This is the website of Abulsme Noibatno Itramne (also known as Sam Minter).
Posts here are rare these days. For current stuff, follow me on Mastodon
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I’ll be watching carefully for reports of how good this is (or not), but I’m sure even if it has kinks, it won’t be too long before they are all worked out. Excellent. NOw I just have to find that XP disk so I can try this… :-)
Parallels Workstation 2.1 Delivers First Virtualization Solution for Intel-powered Apple Computers
Parallels announced today that it is beginning beta testing for Parallels Workstation 2.1 for Mac OS X, the first virtualization software that gives Apple users the ability to simultaneously run Windows, Linux or any other operating system and their applications alongside Mac OS X on an Intel-powered Apple computer.
Virtualization software enables users to run multiple operating systems, like Linux or Windows, in isolated “virtual machines” directly on a Mac OS X desktop, giving users the ability to run programs that are only available on those operating systems, without having to give up the usability and functionality of their Mac OS X machine . Each virtual machine operates exactly like a stand-alone computer and contains its virtual hardware, including RAM, hard disk, processor, I/O ports, and CD/DVD-drives.
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Parallels’ full support of Intel Virtualization Technology®, which is included in most new Core Duo chipset, ensures that virtual machine performance is close to near-native and that each virtual machine is stable and completely isolated from other virtual machines and the host physical machine.
(via Otherwise Occupied)
It had been achieved independantly a few weeks back, but it was a painful procedure and there were missing drivers and such. As of today, Apple offers a way directly from them to do it pretty painlessly.
Boot Camp Public Beta
Once you’ve completed Boot Camp, simply hold down the option key at startup to choose between Mac OS X and Windows. (That’s the “alt” key for you longtime Windows users.) After starting up, your Mac runs Windows completely natively. Simply restart to come back to Mac.
(via practically every website I’ve looked at today)
Of course, what would be really awesome would be full virtualization (a la Virtual PC) but at close to 100% full speed. That will be awesome. And is probably going to be available before too long.
But this right here is good enough so that if Amy has some Windows thing she has to run next year for school or whatnot, we won’t need to make sure we have a seperate Windows machine for her.
Excellent. Not that I *want* to run Windows or anything, but having it as a quick and easy option when needed…. great. (Just have to dig up a XP SP2 disk somewhere… or buy one when the time comes.)
Pretty cool.
Can you help me discover more music that I’ll like?
Those questions often evolved into great conversations. Each friend told us their favorite artists and songs, explored the music we suggested, gave us feedback, and we in turn made new suggestions. Everybody started joking that we were now their personal DJs.
We created Pandora so that we can have that same kind of conversation with you.
Read all the comments from MS employees in the thread. They are pretty unhappy and demoralized at the moment. (At least the ones posting there.)
Vista 2007. Fire the leadership now!
(Mini-Microsoft)
It certainly sounded like Microsoft leadership committed to us, our customers, our partners, and our shareholders that Vista would be out in 2006.
Slip!
We should have asked for more details around the “or else” part of that commitment.
(via Tech Memeorandum)
Meanwhile, Apple is on a roll.
(via Digg)
Oooo… pretty! There is now a finance.google.com. As many of the commenters on Digg mention, there is not much really NEW here that you can’t get dozens of other places, and many of those places give even more info. But it is nice new and shiny. I like shiny things. And I really like how the dot bounces around when you move around. And how you can drag it. And the letters that go to the news stories.
Hmmm. Beta indeed. In the time I took to write this post, it appears to have gone down:
SXSW to MPAA: STFU
(Derek Powazek, Just a Thought)
What followed was an hour-long firing squad as one audience member after another directed angry questions her way. The feeling of pent-up frustrations with the movie biz was palpable, especially as her claims of flexibility and excitement within the MPAA to find “creative new solutions” to the problems raised by the audience rang more and more hollow, the more times she repeated them.
(via Boing Boing)
There is a steady stream of these sorts of things almost every day it seems. More and more restrictions, more and more rules, more and more barriers… all these kinds of things just hamstring all the benefits that can come from a fully wired world. (Not that they don’t mess around with too much with the unwired world too.) Sigh. And most of these things happen with almost no resistance too, that is the sad part.
New bill: Cyber Safety For KidsAct of 2006
(Xeni Jardin, Boing Boing)
Senators Mark Pryor (D-AR), and Max Baucus, (D-MT) have proposed a bill that would require all commercial websites with material “harmful to minors” (in other words, sexually explicit content) to move to a .xxx domain within 6 months of this bill becoming law — or face civil penalties. Under the terms of the proposed law, the US Commerce Department secretary would be required to develop a domain name for adult sites (presumably .xxx) with ICANN.
Europe seeking to make open mapping impossible – help!
(Cory Doctorow, Boing Boing)
The EU’s INSPIRE directive is supposed to harmonize the way that European mapping agencies share their geo-data, but the process has been hijacked. Now it looks more like a proprietary, restrictive, monopoly pricing policy that guts open access.
Geographic data is a key to unlocking information collected by government on behalf of the public – census, voting, planning, utilities, environmental, transport information. Google Maps/Earth mashups are just starting to show us what can be done by overlaying different kinds of environmental and social information over freely available base maps.
The Environment, Public Health and Food Safety Committee of the European Parliament gets the chance to roll back some of these changes next Tuesday (21st March).
I just went to Google to look something up for work and instead of the normal Google home I got this:
Please no. Please stop. Please don’t ruin Google like Yahoo was ruined years ago. I don’t want a damn portal. I want to search. I have never really liked portal sites. They try to do too much for too many and just end up sucking. Even if you use the personilization features. Just too much crap.
Perhaps Google would do better, but this screen shows no evidence of that. I think you have been able to get this page before, but this is the first time it ever came up as the default for me when I just typed in google.com, and I’m not happy about that at all.
Yes, they have a link to the “Classic Home” on the page, and I’ll try to make sure that on the rare times I actually go to google.com instead of using the Google search box in Safari or Firefox, I’ll go there and not this awful “Personalized Page”. But still…
Google is doing more and more stuff that dilutes what gave them their power and made them THE place to go to find stuff. Some of it clicks and is cool. Others just… no. Please don’t.
And while we’re on google… time to reverse that China policy as well as the similar ones in various places in Europe and say screw you, we won’t censor results at all, and if you want to block us, go right ahead, people will find their way around it. And keep fighting the disclosure the DOJ is trying to do in the US, and if you are forced to submit in the end, deliver it in hard copy!
OK. Thanks.
So, I’ve been working my way up the Chessmaster Personality ladder.
* Cassie (Rating 23) – Beat on first game
* Pete (Rating 37) – Beat on first game
* Niko (Rating 57) – Beat on first game
* Ben (Rating 84) – I was completely dominating on the first game, but messed up and caused a stalemete, I beat him on the second game
Then the trouble started
* Petra (Rating 311) – I was crushing her and about to deliver mate and the GAME CRASHED. No record of my game remained. I played her again and crushed her again.
* Parker (Rating 313) – I was delivering checkmate and the GAME CRASHED AGAIN. Once again leaving no record of the game.
Please understand… I have made sure to record every move of every game of chess I have played… or even started to play but not finished… since I was in 8th grade. I suck at chess, but I had been sure to do that. Every game.
But when I play computers, I don’t hand write down the games. Because when it is over I can save it or print it or whatever. I now, for the first time in something like 20 years, have two games I played that I do not have the moves for. I suck at chess. Badly. So it isn’t like these games are to be studied or something. It is just something I have done and been proud that I’ve had a complete set. Now I don’t.
This isn’t quite as bad as the email meltdown of 2004, but it is up there.
I now know that I can not play Chessmaster 9000 unless I want to take the extra effort to hand write every move as a backup.
I have yet to decide if that is worth it.
Chessmaster bastards.
(And yes, I installed the two available patches to make sure I am completely up to date. Those supposidly fixed the bugs it had with Tiger, but perhaps there are new Rosetta bugs that they haven’t fixed yet.)
Anyway, I’m very unhappy at the moment.
This is very cool.
2 Web Sites Push Further Into Services Real Estate Agents Offer
(Damon Darlin, New York Times)
Two real estate Web sites are starting to offer services that could change the way real estate is bought and sold online.
One site, Zillow.com, which will be introduced today, will help consumers obtain more accurate real estate sales information — to the consternation of some real estate agents.
A smaller site, Redfin.com, introduced an unusual new service last week that might be even more disruptive to the real estate industry: the feature automates the process of bidding on a house online.
(via Memeorandum)
I think Zillow is overvaluing our home by a little bit though (based on conversations we have had recently with an agent about the current slowdown in the market). I would of course be very pleased if that was not true. :-)
The other site (RedFin) is starting out in the Seattle area, so maybe we’ll check it out some too.
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