Macwintel

Parallels Beta2 released

So when the boot camp vs. parallels question first popped up, I thought the best thing to do would to be able to install it once under boot camp, and then be able to use it virtually under parallels. That way, if I just needed something out of my outlook, I just load up parallels, get the email or phone number, and keep using OS X. If I needed to play a video game, then I boot up into windows and play it at full speed. No space wasting by having to install twice.

After using parallels for a while, I quickly understood why that would be impossible. Windows has a set of hardware and drivers for that hardware, and Parallels emulates hardware, so using the boot camp drivers for boot camp and parallels drivers for parallels. To be able to boot into the same partition, you’d have to be able to swap out hardware profiles on the fly. That seemed pretty ridiculous. The other problem was windows activation. Windows is tied to a set of hardware ID’s so you can’t just copy it and put it on another computer. When you switch to the emulated mode, you’d have to re activate.

Well Parallels has done the impossible and has made it work somehow. The kind of magic that’s necessary to do this evades my primitive earth brain so I can only guess that one of the many bit gods has blessed this with some kind of obsidian obelisk. Sure enough, in the original beta, the activation problem sprang up, which was no surprise and I said that it’s amazing they got that going in the first place. But now they fixed the activation problem as well as a problem for those of us who installed using FAT-32 (an inferior format to NTFS but mac can’t write to NTFS, so you’d need it if you wanted to write to the the partition without booting into it).

Besides that, there is other magic such as coherence, where you could have the windows apps and the task bar while in a mac environment (mac desktop + dock + windows taskbar + mac windows + windows windows…. crazy). Now if we could have the same performance without having to boot into boot camp at all, so both OS’s can live side by side more as equals than host and slave. But for that we would need VT-D

This would be similar to the “get a mac” ad where they hug each other, except with the PC being inside the mac. Kind of like in Alien… or Deliverance. Except they like it.

ZFS in new Leopard build

I’ve been waiting to use Z-Raid for quite some time, including trying to build a NAS server that would use Z-Raid for its main store. Now if apple will build it in, then my plans for hacking a mac mini to connect to an external case filled with eSATA drives for Raid might finally come true.

check it out on world of apple

Also for you ubergeeks (is there any other kind?), who like me, might have noticed a similarity between google’s famed GFS and ZFS there is a discussion of it here

What the fuck?

Ok, so…. It’s been a long time since I rapped at ya, and I know a lot has happened on the macwintel front. I should tell you a lot has happened with me on that front as well. First of all, I bought a black macbook the day after it came out (they only had white ones in the apple flagship store in SOHO the first day, and as I always say… fuck that, white ain’t right). Parallels has come out - that’s pretty cool. Boot camp, equally sweet. I am running it both ways. I also have an intel mac mini. Soon to be pretty useful…
Well here’s the thing with Apple: they make nice looking products, they advertise in a way that maximizes their condescension (much like their users I guess), and they steal shit from their stockholders, and gives it to Jobs, who is a good guy and Gates is a bad guy. Except one of those guys steals from the rich and gives to the poor, and the other, I guess, steals from the rich and gives to himself.

Anyways, besides all that, there is the matter of them releasing products that don’t work and claiming they are awesome. Take my macbook (please). She’s black, like my ladies. She’s beautiful (ibid). And She randomly shuts down. Some are saying it’s a battery issue (it happens, I guess, to a lot of macbook owners…) And if you think it doesn’t happen to you, well… just wait. Mine was fine last week, and today, BAM! randomly and repeatedly. Not so bad if you don’t mind living in constant fucking fear of losing what you’re working on. But then again those condescending mac ads have already told us that PCs are for work and that these guys are for ummm… “being cool” or whatever. Anyways, since her inception I’ve kept pretty good track of her battery’s capabilities, and it seems that they still haven’t fixed the whole “battery always thinking it’s at 0 charge problem” that they had in like, every powerbook ever. Is this related to the random shutdowns? I dunno, since it happens even when plugged in. I know about the battery thing, however because of my somewhat anal keeping track of my battery’s capabilities. Note the somewhat steep dropoff in battery life at the end:

Now I have to get an appointment with an apple “genius.” Of course, if I paid more for “pro care” i could get a faster appointment, since all I paid was for measly apple care (highly recommended because apple’s quality assurance pretty much sucks ass). Here’s another deal: I know it’s a pain in the ass to get apple to actually support their products, even if you pay more for that support, but it’s a real dick move to use that inconvenience to sell another product where they can remove that inconvenience. I mean think about it: If Apple didn’t add the feature of randomly shutting down to their laptops, then I wouldn’t have had to watch my ass by buying apple care. And if apple didn’t add the feature where you have to show up in store to make an appointment for an apple “genius” and then when you show up for that appointment you have to wait an extra hour and a half, then I wouldn’t have to buy pro care. And isn’t that a dick move? HUH STEVE? YOU DICK

FINALLY!

So this last week has revealed that people’s efforts were coming to a head, with narf pulling into the lead among the winxponmac crowd (though other groups who aren’t competing for the prize are also making headway). Well winxponmac has claimed there is a winner, so we can all stop waiting. Well at this point we have to wait for them to publish the winning formula that makes our useless yet shiny boxes into something beautiful…. What is this beautiful thing you might ask?

A MacWinTel

James don’t kill me

WIN XP BOOTS ON MACBOOK PRO!!!

HERE IT IS! Wow, i was waiting with bated breath and thought it would not really happen, but there it is.

I’m an asshole

What not to do

Mike here folks, reporting on some recent developments along the way of the road to a real windows installation on Apple hardware.

In case you all don’t already know, the reason why people haven’t been able to boot windows on the intel imacs already is because of the new firmware architecture that apple employs in it, the extensible firmware interface. I could go into detail about it, and why it differs from the class BIOS that we all know and love. Essentially it allows macs to do things similar to it’s previous firmware interface, open firmware. Things like target disk mode.
So some people have done some stupid things. Like screw with their EFI until there was absolutely no way to get their computer to boot again.

Other people have convinced their offices to order them a new macbook to replace a windows machine, and now must be able to install windows on it lest they lose their jobs. What’s cool about this, however, is there is a $3097 prize (and growing) for the first person to post instructions on how to install windows xp on an intel mac. So, you know, if you believe in your low level system kung fu, you might be able to pay off your iMac, and if the prize keeps growing, you can buy a macbook to boot (pun intended).

Green tea & cocaine: Charisma +12, Intelligence -5

4:02 in the morning, cracked out and writing my first blog posting ever. Perfect.

This is James King, I’m currently living in Brooklyn, NY employed sporadically as a freelance designer, making money when I need to and delving into various other interests the rest of the time, usually until my cash flow runs dry. I call it the “back to zero” lifestyle and it affords me loads of personal creative time and the ability to submit to my non-existent sleeping schedule.

A little bit about my computing background - I was raised into PC’s for many years, often building my own from scratch, and then taking delight in squeezing every bit of juice possible out of it. My last desktop sounded like a vacuum cleaner on steroids, thanks to an overclocked Athlon and a heatsink the size of a grapefruit. When I turned it off the desk would shake from the torque of the fan motor. In some aspects it was annoying, in other aspects it was damn sexy.

Then I met Lola, my first Apple, my first laptop, my first computerlust. A first generation 17″ Powerbook, she was all I could ever want.

Lola is beautiful. Lola is smart. Lola is thin. She made me realize things, akin to the first time you make out with a real looker and then think back about all the flaws of past lovers, sometimes while your making out with said looker. Lola made me see the true clumsyness of the Windows OS, the lack of UI logic, and the overall ugliness of the experience. But alas Lola, even you aren’t without your shortcomings, and eventually I will leave you for a newer model — one with a faster CPU and those two little dimples at the top of the buttocks that I love oh so much.

In short, I have become a believer in Apple’s design philosophies, but miss the blazing speed of my Athlonmower. Stay tuned for the my next posting - The Trifecta of Evil. Bedtime.

On the Pluses of Applecare and the Evils of Tekserve

I had previously mentioned that I’ve had bad experiences with Apple QA. Let me tell you a story children, while we wait for the OS hacking gurus to figure out a way to get windows running on the new Macs (yes it is only a matter of time).

Once upon a time Apple released these new notebooks called Titanium Powerbooks. They had this cool titanium exterior but these tiny little hinges where far too much torque was required to move the screens, thus placing too much force on a small point. Back in those days, Apple hadn’t decided to screw over their loyal resellers by opening up their own Apple retail stores and give them better supplies. So the only place you could buy your stuff in the city was a magical fairy tale wonderland called Tekserve. There a friend of mine fished out good money for her new shiny titanium powerbook and an applecare package. Needless to say, the hinges eventually broke. She took it back to Tekserve where they told her it would cost her $1500 to fix and it was not covered by applecare. So she ended up having to buy a new one, and this was not easy for her to afford, but she was in school and in the middle of a final project editing a video, so she had no choice.

A while later, i had need of a powerbook, and since no one could use it, i asked her if i could try hers. I then fixed it (not an easy task since I had to remove the motherb– i mean logic board and every other part of the thing to get to the right parts). When I was done with it, i returned it to her, working, but ugly. I then found someone else who had the exact same problem on craigslist and I bought it from him. He too went to Tekserve and they too told him the $1500 price. So I bought an 867 mhz tiBook for $600. When I was going to buy the replacement hinges, someone told me that the genius bar at the mac store will replace your hinges for free, since enough people have complained about it and it’s become an accepted fault of Apples (though they won’t publicly admit it… they just removed the hinges in the new powerbooks and macbooks). So I took it there, and they replaced not the hinges, but the entire screen and touchpad assembly. They eventually replaced the logic board too for battery reasons, so I essentially got a new powerbook with an old processor for $600. Eventually, I had work to do however, so I gave the powebook to a Swiss friend of mine who was a student filmmaker and I got a thinkpad.

There are many morals in this story.

• Be careful of buying the first revision of anything, especially an Apple product.
• If you do buy an Apple product, definitely get Applecare, because the product will have a good resale value for a long time and they really do take care of you - unlike the dirty poor people who can’t afford Applecare. Screw them. NO YOU CAN’T PAY FOR APPLECARE WITH FOODSTAMPS OR CRACK.
• Apple screws over their resellers, but if that reseller is Tekserve, then they deserve it and should go out of business soon. Anyways the Mac store looks cooler, it’s in Soho, and for some reason, it always seems like there are 4 or 5 fashion models there just shopping. And their stairway is made out of glass, so you can hang out under there and umm, admire the architecture.

Greetings from Macwintel.com!

Hey all, we registered this domain in the anticipation of the burgeoning community of people who would like to run windows on their shiny new intel macs…

I’m Mike, a longtime windows guy who has owned a couple of g4 powerbooks and a dual g5, and currently own a mac mini (my first computer was a mac plus). I’ve always appreciated apple’s aesthetics (if not their QA). Currently, i prefer to use windows machines, and keep a mac mini around to compile and test mac stuff on. My notebook of choice has been an IBM thinkpad, which I’ve always viewed as rock solid and reliable, until last week, one day after “Teh Steve’s” announcement about the new Macbook, my steady reliable thinkpad just died. I considered this an omen. It came at a rather unfortunate time, however, as I was onsite in Torino setting up a display project for the olympics. I couldn’t get a replacement and had to borrow someone else’s Dell (thanks, Simon). Ironically, thinkpad is the official notebook of the Olympics.

Strangely enough, my thinkpad problem was quite similar to Ellen Feiss’s. I was coding up this mission critical project when my screen started blinking and when i rebooted it went bleep bleep bleep (actually this was the beep code for “everything from my memory to my display and my motherboard have totally died.”) The only difference between me and Ellen is that I hadn’t smoked copious amounts of ganja before hand.

And Ellen you’re totally cute. Call me. We’ll make out.

History:

There were quite a few rumors floating around when apple released OSX that they also had managed to compile an X86 version. The project was supposedly codenamed “Marklar” In June 2005, Steve Jobs at the Apple developer conference let us know that the rumors were true, and that he would convert the whole mac line to x86 by the end of 2006.

Apple then released some transition kits to developers to test out their software moving to x86. Some crafty developers managed to install windows on it, as well as cracked the OSX implementation that locked it to Apple hardware and installed it on vanilla x86 boxes. This corresponds to Apple senior vice president Phil Schiller’s statement: “That’s fine with us. We don’t mind,” Schiller said. “If there are people who love our hardware but are forced to put up with a Windows world, then that’s OK.” This is marketing tough talk to make it seem like their acceptance of windows dominance was a matter of Apple’s magnanimity.

Now last week Apple reported being ahead of schedule with the transition and released the intel core duo imac and the intel core duo macbook. Much drooling occured.

So to the question: Can we install windows on these like on the dev boxes? So far, it seems not:

Just for kicks, I tried to boot from a Windows XP installer CD. No dice. I then tried booting from a Vista installer DVD (Build 5270). Again, no dice. When holding down the Option key, the only icon that appeared was for the iMac’s internal hard drive. Holding down the D key to try to force booting off of the optical drive failed as well. With the Vista DVD, the optical drive churned a bit and the iMac hesitated as though it were contemplating whether it wanted to boot the foreign OS. Soon afterwards, the familiar gray Apple logo appeared on screen and Mac OS X finished booting.

So where does this leave us? So far we are anxiously waiting to get our hands on these machines, to figure out how to book windows on the new extensible firmware.