HD3000 GPU work without flaws. Thanks!

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• How to fix display on external Samsung Syncmaster shifted to the right when connected to Macbook Pro?

  - by joe larson

  Is there something special I need to do to be able to use external LCD displays with my new MacBook Pro? Do I need extra software, or do I possibly need a different cable? I'm attempting to use an external display with my MBP. I've got a "Mini DisplayPort to VGA Female Adapter for Mac", plugged into the thunderbolt port on my MBP, which I understood should be compatible with thunderbolt. I've tried this with three different SyncMaster models: a B2330 (21.5"), a EX2220 (22"), and a third (also 22" ish) which I don't have the model # for -- but all are 1920x1080 resolution; plus an additional HP monitor of similar size and resolution. In all four cases, the MBP recognizes the screen and choses the correct resolution. However, the display is shifted over about 1 inch. This is true no matter if I change screen resolutions also. The controls on the monitor for horizontal position don't help. Also, sometimes (especially if I drag an app over into the second screen), the screen starts skipping left to right and having bands of fuzz. Additionally, the monitor will periodically blink off for a moment, trying to switch from Digital to Analog and back (the Syncmaster shows text on the screen to tell you it's trying to do this). Often when it comes back from one of these blank-outs, it will show OK (no skipping or fuzz) but still shifted right; then after a few seconds it will go wrong again skipping and fuzzy. This photo shows the worst of it. I've added red rectangles to show the physical edge of the screen, and a yellow rectangle to show the empty space on the left of the screen. (Sorry for the awful quality and lighting!) Also, it's worth noting I am on Mac OS X 10.6.7, and yes I have this update 1.4 installed.

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• Viability of Mac OS X 10.9 Time Machine Server in office environment

  - by user197609

  Currently we have about 20 Mac OS 10.9 MacBook Pros (almost all with SSDs) backing up to individual USB drives. I'd like to consolidate these to one drobo thunderbolt drive array attached to a Mac Mini server (running 10.9 server) using time machine server. My question is, will this scale to 20 users? Examples I have seen seem to be 5 or 6 users tops, and this isn't easy for me to test (I'd rather not ask everyone to backup to the array and then switch back to USB drives if it brings our network to its knees). My primary concern is saturating our gigabit network, as time machine backs up every hour for every machine, so there would usually be a couple people backing up at any given time. We also have some people occasionally on our 802.11ac network and not on ethernet (usually connected via 802.11n until people upgrade to newer machines), but most of the time people are connected to our thunderbolt displays which have a gigabit ethernet connection on them. Our network topology is one 32 port gigabit switch with 5 smaller gigabit switches at each desk cluster. The mac mini server is connected directly to the top level switch. Update: Failing information from someone who has done this in practice, I suppose my question is really around how switches work. If three or four people are backing up simultaneously, and then other two (different) users transfer a file between each other, will they be able to transfer the file at gigabit speeds?

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• Automatically disable devices to save power and mitigate DMA attack in Windows 7

  - by Martheen Cahya Paulo

  Some OEM include energy saving apps that can switch off certain devices such as webcam or optical drive. Is there any brand-agnostic app out there that can do it? If the list of disabled device is customizable, it would be useful too for mitigating DMA attack (disabling Firewire, PCMCIA, SDIO, Thunderbolt, etc). Even better if it can recognize lock/logoff event, to mimic OSX behavior in mitigating the DMA attack.

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• Mac mini 2012 graphic upgrade for UE4 Unity3D Blender

  - by DaCrAn

  I have a mac mini (late 2012) i7, 16gb ram Vengeance graphic card intel HD4000. I buy recently a thunderbolt expansion PCIE whit support a graphic card PCIE 2.0 16x whit space for Full leght card. I have dubts about what graphic card gona give me the best results for using the Unreal Engine 4 UE4 or Unity3D, and Blender. My badget cover a Nvidia Quadro K4000 3gb or ATI Firepro W7000 4gb. Any recomendation? What professional graphic card can be better for design games in 3D? Thanks. DaCrAn

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• Install Ubuntu on iMac 21.5" (mid 2011)

  - by Mystic Mark le Maverick

  I has a dual boot system with MacOSX 10.8.2 and Microsoft Windows 7 Home Premium x64. I would like to install Ubuntu alongside the two existing operating systems for cross platform development purposes. My System specs are listed below. iMac 21.5-inch (mid 2011) Intel Core i7 @2.80GHz AMD Radeon HD 6770M Facetime HD Internet Camera Thunderbolt port Wireless Airport adapter card Apple 8x Superdrive Apple Magic Mouse and wired keyboard with numeric keypad Will rEFIt install properly on my machine too? Thanks you very much for the help.

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• How do I use an internal SSD as a scratch disk for FCP X?

  - by andrewb

  I'm contemplating setting up my MacBook Air as a video editing machine. If I do this, I'll upgrade to a 256 GB SSD, and I should be able to keep around 100 GB or more free for video editing. The video files would of course be stored externally, but save purchasing some expensive Thunderbolt RAID device (which I suppose is gradually becoming more of an option), it will be slow for read/writes. How can I have a set up where I take advantage of my SSD's speed for a scratch disk/cache for FCP X, but still have the TB(s) of storage of externals? I don't want to have to be moving files constantly back and forth, this is about saving time not wasting it.

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• External Display connected to Macbook pro won't sleep

  - by Moiz

  I have Macbook Pro with OSX 10.6.8. It is connected to external display (HP 2311x) using Thunderbolt to HDMI cable. My Macbook display goes to sleep after every 15 minutes of inactivity but the external display won't go to sleep. It does try to go to sleep but wake up immediately. It does that in never ending loop. I have to manually turn off the external display. Is there some settings I need to change to make external display sleep when Macbook display goes to sleep? Any suggestions? Thanks in advance!!

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• Acceptable sound quality: stereo needed for an Android game?

  - by Thomas Calc

  I have various simple short sound effects (damage sound, dying sound, thunderbolt, fanfare, breaking) for a game that is developed for Android currently. I use OGG files: 96kbps VBR, 44.1KHz, 2 channels (that means stereo, right?). I read the other stackexchange topics about "acceptable sound quality", but they're too general, address too many things. My experience is that even with 80kbps, my effects sound OK. But I tested it on a limited number of Android devices (including a Sony Ericsson Xperia Neo and a HTC Desire HD). My questions: For mobile phones and tablets, generally, what parameters are recommended? Won't my 80kbps sounds be bad on a newer device (such as a modern tablet)? I don't hear any difference between stereo and mono (2 channels vs. 1 channel, right?), is there any noticeable difference at all for mobile phones / tablets? (in terms of the player experience) May it worth it at all? I assume that stereo sounds take much more in memory (when they're decoded to PCM), despite of the fact that the compressed OGG size is practically the same. Reacting to Roy T.'s great comment: Actually, I couldn't measure the PCM size (Android decodes OGG internally), but I thought that stereo will take more space than mono when uncompressed After throwing out one of the WAV channels in Audacity, and re-exporting it: The new WAV file size is half than before The OGG file size is practically the same as before The sound effects and game music was recorded by my friend who is an experienced hobby musician/composer, but he knows little about computers & software so he just gave me some high-quality WAV files generated via his hardware.These were stereo, but if I check them in Audacity, both channels appear to be exactly the same.Can I consider them the same (= moving to mono), or might there be some unnoticeable differences to the human eye?

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• .NET development on Macs

  - by Jeff

  I posted the “exciting” conclusion of my laptop trade-ins and issues on my personal blog. The links, in chronological order, are posted below. While those posts have all of the details about performance and software used, I wanted to comment on why I like using Macs in the first place. It started in 2006 when Apple released the first Intel-based Mac. As someone with a professional video past, I had been using Macs on and off since college (1995 graduate), so I was never terribly religious about any particular platform. I’m still not, but until recently, it was staggering how crappy PC’s were. They were all plastic, disposable, commodity crap. I could never justify buying a PowerBook because I was a Microsoft stack guy. When Apple went Intel, they removed that barrier. They also didn’t screw around with selling to the low end (though the plastic MacBooks bordered on that), so even the base machines were pretty well equipped. Every Mac I’ve had, I’ve used for three years. Other than that first one, I’ve also sold each one, for quite a bit of money. Things have changed quite a bit, mostly within the last year. I’m actually relieved, because Apple needs competition at the high end. Other manufacturers are finally understanding the importance of industrial design. For me, I’ll stick with Macs for now, because I’m invested in OS X apps like Aperture and the Mac versions of Adobe products. As a Microsoft developer, it doesn’t even matter though… with Parallels, I Cmd-Tab and I’m in Windows. So after three and a half years with a wonderful 17” MBP and upgraded SSD, it was time to get something lighter and smaller (traveling light is critical with a toddler), and I eventually ended up with a 13” MacBook Air, with the i7 and 8 gig upgrades, and I love it. At home I “dock” it to a Thunderbolt Display. A new laptop .NET development on a Retina MacBook Pro with Windows 8 Returning my MacBook Pro with Retina display .NET development on a MacBook Air with Windows 8

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• What's the difference between these Asus socket 1155 motherboards?

  - by Johnny W

  I've looked on Asus's website, but they don't make it easy to understand what the differences are, and there's so many models to choose from! It's all spiel, and endless specs. How is anybody supposed to rifle through so much detail in order to make note of minor differences? If anyone already has this knowledge, I'd love to know what the major differences between these Z77 models are: P8Z77-V P8Z77-V DELUXE P8Z77-V LE P8Z77-V LE PLUS P8Z77-V LK P8Z77-V LX P8Z77-V PREMIUM P8Z77-V PRO P8Z77-V PRO/THUNDERBOLT Asus are famous for offering lots of solutions, but if there's no easy way to see the differences, how can you even consider what to buy? Their website does include a Comparison tool, but it's broken: I'm primarily interested in 1, 3, 4, 5 and 6, if that makes the task any easier. I'm sure there are people who have this knowledge. Thanks for any help.

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• Connecting OS X MacBook Pro to DirecTV DVR

  - by user14293

  I have a DirecTV DVR which soon will be replaced. The local phone carrier has wired fiber-to-the-door and that DirecTV sat service will soon be history. I have irreplaceable video recordings on the DVR's disk I would like to salvage. I'd like to connect my MacBook Pro (OS X 10.5.3) to the DVR (male HDMI to male Thunderbolt) and treat the MAC as a TV monitor. I'd like to capture the video stream to a file and then burn it to DVD. This is for my use only, not for distribution. Still researching video capture. Don't yet have a solution. Maybe there isn't one. Any ideas?

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• Connecting Dell XPS 17/HP Pavilion dv7 (nvidia GT 650M) to Apple LED Cinema Display for 2560x1440 resolution from notebook

  - by alphaTrader

  Is there any way to run higher than 1080p resolution from a Dell XPS 15/17 or HP Pavilion laptop? Specifically, I am planning to buy Dell XPS L721X or HP Pavilion dv7-7005tx with nvidia GeForce GT 650M and connect it to the Apple LED Cinema display via mini Displayport (I don't think Thunderbolt is supported on these notebooks). The idea is to get 1080p on the notebook and 2560x1440 on the main display. Only one of the montitors is active at any time. I asked Dell and they weren't of much help.

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• Mac app to apply certain settings based on selected location (profile)?

  - by Jonathan

  When my MacBook is connected to my Thunderbolt Display, I want WiFi to be turned off, Bluetooth to be turned on and the screen brightness to be at max. On the road I want WiFi to be turned on, Bluetooth to be turned off and the screen brightness to be somewhere in the middle. It would be easy if there was an application that would let me create several profiles (like 'Home' and 'On the road'), which I could easily select (from Dashboard or the menu bar). The profile settings would then be applied instantly. Does an application like this exist?

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• Macbook Pro won't boot from DVD with SSD

  - by Adam Carr

  Here's the timeline of events. Had a running MBP 17 Early 2011 Thunderbolt with OWC Mercury Extreme Pro SSD 115GB drive. Installed Windows 7 via bootcamp. I have done this multiple times before and every time I need to format the bootcamp partition before installing. I think this time I actually deleted the partition and then selected the freespace to install. This worked fine for the most part but I wasn't able to boot the boot camp partition using vmware fusion. I gave up and used the boot camp assistant to revert back to one mac partition. I was getting some odd behavior so I rebooted the machine. It then came up with a message saying no bootable partiton. This made me think (and still does) that the windows install using the free space versus the boot camp partition caused the windows MBR boot loader to get installed incorrectly and mucked up the OS X installation. Ok, fine, I can just reinstall. I can't seem to boot from the original MBP installation DVD. I hold down c on boot but I never get past the all grey screen. I hear the DVD drive spin up but it eventually stops. I put the original HD back in it and everything works fine but when I put the SSD in, I can't boot from the DVD drive. I have already set up an RMA with OWC to send back the drive but considering the order of events, I feel as though it isn't a hardware issue but can't seem to figure out how to fix it. I can always send it back in but figured I would check and see if anyone could offer some guideance/assistence before doing so.

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• virtual machines, dual booting and data disks on SSD

  - by stevemarvell

  This is in planning, so if I've got the strategy wrong, please let me know. There are multiple questions here, but I think they all degenerate to the same answers. The hardware is a laptop with a single SSD. I'm trying to not lose the performance of the SSD. I plan a native dual booting Windows (plus cygwin) and Linux machine which is my BYOD and represents the development environment. I keep the codebase on a shared partition (though sometimes this is an external thunderbolt SSD) which can be natively "mounted" by whichever OS is in operation. I boot into one or the other environments depending on the task in hand. Sometime I have to develop with windows tools, but generally, Linux is my preferred development environment. It would be ideal if I could VM the other OS and run either in either. I'm going to assume, because I've not found a sensible VM based solution, that I have get samba involved to share the code partition between VMs. Is this going to blow my SSD performance in the VM? The client also supplies me with a VM for the target environment, usually linux. This is not often suited to development and is used for testing only. I normally keep two copies of this, one as a sandbox and one which I deploy to using the client's preferred method. I keep these VM snapshots on the shared partition. The latter is interacted with over the network and so has no disk sharing requirements. However, it would be useful for the sandbox to be able to "mount" the code base from the natively running OS. Is this samba or nfs again, depending on the native OS? Am I missing a trick which allows this to all work smoothly with all four environments running at once without loosing the SSD performance?

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• How to set up Windows 7 Professional as a NAS

  - by Enyalius

  I searched and didn't find any answers, so please forgive me if this is a repeat. Anyway, I have an older computer that I'm using as an HTPC, and I was hoping that I could use it as a NAS/multimedia server, as well. My primary uses would include accessing content on my PS3 (same LAN), accessing content from other computers on my home network and (if I can) accessing content from my Android phone over the internet. I have used SubSonic to stream music to my Android phone and other computers before, but I would really like to find a way to do this natively if possible. I know that I can buy external hard disk cases that can plug in the USB port of my router, that I can get a Drobo or other network storage solution, but I would really just rather not spend the money (especially considering that I already have a computer that I should be able to use). Hardware involved: Apple AirPort Extreme base station router (most recent revision) Home Theater Personal Computer: Core 2 Duo @ 2.4GHz, 8GB DDR2 RAM, ~3.5TB hard drive space Sony Playstaiton 3 Thin 120GB HTC Thunderbolt (I have 4G coverage) rooted and running Android 2.2.1 Various Apple laptops Various Windows 7 desktops/laptops Thanks in advance! Note- I have looked at open source NAS software but I would like to preserve the Windows Media Center functionality in Windows 7, so other NAS software is not an option for me currently. .

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• Connecting a 2560x1440 display to a laptop?

  - by tjollans

  Having read Jeff Atwood's blog post on Korean 27" IPS LCDs, I've been wondering to what extent these are useful in a notebook + large display situation. I own a Lenovo Thinkpad Edge E320 with 2nd gen. integrated Intel graphics. According to the spec from Intel, this should support HDMI version 1.4, and, using DisplayPort, resolutions up to 2560x1600. HDMI version 1.4 supports resolutions up to 4096×2160, however, according to c't (German), the HDMI interface used with Intel chips only supports 1920x1200. The same goes for the DVI output - dual-link DVI-D, apparently, is not supported by Intel. It would appear that my laptop cannot digitally drive this kind of resolution. Now what about other laptops? According to the article in c't above, AMD's integrated graphics chips have the same limitation as Intel's. NVIDIA graphics cards, apparently, only offer resolutions up to 1900x1200 over HDMI out of the box, but it's possible, when using Linux at least, to trick the driver into enabling higher resolutions. Is this still true? What's the situation on Windows and OSX? I found no information on whether discrete AMD chips support ultra-high resolutions over HDMI. Owners of laptops with (Mini) DisplayPort / Thunderbolt won't have any issues with displays this large, but if you're planning to go for a display with dual-link DVI-D input only (like the Korean ones), you're going to need an adapter, which will set you back something like €70-€100 (since the protocols are incompatible). The big question mark in this equation is VGA: a lot of laptops have it, and I don't see any reason to think this resolution is not supported by the hardware (an oft-quoted figure appears to be 2048x1536@75Hz, so 2560x1440@60Hz should be possible, right?), but are the drivers likely to cause problems? Perhaps more critically, you'd need a VGA to dual-link DVI-D adapter that converts analog to digital signals. Do these exist? How good are they? How expensive are they? Is there a performance penalty involved? Please correct me if I'm wrong on any points. In summary, what are the requirements on a laptop to drive an external LCD at 2560x1440, in particular one that supports dual-link DVI-D only, and what tools and adapters can be used to lower the bar?

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• OS X server large scale storage and backup

  - by user135217

  I really hope this question doesn't come across as trolling or asking for buying advice. It's not intended. I've just started working for a small ad agency (40 employees). I actually quit being a system administrator a few years ago (too stressful!), but the company we're currently outsourcing our IT stuff to is doing such a bad job that I've felt compelled to get involved and do what I can to improve things. At the moment, all the company's data is stored on an 8TB external firewire drive attached to a Mac Mini running OS X Server 10.6, which provides filesharing (using AFP) for the whole company. There is a single backup drive, which is actually a caddy containing two 3TB hard drives arranged in RAID 0 (arrggghhhh!), which someone brings in as and when and copies over all the data using Carbon Copy Cloner. That's the entirety of the infrastructure, and the whole backup and restore strategy. I've been having sleepless nights. I've just started augmenting the backup process with FreeBSD, ZFS, sparse bundles and snapshot sends to get everything offsite. I think this is a workable behind the scenes solution, but for people's day to day use I'm struggling. Given the quantity and importance of the data, I think we should really be looking towards enterprise level storage solutions, high availability and so on, but the whole company is all Mac all the time, and I cannot find equipment that will do what we need. No more Xserve; no rack storage; no large scale storage at all apart from that Pegasus R6 that doesn't seem all that great; the Mac Pro has fibre channel, but it's not a real server and it's ludicrously expensive; Xsan looks like it's on the way out; things like heartbeatd and failoverd have apparently been removed from Lion Server; the new Mac Mini only has thunderbolt which severely limits our choices; the list goes on and on. I'm really, really not trying to troll here. I love Macs, but I just genuinely don't know where I'm supposed to look for server stuff. I have considered Linux or FreeBSD and netatalk for serving files with all the server-y goodness those OSes bring, but some the things I've read make me wonder if it's really the way to go. Also, in my own (admittedly quite cursory) experiments with it, I've struggled to get decent transfer speeds. I guess there's also the possibility of switching everyone off AFP and making them use SMB or NFS, but I understand that this can cause big problems with resource forks and file locks. I figure there must be plenty of all Mac companies out there. If you're the sysadmin at one, what do you use? Any suggestions very gratefully received.

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