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

What the fuck?

FINALLY!

WIN XP BOOTS ON MACBOOK PRO!!!

What not to do

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

On the Pluses of Applecare and the Evils of Tekserve

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