[1/31] Bury the Megabyte Myth, a 1.25 GHz Mac mini with 512MB RAM--How Fast Is It? Isn't 256MB RAM enough for the Mac mini? We think so, of course, for the Mac mini's intended market but why are so many saying/writing that it's not? Usually, the first thing out of their mouth when getting to the cons of the Mac mini is that the RAM needs to be upgraded from 256MB. None other than Bob "Dr. Mac" Levitus, the famous Mac Guru, said so in his segment on last week's The Mac Night Owl LIVE internet radio show (listen to it here). And Macworld Magazine, the icon of Mac media, wrote in the con list of their review, "Doesn’t come with enough memory...." We even read a piece that claimed that using the Mac mini was no fun after switching back from 512MB to 256MB RAM. Finally, we got a few emails from readers following our initial 1.25GHz Mac mini speed test suggesting that we test our Mac mini with 512MB RAM to confirm our conclusions drawn from our earlier test of an upgraded G4 Cube. Okay, so we have done so and then some. Can we help bury the RAM megabyte myth?

We ordered a 512MB PC2700 DDR 333MHz RAM module on line and received it Friday. Unfortunately, the price of PC2700 DDR RAM jumped up in the past week from the recent mid-$60's so our module cost $84, plus $8.62 overnight delivery by DHL. We actually received a faster 512MB PC3200 DDR 400MHz module so perhaps a shortage of the slower PC2700 RAM may explain the recent price increase. To install the RAM in our Mac mini, we had to "crack" open its case again with our 4" putty knife. Thankfully, the second time we opened our Mac mini was much easier than the first.

Here are the results using our standard suite of speed tests using both "canned benchmarks" and "real world" tests. (see our speed test FAQ):

The results are virtually identical within normal statistical variation for our Mac mini using 256MB or 512MB of RAM. There is no evidence that the performance of the 1.25GHz Mac mini is in anyway impaired at 256MB of RAM.

However, two weeks ago we devised an additional test that would show more clearly the effects, if any, of different amounts of RAM. Our RAM test using Xbench and open applications is adequate to demonstrate the utility of adding RAM for general use but we decided to kick it up a notch to be more convincing. We added concurrent QuickTime Streaming of Steve Job's Macworld Expo keynote address and iTunes playing Beethoven's Sixth to the five open applications. Of couse, we also had the test application Xbench and Activity Monitor open to examine RAM usage.

Here is a table of RAM usage at 256MB and 512MB without the applications open (No Apps--white column), with them open (Apps--yellow column) and with QuickTime streaming and iTunes playing (Apps+--orange column):

At 256MB, there is a small change in the amount fo RAM assigned by Mac OS X to all categories when receiving QuickTime streaming and with iTunes playing (compare the orange vs yellow columns). The free RAM drops from the already small 7MB to 4MB. With 512MB, the RAM use allocation by category is substantially increased when receiving QuickTime streaming and iTunes is playing a song. Does this affect the performance of the 1.25GHz Mac mini? More importantly, does using 512MB ameliorate any of the performance hits?

Here are the speed test results with no applications open, five applications open and with QuickTime streaming and iTunes playing:

[1/27] Tonight on the Mac Night Owl LIVE--Bill Fox, Dr. Mac and Christopher Breen: This week Hosts Gene and Grayson Steinberg discuss the state of the Mac with Bob "Dr. Mac" LeVitus and Mac 911 columnist Christopher Breen. You'll also learn all about the performance of the Mac mini with Bill Fox, editor and publisher of Macs Only! Yes, that's us. Tune in at 6-8pm PST (9-11pm EST) for a great internet radio show. [Bill Fox]

[1/27] Apple Pro Tip of the Week--Force Quitting from the Dock: If an application hangs or otherwise quits functioning in Mac OS X, one can just force it to quit and relaunch without causing problems for Mac OS X or any other application running. This is a major improvement of Mac OS X of prior versions of the Mac OS. There are many ways of force quitting but the easiest is to simply control-click on the application's dock icon. A dialog box will pop up and then press the Option key so that the "Quit" command changes to "Force Quit." More details are on this Apple Pro web page. [Dana Baggett]

[1/27] Pitt Prof Chooses Xserve G5 for Genetics Cluster Computer: Univerity of Pittsburgh Assistant Professor Dr. Michael Barmada evaluated the solutions offered by Dell, SGI, IBM and Cray but chose the Xserve G5 for its ease of management and the ease of porting UNIX applications to run on it. "[T]he added benefits that we can reap," he stated "[are] the Xserve’s vectorization and G5processor’s vector and 64-bit capabilities." Dr. Barmada's work is profiled on this Apple science web page. [Dana Baggett]

[1/27] Apple Revised the Offerings from Two Hot Deals Retailers:

MacZone has fantastic prices on essential Mac products, including LaCie's Porsche Design 160GB External FireWire Hard Drive, MacAlly Professional Monice Cancelling Headset for iPod, Triton Sound Bite Portable USB Speaker System, Kensington PocketHub Mini Compact 4-Port USB Travel Hub, Targus Citygear Miami Messenger Notebook Case, Nikon CoolPix 4200 Digital Camera with Tripod and Case and much more.

Publishing Perfection has great deals on a variety of design and print products for your Mac, including Corel Painter IX, Corel Knockout 2, Andromeda Artistic Screening Tools, Alien Skin Eye Candy 5: Nature, Wacom Graphire 3 6x8 Graphics Tablet, Discreet Cleaner 6, Adobe Acrobat 7 Professional Upgrade, and much more.

[Bill Fox]

[1/26] Brief Hands-On Report--Apple Security Update 2005-001 for Mac OS X 10.3.7 and 10.2.8, Client and Server: Late yesterday afternoon Apple released Security Update 2005-001. Note that Apple has changed the naming convention for security updates from a complete exact date to a year-serial number.

The new update delivers a number of security enhancements and is recommended for all Macintosh users. For detailed information on this Update, please visit this Apple web page. This update includes the following components:

at commands

Available for: Mac OS X v10.3.7, Mac OS X Server v10.3.7
CVE-ID: CAN-2005-0125
Impact: Updates the "at" commands to address a local privilege escalation vulnerability
Description: The "at" family of commands did not properly drop privileges. This could allow a local user to remove files not owned by them, run programs with added privileges, or read the contents of normally unreadable files. This update patches the commands at, atrm, batch, atq, and atrun. Credit to kf_lists[at]digitalmunition[dot]com for reporting this issue.

ColorSync

Available for: Mac OS X v10.3.7, Mac OS X Server v10.3.7, Mac OS X v10.2.8, Mac OS X Server v10.2.8
CVE-ID: CAN-2005-0126
Impact: Malformed ICC color profiles could overwrite the program heap resulting in arbitrary code execution. Description: An out-of-specification or improperly embedded ICC color profile could overwrite the program heap and allow arbitrary code execution. There are no known exploits for this issue. With this update, ColorSync will reject incorrectly-formed ICC color profiles.

libxml2

Available for: Mac OS X v10.3.7, Mac OS X Server v10.3.7
CVE-ID: CAN-2004-0989
Impact: The libxml2 library contains unsafe code that may be exploited in applications linked against it.
Description: This update fixes several functions in the libxml2 library that have been identified as unsafe due to potentially exploitable buffer overflows.

Mail

Available for: Mac OS X v10.3.7 Client, Mac OS X Server v10.3.7
CVE-ID: CAN-2005-0127
Impact: Email messages sent from a single machine can be identified
Description: A GUUID containing an identifier associated with the ethernet networking hardware was used in the construction an RFC-822 required Message-ID header. Mail now hides this information by computing the Message-ID using a cryptographic hash of the GUUID concatenated with data from /dev/random. Credit to Carl Purvis for reporting this issue.

PHP

Available for: Mac OS X v10.3.7, Mac OS X Server v10.3.7, Mac OS X v10.2.8, Mac OS X Server v10.2.8
CVE-ID: CAN-2003-0860, CAN-2003-0863, CAN-2004-0594, CAN-2004-0595, CAN-2004-1018, CAN-2004-1019, CAN-2004-1020, CAN-2004-1063, CAN-2004-1064, CAN-2004-1065
Impact: Multiple vulnerabilities in PHP including remote denial of service and execution of arbitrary code
Description: PHP is updated to version 4.3.10 to address several issues. The PHP release announcement for version 4.3.10 is located here.

Safari

Available for: Mac OS X v10.3.7, Mac OS X Server v10.3.7, Mac OS X v10.2.8, Mac OS X Server v10.2.8
CVE-ID: CAN-2004-1314
Impact: When Safari's "Block Pop-Up Windows" feature is not enabled, a malicious pop-up window could appear as being from a trusted site
Description: If the "Block Pop-Up Windows" feature is enabled, then this issue does not occur. If the "Block Pop-Up Windows" feature is not enabled, a user can be misled about the content of a Pop-up window if they used an untrusted link to navigate to a site they wanted to view. This update corrects the issue regardless of the "Block Pop-Up Windows" setting. Credit to Secunia Research for reporting this issue.

SquirrelMail

Available for: Mac OS X Server 10.3.7
CVE-ID: CAN-2004-1036
Impact: SquirrelMail is updated to address a cross-site scripting vulnerability
Description: A cross-site scripting vulnerability in SquirrelMail allowed email messages to contain content that would be rendered by a users web browser. SquirrelMail is updated to address this issue. Further details are available from the SquirrelMail web site.

We were able to update most of our Macs using the System Preferences software update pane with no problems. This included our new Mac mini that we updated using Apple Remote Desktop. However, two of our Macs, a G4 Cube and a 12" PowerBook G4, could not be updated that way. We got a "could not expand and verify" error message. We repaired permissions but to no avail so we downloaded the appropriate updater from this Apple support web page. The update installed with no further drama. So far we have no operating problems on any Mac since installing the update. [Dana Baggett & Bill Fox]

[1/26] Game Developers Conference Design Track Highlights: GDC 2005 is coming soon, March 7-11, to San Francisco's Moscone Center West. Creating compelling, immersive games requires understanding, visualizing, demonstrating, and tuning the interactions of an ever-increasing number of game tools and systems. While game designers need to understand and exploit the possibilities of new technologies such as realistic physics, facial expressions, and lighting techniques, they must also continue to master the traditional disciplines of drama, gameplay, and psychology. The Game Design Track explores the challenges and ramifications of the interaction between new technologies and established techniques.

Here are some of the Game Design Track highlights:

• Normalcy and Displacement Map, Sitting in a Tree (Matthias Worch)
  
• Raising the Bar on In-Game Animation (Jeremy Cantor)
  
• The Road to Victory: Procedural Modeling for EA Sports NASCAR Thunder (Wesley Grandmont III)
  
• Game Design Atoms: Can Game Designs Be Diagrammed? (Raph Koster)
  
• Storytelling Across Genres: BioWare's Perspective (Ray Muzyka, Greg Zeschuk)

Registration for GDC 2005 is open now. [Bill Fox]

[1/25] Update 6--Sp@mX, the Road to Near Zero Spam: We are using Sp@mX from HSC to try to reduce the 4000+ spam messages that we received weekly prior to using it. Our initial review of Sp@mX v3.0.5 appeared on December 13th and we have issued weekly progress reports since then ( 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5). The $20 Sp@mX automatically processes spam messages and provides reports to the adminstrators of servers that handled the spam on its way to you with a request to block its originator. It relies on them to follow through. In addition, Sp@mX can be configured to send copies of your spam to the FTC and DoJ. We completed Week 6 last Friday and here are the results:

Our spam load during week 6 declined over 100 from the previous 2 weeks. But for the past four weeks it seems that we have reached some kind of a plateau, averaging 1282 with a range of 1145-1385.

What could be causing this plateau in the road to near zero spam? Well one thing is inattention (or worse) from too many mail server administrators. We note that most of our spam now generates server abuse addresses in Eastern Europe, Korea and China, also where most of our failed deliveries are from, i.e. many of the abuse mail addresses in those countries lead to blocked or full mailboxes. It seems that one way to quickly reduce our spam further is to block/delete all email handled by servers from those countries at our host's email server since we never get any legitimate email from people in those countries anyway.

Sp@mX is up to version 3.2.6 as of this report. The interface has continued to improve as has its functionality. Recent versions have included a script to export spam from BareBones' Mailsmith 2 in a format that Sp@mX can use, adding more convenience for Mac users.

Our spam dropped precipituously during the first three weeks of using Sp@mX, a two-thirds reduction in our spam from the level from before we began using Sp@mX. We think this is an outstanding achievement. At least the FTC and California DoJ got another 1246 spam message examples from us last week. But because we are on a four-week plateau, we will issue our next report when the amount of spam makes a significant change from the average over the past four weeks. [Bill Fox--Disclaimer: HSC is now an advertiser on Macs Only!]

[1/25] Apple Pro Stories Updated: In the past week Apple has updated several of its Pro pages with examples of people successfully using Macintosh hardware and/or software:

Design--Jacob Colie

Video--Harold Moss

Video--Bob Arnot

[Dana Baggett]

[1/24] Apple's New 1.25GHz Mac mini--How Fast Is It? On Saturday we bought a base 1.25 GHz Mac mini at the Fashion Valley Apple Store in San Diego when the store opened. We didn't buy it because it's a speed demon, but because of what it can do for the remarkable price of $499. Apple intends the Mac mini to be an ideal starter Mac for cost-conscious PC switchers, and it is, but many Mac minis will find their way into homes and offices of Mac users as well--like ours, for example.

While those in Saturday morning's line at the Fashion Valley Apple Store were mostly looking for an iPod shuffle, there were many Mac mini buyers as well. Apple will be happy to know that every Mac mini buyer in line close to us, all well under the age of 30, intended to buy a Mac mini to replace their Windows PC. We got a few questions of concern from them about the Mac mini's speed and RAM compliment. Most planned to buy the $599 1.42 GHz model--the MHz myth lives on. Of course, we think the Mac mini (either model) is plenty fast for the normal computing jobs that they planned to tackle. We also advised them not worry about the base 256MB RAM. It is likely that they will find that 256MB works just fine based on our test of last week.

Our 1.25GHz Mac mini came in the now famous small box with a gray handle along with a small white plastic power brick and a DVI to VGA video adapter. Also included was a small gray box with a system restore/bundled software/hardware test DVD, a Mac OS 9 install DVD, an iLife '05 DVD, a 105-page user guide and the usual white Apple logo stickers, software proof-of-purchase coupons, software license and one-year limited warranty.

We hooked it up to our ethernet network and 17" display with a DVI to ADC adapter and then plugged it into the power brick. We plugged our D-Link Bluetooth module and USB mouse into USB ports on the display and pushed the power button. The only setup glitch we encountered was that our Bluetooth Apple Wireless Keyboard was not recognized initially so we had to use a wired USB keyboard for setup. After the setup it worked fine.

We had to install iLife '05 and Mac OS 9 from their DVDs. We also had to download and install a number of recent software updates. While we didn't mind all this extra "work" it is probably not the best experience for a switcher. Finally, we installed Apple Remote Desktop Client, M$ Office 2004 and our test suite applications.

So how fast is it? We subjected our 1.25GHz Mac mini to most of our usual speed tests. We compared the results with those from our original 2000-vintage 450MHz Power Mac G4 Cube, stock except for the 704MB of RAM, and our 2004-vintage dual 2.5GHz Power Mac G5--all running Mac OS X 10.3.7. Here are the specifications of the three computers:

Our speed tests consist of several canned benchmark applications and several so-called "real world" tests. They are all easy to do on your own computer--see our Speed FAQ for details. Here are the results:

For the most part the Mac mini's performance falls comfortably in between that of the older G4 Cube and the latest Power Mac G5. The hard drive is on the slow side as expected since it is a PowerBook hard drive and the Mac mini's time to shutdown and to export a QuickTime movie in Full Quality DV are longer than expected. Each of the three trials of those two tests were consistent so we have no explanation. The good news is that the graphics results, including those for the 3D game Quake III Arena, are surprisingly better than we expected.

RAM. What about the 256MB of RAM? Curiously, ours came with a PC3200 DDR 400MHz RAM module rather than the slower 333MHz PC2700 DDR RAM which is the Mac mini's specification. Last week we tested whether 256MB RAM was sufficient for most uses with Mac OS X 10.3.7 in an upgraded G4 Cube. Basically, we ran Xbench with no other applications open except it and Activity Monitor and then we re-ran Xbench after opening five RAM-sucking applications: Safari, Apple Mail, iTunes, M$ Word and M$ Excel. Opening the applications resulted in a minor performance hit but increasing RAM to 512MB and 1GB did not ameliorate the performance hit by much at best.

We re-ran the tests with and without apps on our Mac mini. The first table below shows that opening the five additional applications uses up all of the free RAM except for 7MB.

The second table below shows the results without the applications open and with them open. We also included the results from a 1.42 GHz Mac mini posted on this web page.

[1/19] See Cool Animations of Titan in Apple QuickTime Video: VendorNation posted the two most recent flight animations of the surface of Titan. Further information on the INAF scientific web sites can be visited as well from the Vendornation web site. They are selling the VistaPro Renderer, which only runs on Windows, but the QuickTime clips are cool. [Bill Fox]

[1/19] Wireless Internet (Wi-Fi) is Rapidly Taking Over the Globe--Free Auto-updating Directory: There are some 50,000 Wi-Fi hotspots according to this Yahoo News article. London leads the globe for cities with over 1100. The US leads among countries and California leads among states, but the number one US city, New York, is third with the top California city, San Francisco, a mere ninth among cities worldwide. The article got its data from Jiwire, a great resource for finding Wi-Fi hotspots. Jiwire has a free auto-updating Wi-Fi directory that can be downloaded and carried on a PowerBook or iBook (registration required). The directory is updated when connected to the internet. We used it to find 18 free hotspots in San Diego, CA. [Dana Baggett]

[1/19] Firefox Continues to Chip Away at Internet Explorer's Lead: Firefox, the Mozilla Project's standalone open source web browser, reached nearly a 5 per cent share in past month according to this Yahoo News article. Internet Explorer still accounts for 90 per cent of web browsers but that's down 3 per cent since October when Firefox 1.0 was released in final. [Dana Baggett]

[1/18] Apple's New Mac mini--Is 256MB of RAM Enough? Our Pre Hands-On Trials: Early in the life of Mac OS X, Apple was providing a meagre 64MB of RAM with many of its Macs, RAM was expensive and people were grousing. So we conducted a study of how much RAM was needed to run Mac OS X smoothly. We found that the sweet spot for general Mac use was 256MB, i.e. the benefits from increasing RAM dropped off precipitously using over 256MB. Of course, that was early in the development of Mac OS X, G4 CPU speed was stalled at 500MHz and RAM was more expensive than today. Does our conclusion still apply today?

Many long-time Mac users are now used to using more than 256MB of RAM and the real power users are pushing installed RAM well past 2GB. The speed of processing large image files is nearly directly related to the amount of RAM. But most Mac users from among the 14 million using Mac OS X don't process huge images. All of today's consumer Macs come with 256MB, as do the low end of the PowerBooks and Power Macs, and the top end PowerBooks and Power Macs come with just 512MB.

The base consumer $499 Mac mini and upscale $599 model also come with 256MB. So what is all the grousing about? It is partly because Apple made the Mac mini difficult to get open to upgrade RAM or anything else for that matter. This is a smart move by Apple because the margin on the base Mac mini has to be really thin. People fiddling inside will surely result in more repair returns and help suck the thin profit out of the Mac mini. In addition, it provides an opportunity for resellers to get a bit more out of a sale for those wanting more RAM.

Why do people want more RAM? Well, some are just plain used to it. Then, there are some who see the Mac mini as a cheap alternative to an iMac G5 or Power Mac G5 for work that should be done on an iMac G5 or Power Mac G5. Really? C'mon, give us a break.

The Mac mini is an inexpensive base Mac that runs Mac OS X and it is intended for general low end users, especially Wintel users. Apple has clearly gone through great pains to ensure that it does not compete with an iMac G5 or Power Mac G5. But this does not mean that the Mac mini might not fit some niches of current Mac users. We see several and plan to get a base $499 Mac mini as soon as they are out.

We can't really answer the question of whether we need more RAM or not without actually having a Mac mini in hand. But we can use a Mac that is roughly similar in specs and see how it performs as guidance. So we used our upgraded 1.4GHz G4 Cube as a proxy to try 256MB, 512MB and 1GB of RAM. Here is a chart comparing the two:

The upgraded G4 Cube has a faster hard drive and L3 cache but otherwise the $599 Mac mini has a slight speed advantage.

We used Xbench 1.1.3 to test the speed the G4 Cube with Mac OS X 10.3.7 and 256MB, 512MB and 1GB of RAM. We tested it with no other applications open and with a RAM-sucking set of applications open: Safari, Apple Mail, iTunes, Microsoft Word and Microsoft Excel. Someone was able to run Xbench on a $599 Mac mini with 1 GB RAM at Macworld and posted the results. Here are the results as compared with the posted $599 Mac mini results: