Tech Tok

Below is the movie I was showing at gaming Friday night. It shows a Mac running OS X, Windows XP and Red Hat Linux.

Desktop switching is being done with VirtueDesktops, an awesome workspace-switching program for the Mac (finally!). Actually, I just installed it after typing the first 5 words of this paragraph, and I am very impressed. highly recommended.

The OS stuff, however, is being done with Parallels, a $40 app similar in some ways to VMWare.

Note that there are performance drawbacks to this software, in that you wouldn’t be able to run 3D games at full speed. Everything else is pretty much full speed though - MS Office (Mac or Windows version), databases, Excel, etc. Anything compute-intensive (as opposed to video-intensive) will fly at full speed.

Note also that this consumes other hardware resources for each OS too, like CPU and RAM.

I’m looking forward to getting a quad-core Mac Pro (or whatever awful name they give the new Power Mac) later this year!

Reviews on the HD-DVD versions of Serenity and The Last Samurai are up. So I guess this means that HD-DVD has “arrived” as of Mon Apr 17, 2006.

Now we see how big the gap is until Blu-Ray shows up..

Hope it’s not *too* long.

Very cool. iTorrent is a Python script that simply turns itself into an RSS proxy for BitTorrent downloads.

(provided you have enough CPUs, of course).

Techworld notes that the Russian-based company Parallels will have details concerning their virtualization support on Macs later this week.

Hmm, running Linux at the same time would have appeal for me. I would run Windows mainly for games, and would thus want as many hardware resources available as possible.

Rogers’ WiMax offering Rogers and Bell are rolling out WiMax service for Toronto and a few other cities. It’s a joint venture between Bell and Rogers, called “Inukshuk Wireless Inc.“. The price structure looks like this:

Speed down/up	Price	Company
½ Mbps/125 kbps	$45	Bell
1½ Mbps/¼ Mbps	$50	Rogers
3 Mbps/384 kbps	$60	Bell

Interestingly, despite WiMax’s symmetrical up/download speeds, the service is asymmetrical with slower uplaod speeds than download. This may be an artifact of the head end’s limited internet connectivity.

Alas, the number of cities with WiMax available is pretty small at the moment. I was hoping to get my Mom on it.

Also, the modem is a separate box that needs its own power, not a PC-card for your laptop or something nice like that.

Excellent article all about it over on Ars Technica

I upgraded to this unit. The local cable company does not support the HDMI connector, but based on reports that it worked for some people’s TVs, I tried it. It works okay for me using a $100 HDMI to DVI cable to the back of my SONY Grand Wega. The image contrast seems to have improved slightly over component video. The main issues other people have had with HDMI have been unsynchronized audio, I was told. I have also read that even though Roger’s employees are discouraging it, external SATA-300 drives can be plugged into the back. I want to buy a 400Gig SATA-300 tomorrow and try it. This would be about 100 hours of HD programming that could be stored. I have read elsewhere on the net that people have been successful with this. I still expect better technology in this area shortly, so “rental” is the key word here.