My research of the problem started with extensive googling of words “freeze”, “beach ball”, “seagate 7200 rpm”, and it led to myriads of posts that complained about the very same problem. Now, surprisingly firmware was just update by apple and I had latest and greatest Apple updates installed. Still freezes persisted, beach balls was accompanied with no-CPU usage and no log entries dropped. I tried to disable shock sensor on hdd, resetting NVRAM, rolling back firmware upgrades – none helped.

Here is what helped. I booted in 64-bit and all freezes and beach balls disappeared. To boot you just need to hold ’6′ and ’4′ while computer starts booting. Obviously bunch of kernel extensions stopped working. 3rd party drivers like Logitech was not compatible anymore and bunch of other things. I went and upgraded what I could find and uninstalled everything I couldn’t find updates for. So far experience is much better.

Now few important tips:

1) Here is a link on how to make 64-bit a permanent boot mode: http://netkas.org/?p=127

2) Run the following from terminal to learn what non-Apple kernel extensions you run (uninstalling them might help remove freezes and beach balls):

kextstat | awk ‘$6!~/(com[.]apple)/ {print $6}’

One huge current disadvantage of running in 64-bit is non-availability of VMWare Fusion and NTFS Read/Write drivers from Paragon. Pretty sure it will be fixed in the nearest future, but may be disabling unnecessary extensions might help solving your problems and run in 32-bit mode.

Update: one more thing that doesn’t work in 64-bit kernel mode is an ability of TextMate to run commands (described here: http://ticket.macromates.com/show?ticket_id=F66289D9). Though TextMate still can edit your files.

As of me: I am happy with 64-bit mode for now.

Let me know if this suggestion helped.

To my surprise I wasn’t able to find good solutions by brute force Google search, and digging further in software packages there were no satisfying answers. The closes shot was located on the site of prof. H.C.Tijms (http://staff.feweb.vu.nl/tijms/). He created a program (not for commercial use that appears to calculate all kinds of queues. This find led me to his book that helped me to create the following solution in Mathematica:

M/D/c queue calculation in Mathematica

It looks like a cumbersome and big, though in principle it is just a combination of several steps.

Three Table statements create equations for p_j.

Solve statement solves system of created equations producing list of probabilities.

For higher numbered probabilities we just approximate them with a formula for which we need tau (also obtained by solving an equation).

After we’ve got all the probabilities it’s just a matter of summing up relevant probabilities multiplied by number of cars in line to get an average queue length (L_q).

After summing up all we need is to divide L_q by arrival rate (Little formula) to get W_q.

In  order to use the result all we need to do is calculate WqF function for any reasonable parameters where c is number of server, lambda – arrival rate and d service time measured in hours. So one of the usages of the formula can be:

Manipulation for M/D/c queue

In this example we just expose all the parameters of the formula for manipulation. Might be very useful.

Under one minute, not leaving a car, not touching anything …

Enjoy: from the land intellectual property is not a property.

Geely GE. Don’t know? Looks like Rolls-Royce Phantom VI? Neh. That one must be designed from scratch.

May be they would spare cheaper cars? Wrong. Here it comes Shuanghuan CEO. And they were able to win a law suite saying that it is not a knock-off.

Cute little Mini this girl stands next to. Oh no! It’s not Mini. It’s another knock-off…

Lets move to Mercedes cars. BYD F8 must be and eight iteration of some design cycle, but it came out looking exactly like Mercedes CLK. Don’t trust me? Look yourself:

This little Mercedes cutie got it’s Chinese twin too:

Must be something against European car makers. But here it comes another one. Now it looks like Toyota’s Scion.

As most of us understand such things are simply unacceptable.
Though what can I do you may ask to prevent this?
My list is the following:
1. Do not buy knock-offs
2. Do not deal with people who make them
3. Do not deal with people who buy them, make sure they know that

It’s quite cool to see something like this.

Once you think that you’ve seen the best robot out there (Dog created by Massachusetts guys), they come and beat your expectations.

To see the full video – jump here (I cannot embed it cause of their request): Full Video

More stuff on their home page. Those robotic jelly looks also cool: Jelly

So if anyone says that something is impossible he’s most likely wrong.

Great Hybrid Car.