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I know I don't normally do news, but this is quite related to my last MacBook Pro bug post, so here goes...
Yahoo (they've removed the story, as of Dec. 2009) (among others) are reporting that NVidia has admitted that some of their mobile GPU lines have been failing at higher than usual rates; they're cutting predicted revenue by ~150 million dollars in order to fix this; stock price is dropping, etc...
One wonders if one of the affected GPUs might not include, oh, say, the GeForce 8600M GT?
In any case — things are looking up for this problem getting solved, perhaps.
Some Evas news and a little Lispy bonus tomorrow!
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Recently, an unknown number of first-revision Santa Rosa MacBook Pros began exhibiting issues with their onboard video cards. After a reboot, or on wake from sleep, the machine refuses to acknowledge the presence of a display, either internal or external. From that point on, the computer never regains its displays — not after a reboot, etc. Subsequent debugging indicates that the machine is misidentifying its NVIDIA GeForce 8600M GT card as the MacBook's Intel X3100 card. This issue is known to affect at least 50 people — a group of affected users has formed a Google Spreadsheet in order to document and organize cases.
AppleCare is recommending replacing the logic board, which some have gone through with, only to have the machine return to an unusable state shortly afterwards. Compounding the issue is the fact that this problem has arisen only shortly after the expiration of the default warrantee on these machines (this issue seems to only affect machines shipped around June, 2007), thus causing the logic board replacement to cost upwards of 400$ for those who did not purchase extended warranties. If you are experiencing the issues detailed below, please add yourself to the spreadsheet and visit our thread on the Apple Support forums, so we can get a reasonably accurate count of affected users.
Symptoms & Notes
- Blank screen, both on the internal and external displays
- The computer boots; it is accessible over the network or with Screen Sharing
- Target Disk Mode works (this can be used to backup user data!)
- ioreg and System Profiler both report an Intel X3100 video card, which is incorrect
- Affects people even with MacBook Pro EFI Firmware Update 1.5.1 installed (which was released to fix a similar problem, introduced in Firmware 1.5)
- Seems to be independent of any software updates, hardware changes, etc.
There are a great number of potential fixes floating around on the Apple Support forum thread. These include PRAM/NVRAM/PMU resets, firmware restores, changes in memory configuration, deleting Safe Sleep files, etc. However, none of these appear to be permanent fixes; apparently, even replacing the logic board is not a permanent fix, at least for some!
Someone has mentioned the disabling/deleting Boot Camp might fix things. Replacing my machine's logic board seems to have worked, at least so far!
So! I've had my camera for a few days now, and I'm incredibly happy!
I've found it to be crazy sharp, and with really really low noise (crazily, if you use NR for long exposures), and it's just very impressive, overall! I'm still getting used to the controls, and I've made some mistakes because I don't pay enough attention to settings that I've changed previously, but I'm catching on (everything I need to know is on the little LCD on the top!). I'm also surprised that I quickly adjusted (and enjoy!) having to use the viewfinder for everything!
I managed to get some good shots:
- Sunset through the June 10th storm — JPEG RAW
- Water drops on a geranium, or something — JPEG RAW
- Grasses in the window — JPEG RAW
- Amy at the Falls — JPEG RAW
- The Mill by the Falls — JPEG RAW
- Airplane over Winooski — JPEG RAW
- Pepa eating ice cream — JPEG RAW
- Daisies on the deck — JPEG RAW
I've been shooting everything in continuous mode, as RAWs, so I've taken a lot of pictures already (almost a thousand, worth many gigabytes!), but I've only kept about a tenth of that. I should slow down, though, so I have stuff to do when I start up a variant of APAD (I'm thinking more like a summer-bounded year of pictures once a /week/, instead... more time for quality, less difficulty making a book, etc.). I'll get more details about that out there sometime in the not too-distant future — I'll probably start around July 1, but I really don't know! So my camera's been epic so far... there's only a few things I've noticed are a problem. One, I've completely lost the ability to do close-ups. I don't have a macro lens — it's on my list of things to get, but it's pretty far out there because it's so expensive (the very nice looking, manual focus, 55mm f/2.8 Nikon Micro lens is ~300$, which is crazy... well... apparently it's not crazy, but it feels crazy to me, so I'm going to wait for a while!). The other is that I have no time-lapse function, nor the ability to keep the shutter open for more than 30 seconds. These were both quite commonly used features of my last camera, for me... I made dozens of time-lapses and took a good number of star-trails pictures with the 8700 (which the incredibly noise-free D80 would be insanely much better at!). Luckily, the D80 comes with both infrared and wired shutter controls, which dad and I are going to have to rig up to work. I think wired would be better, if only because I don't know where I'd put a little IR box when outside doing night exposures (also because it's much more obvious how you're supposed to hold the shutter open with the wired control!). Problem is, I don't know what kind of connector the camera requires... I don't recognize it at all... The last thing I have to grab some time is a wide-aperture prime lens — I've been told (and have read, time and time again), that this is really the single most necessary lens (besides a standard happy zoom lens), because it's so much faster, and supposedly literally noticeably sharper than anything else... but someday! This was actually on my spreadsheet when I was initially deciding what to get, but I went with just the absolute minimal order when I went to make the purchase, for now! Anybody with other suggestions? I dunno :-)
Guesses? Hopes?
- OS 10.6: short babble, no PPC, yes 32-bit, yes Carbon.
- iPhone OS 2.0 (OS 10.6??): today.
- Cheap iPhone: <<< 300$.
Mostly probably things we aren't expecting. Hopefully everyone who's out there has fun :-)
So I've just finally managed to get my machine up and running again! Took a few days to backup, reload (triple booting Leopard, Hardy, and XP), and copy stuff back down (that's still going on, but I've got my music back so I'm happy!).
Odds and ends: Hardy is another level of spit and polish above previous releases, for sure. They're not quite there yet, but it's still wonderful compared to Windows! Year of the Linux desktop: 2 releases from now.
Robb seems to think that synchronizing releases of lots of Linux software to a unified release schedule (a la Mark Shuttleworth's latest blog post) would be a really positive thing. I can see it, but we also discussed whether this would lead to an even lesser difference between distros (as we've been seeing anyway), and what the 'distribution' would actually come to mean in a world like that. Obviously per-distro patchsets won't go away, though I wonder if maybe they wouldn't decrease in size... everyone being coordinated, not just on a schedule, but also with more general communication, would almost certainly lead to lots more patches being pushed upstream (and probably, bad patches *ahem* being caught earlier)...
We generally concluded that distributions would probably converge, but allow for competition, mostly in the areas of integration/artwork/customization/reasonable defaults... but would a bunch of distros, like we have today, manage to exist without really competing on legitimate technical merit?
I dunno :-)
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