• Macs don’t have viruses
• Macs don’t need to defragment the hard disk drive

First and foremost, Mac OS X is based upon UNIX operating system (Berkeley Software Distribution or BSD with parts from NetBSD and FreeBSD – all from Nextstep era), thus it is an operating system subject to security vulnerabilities such as viruses, Trojan horses, hacking, brute force cracking and so on. Before Apple switched to Intel and begun to gain serious market share, hackers and crackers weren’t exactly interested in the platform.

According to Stephen Withers of ITWire fame, Apple recently started to update its knowledge base recommending that users start using anti-virus software for their OS, the Mac OS X. Sadly, we see this as a beginning of the trend, and it is only a matter of time before Mac users start to need complete internet protection from 3rd party software manufacturers.
Second misconception is that you don’t need defragmenting the hard drive, because the “system does not need it”. EVERY hard drive (sans SSD) needs defragmenting in order to put frequently used files at the beginning of the hard drive. It is a the way how conventional hard disks work (they’re analog devices, after all), not file system based. There are some efforts in fragmentation-free file systems, but Apple isn’t one of them.

Back at the day, I was surrounded by Macs and users that kept them at “sacred ground”, banning my test lab or IT department from fixing them – yet we had to suffer through various instabilities (bombs were an everyday thing, especially if 2-3 software apps were loaded at the same time). After some Apple zealots left the company, all of the hard drives were defragmented and these machines gained a second life.
It was sad hearing brand new Mac Pros “scratching” the hard drive in every-day work – personally, I recommend TechTool Pro as the best collection of utilities for Apple platform. Alternatively, you can use iDefrag.

Bottom line is very simple: Mac is a machine just like every other computer or mechanism like cars, planes and yes, you can draw a comparison to humans. We need food and keep our maintenance (in our case, hygiene in order to keep the bad bacteria away), cars need food (fuel) and service (oil’n’stuff) and Macs need their maintenance too – defrag your hard drive and protect your operating system.

P.S. author of these lines is former/expired ACTC from Mac OS 8 era. Thus, any flame comment questioning author’s expertise through personal life attacks will be met with due diligence. Have a good one!

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Can this device put Blu-ray on a map as viable backup solution?

OWC Mercury Pro is external Blu-ray burner, but it features e-SATA port. Yep, you’ve read it correctly – it does come with FireWire 400 and 800, USB 2.0, but it also comes with e-SATA port, meaning you can burn 50GB of data at a speed of 1GB/min, instead of almost two hours of dwelling through USB connector. I own Sony’s BWU-100A in internal IDE and external USB version, and it is a drag burning 50GB for more than an hour. E-SATA enables burning at the maximum speed of SATA 1.0 spec, which is 150MB/s, so no more 40 MB/s through USB 2.0 (USB 2.0 can do 60MB/s? Yeah, right.), or FireWires which aren’t exactly… fiery.

E-SATA is the way to go, and these guys are offering this piece of hardware for 500 bucks. Given that my Sony cost over a grand a while ago, this is a fair value. And yes, this finally brings decent Blu-ray drive to Mac systems, which are traditionally lagging behind PC in terms of hardware connectivity. Since St. Jobs finally added e-SATA connector on latest series of MacBooks, you can get this device and have decent storage capabilities.

The device supports reading HD-DVD media as well… so time to back up my 100+ HD DVD movies is here. And with a help of Badaboom Pro beta, I might even put the GTX280 to a good use, instead of waiting for weeks on a CPU.There are two models available (http://eshop.macsales.com/shop/firewire/optical-drives/), one without Roxio Toast 9 Titanium (MacOS X), and one with. The difference is 80 bucks, so have phun.

If OWC dares to send the device for a review, they can be sure I’ll check their claims of 1GB/min write speed.

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imageSynth 2 inside Photoshop (Mac version)

Maker claims that imageSynth brings 10x speed increase over previous version, but we wonder how that could be if the company is not supporting GPU acceleration. Well…the secret lies in the fact that Luxology works hard on optimizing threading on all the CPUs, so a quad-core can be brought to perform four times faster than a single core one. Luxology was always known for great scaling (see Modo), and it is good to see imageSynth receiving the same linear scalability as Modo.
This is “the” utility to create textures. Did I mention that this application works on both Mac OS X and Windows?

Nuff’ said.

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