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Posts Tagged ‘Virtualization’

MacUpdate bundle offers Parallels 5, we offer chance to win

If you want an economical way to buy into the reigning speed champion of virtualization apps, the MacUpdate Promo Spring Bundle may be just the ticket. At $49.99, the 11-app bargain basket is headlined by Parallels Desktop 5 (normally $79 alone). The rest of the lineup is solid as well:

• Bee Docs Timeline 3D ($65)
• Spell Catcher ($39.95)
• Hydra ($79.95)
• Back-In-Time ($29)
• ForeverSave ($14.95)
• Hyperspaces ($12.95)
• Web Snapper ($15)
• Mac DVDRipper Pro ($9.95)
• MacScan ($29.99)

If you’re buying the bundle early enough (within the first 20,000 purchases — as of right now they are edging towards 14K), you get Metakine’s DVD Remaster Pro as a bonus app. The bundle sale runs for 12 more days, but you’ve only got 2 days to get in on our 2-bundle giveaway; MacUpdate has reserved one bundle each for two lucky TUAW readers. See details by clicking “Read more” below!

To enter, just submit a comment below telling us which apps you think would be best for the next MUPromo bundle.

Summary of giveaway rules:

• Open to legal US residents of the 50 United States and the District of Columbia and Canada (excluding Quebec) who are 18 and older.
• To enter leave a comment below describing the app you think MacUpdate should include in the next bundle offering..
• The comment must be left before Sunday March 21, 11:59PM Eastern Daylight Time.
• You may enter only once.
• Two winners will be selected in a random drawing.
• Prize: One MacUpdate Promo Spring Bundle. ARV $49.99.
• Click Here for complete Official Rules.

TUAWMacUpdate bundle offers Parallels 5, we offer chance to win originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Fri, 19 Mar 2010 20:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Cloud Religion: Do’s, Do Not’s, and a Glimpse of Nirvana

As the cloud is getting more players and interfaces, best and worst practices are emerging. As the market grows and more companies try to plug in, the cloud may benefit from guiding principles.

Similar to new technology movements in the past, a natural process is underway to define “what is good”, which, for some in the industry, equates to “what is open”. Like religion itself, open can be defined in ways that are uplifting, or on the other side of the coin, restricting. Also, we learn again, nothing is free.

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Cloud APIs Must Walk on Water

If you’ve been part of a software development project, you know that sometimes it’s hard to get the team to all agree on best practices for interface design, database optimization, or even what technology to use. In this analysis, we take a look at some of the movements in cloud computing that start to lay a framework of good as it relates to this technology.

In this context, API designers for cloud applications need to think ahead and avoid common pitfalls. For several reasons, more than ever before. First, because many people will be accessing your one piece of code. Second, is that in this world of open APIs, it’s easy to compare your code against another.

We notice that data management practices are at the core, and details matter when provisioning in platforms. At the same time that groups are forming to align practices and forms of virtualization and cloud standards, a voice whispers that perhaps this is a free-market problem. People who benefit at solving it, will; others will ignore it or compete directly. We enjoyed this post from Joyent on where standards matter in a practical sense.

In essence, the question raised: If a vendor makes it easy and bakes in the ability to “just do it”, do you know or care about the standards? This seems to mirror an iPhone development paradigm, which is to expect work from the vendor SDK or libraries. The SDK wraps standards implementations, which is done in the way best understood by that vendor.

Do Unto Others as You Would Have Done To You

We know the cloud is big – perhaps it will inevitably be bigger than the Internet itself as it usurps our conception of location, space and time.

Where power forms, rules, groups, and organizations do as well. In information technology there is always tension between open standards and defacto standards. The former are crafted through agreements, the latter through leadership and market dominance.

We asked in a prior series “Will a single company become the dominant provider in the cloud?” Today we look at the more practical side of “who is winning now” – who is setting the rules and who is in the trenches.

Quite a number of the responses to our earlier posts emphasized that “the cloud should be free”, meaning that it should have governing principles to avoid one vendor from owning the landscape.

Here are a few groups that have emerged to provide some context in how this may come together, both philosophically and practically. In both, the devil is in the details. A good summary of some of the current combining of forces is by the Open Grid Forum. (In our opinion, grids have given way to clouds as the dominant concept in this technology makeover).

• A resource directory of initiatives is located at the Cloud Standards Wiki, which in itself was formed by a handful of organizations and movements working to align around setting rules and patterns for cloud computing.
• The Open Cloud Consortium is organized around developing practices around sharing resources and has recently focused on a developing a test bed.
• The DMTF is working at the core definition of virtualization. It recently focused on the 1.1 version of the Open Virtualization Format (OVF) specification that focuses on packaging virtualization instances and creating a portable mechanic distribution by defining envelope and collection parameters around the virtual machine and its services. The organization, which contains members of IBM, Microsoft, Dell, VMware, XENSource, Sun, and NEC, has submitted 1.1 for consideration as an ANSI and ISO standard.
• The efforts by the federal government in its data.gov initiative shows that there’s a market that’s starting to see the value of raw government data formats. Soon, we would expect this to be powered by a mesh of computer resources that allow all sorts of jobs – integrated jobs – to work with these data sets. It would comprise an active government cloud.

Do Not Covet Thy Neighbors Network Resource

When looking for things to avoid, we found a lot of philosophical questions around data ownership, logging and portability. These discussions are alive and well and seem to be being absorbed into vendor solutions and consortiums like the ones mentioned earlier.

For a more practical view, we turned to a friend of ReadWriteWeb, Thorsten von Eicken, and have summarized his thoughts from a recent post, “Top Cloud API Sins. Bold items are our (loose) mapping to biblical terms.

• Do not covet your neighbors resources.: Listing of resources without the details, e.g., a list-servers call that doesn’t return all the details for each server. This makes it very expensive to poll for server state changes …
• Do not make cast idols: Not returning a resource id on creation. Some APIs don’t give you a server i.d. when you request a server…
• Labor six days, rest on the seventh: Providing a task queue. Several APIs I’ve seen have a task queue that is supposed to provide updates on tasks that are in progress E.g., you launch a server and you get a handle onto a task descriptor. For us that’s just overhead…
• Though shall not bear false witness: Not returning deleted resources in a “list resource” call. In particular, terminated servers must be returned in a list servers call for a certain duration, probably at least for an hour. Ouch!…
• Shall not covet his neighbor (or force me to repaginate): Pagination that goes page-wise instead of using a marker, e.g. where you get page one or the first 100 resources and then issue a query for “page 2″ or “from 100 on”. Explain to me how a client can get a consistent resource listing when resources can be added and removed concurrently…
• Randy Bias added to Torsten’s post: Treat others as you want to be treated Your UI MUST use your API so you understand how to be a consumer of your own API…

We plan on keeping up with this list and seeing how it intersects with implementations and standards that evolve.

Nirvana: Smells Like Services Orientation

Torsten goes on to describe a picture of the future. “Now here’s what I’d really like to see. This is what we’re working on for internal purposes and it’s not easy, which is an event based interface instead of a request-reply based interface… ”

Smart services in the cloud, rather than resources alone. This starts to get us closer and closer to an object-orientated network. Maybe that’s what the cloud will be for platforms, infrastructure and software. The industry has been quick to identify the layers. But perhaps the point is piecing them together in a smart transactional framework.

A way to engineer highly reliable systems around these architecture challenges may sound familiar to those who monitor existing data centers today.

Torsten continues, “We run a good number of machines that do nothing but chew up 100% cpu polling EC2 to detect changes. Fortunately cpu cycles are cheap ”.

This is practical intervention between vision and get it done.

We find it refreshing to hear this type of dialog in the industry and see a fresh opportunity for defining efficient patterns for this next generation of the cloud infrastructure.

Perhaps a new concept is forming: “Divine Computing”.

What buying decisions will be based on the openness of cloud resources and common APIs?

Photo credit: tsarkasim, Amsterdam Esogna

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Ask TUAW: Power adapters, Windows 7, iWork refresh, and more

Filed under: Features, Troubleshooting, Ask TUAW

Welcome back to Ask TUAW, our weekly troubleshooting Q&A column. This week we’ve got questions about MacBook power adapters, Windows 7 in Boot Camp and virtualization in general, resetting the Mac Setup Assistant, the next iWork refresh, and more.

As always, your suggestions and questions are welcome. Leave your questions for next week in the comments section at the end of this post. When asking a question, please include which machine you’re using and what version of Mac OS X is installed on it (we’ll assume you’re running Snow Leopard on an Intel Mac if you don’t specify), or if it’s an iPhone-related question, which iPhone version and OS version you have.

Tofa asks

I have a 15″ MBP (unibody 2nd gen) and a 13″ MB. I noticed that their power supplies are different. There is a 60W(13″) and an 85W(15″). Is it bad for the battery if i use one on the other?

Check out this Apple Support Doc. Basically it comes down to this: it’s fine to use the higher wattage adapter with the lower power device, but it may not work so well in the other direction.

Matt asks

I’ve installed Windows 7 on my (late) 2006 24″ iMac. The best thing about Windows 7 is Windows Media Center, which I’d like to be able to use while still being logged into the OS X side of things. First question, can I now buy Parallels or some other software to run my Windows 7 from the Bootcamp partition? I don’t want to have to reinstall Windows 7 again if I can help it. Second, can you recommend a USB Tuner that will work with Windows Media Center to capture over the air broadcasts?

Both Parallels and VMware Fusion allow you to use a Boot Camp installation in virtualization. That is, you can run your Boot Camp partition as if it were a virtual machine. As far as tuners go, I’d probably try for something cross-platform so you could use it straight from OS X as well. Check out this site (scroll down) for some suggestions from Equinux and Hauppauge.

CozartDono asks

I have a late 2007 Macbook Pro running the latest Snow Leopard and a Boot Camp partition running Windows 7 32 bit. I have the retail upgrade version that includes 64-bit and 32-bit.The last time I checked, there wasn’t a way to install 64-bit Windows 7 with Boot Camp. But I noticed the Boot camp update has a download for 64-bit Windows 7. Whenever I’ve tried to install 64-bit, I can’t get the disc to boot up and start the installation. Is there a way to install 64-bit Windows 7 with Boot camp that I was never aware of? Is there a guide I can look at? And most importantly, can I do an upgrade from my existing installation of Widows 7 ?I’m thinking most likely this is case.

According to this Microsoft FAQ the only way to upgrade from 32-bit to 64-bit Windows 7 is to backup and reinstall. The most recent version of Boot Camp 3.1 supports 64-bit Windows 7.

John.B asks

After doing a fresh install (assuming Leopard for my Blackbook, but interested in the Snow Leopard answer as well), can’t I log in once with an administrative account to get the Mac fully updated with the latest updates and patches, then blow away that user’s home directory to get the Welcome screen to run for the new owner.

It is possible to do this, but it’s not completely straightforward as you’d need to do it from the terminal in Single User Mode. Check out this hint from Mac OS X Hints for the low-down. There also this Clean Install.app that’s a bit easier to use, but you’ll need to be booted onto a different volume.

James asks

Hi, I recently got a 27 inch iMac core i7. In general I’m thrilled with it but the dvd player software that comes with it isn’t that great. I’m not keen on using front row because I want to be able to do other thing’s while the dvd’s playing. Is there a decent dvd playback programme for the mac ? I’ve tried myself to find one but mostly they seem to be about ripping and burning dvds rather than watching them !

You don’t say what you dislike so much about the built-in DVD player application, so I’m not sure what you would think is decent. That said, I can suggest you have a look a VLC for a free alternative.

Jo asks

Since the January event is over, and we still have no iLife X, will we see it anytime later this year? I’m considering getting iWork and iLife now….

trevor asks

Will there be an iLife 10? I’ve looked everywhere and found no sign of it. Am I better off just buying 09 now as I am still running 07’s version.

As with all Apple hardware and software releases, there’s simply no way to tell for sure regarding unannounced products. As it happens, there was about a year between iWork ‘05 and ‘06, but 19 months between ‘06 and ‘08 and 16 months between ‘08 and ‘09 (source). It’s been a little more than a year since iWork ‘09 so I would expect to see something this year, but I have absolutely no hard information. Personally, I think it’s likely that an update would come on the heels of the release of iWork for the iPad in the late Spring or Summer, but that a pure guess.

behindthecurtain asks

I LOVE using Remote on my iTouch to control iTunes on another computer, but hate being limited to that device. Is there a widget or app that does the same thing on my Macbook Pro?

There are several applications out there designed to do this, but it seems like none of them have been updated recently. You might want to check out TuneConnect 2 iTunesRemote and iTunes Remote Control.

TUAWAsk TUAW: Power adapters, Windows 7, iWork refresh, and more originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Thu, 04 Feb 2010 09:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Week in Tech: Large Hadron Collider working, Ubuntu matures

Version 5 of the popular Mac virtualization package, Parallels Desktop, has hit the streets, and Ars puts it through its paces. Gaming performance, Windows 7, content creation, Linux—it’s all here, plus the inevitable comparisons to the most recent VMware Fusion release.

After a series of complications and setbacks, the Large Hadron Collider sees its first particle-particle collisions after a weekend of furious activity. While these weren’t at any significant energy, the milestone marks an important step in getting the mammoth machine up and running and filling in the last space on the particle bingo card.

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VMWare Fusion 2.06 hits the streets

Filed under: Software, Snow Leopard

VMWare has pushed out another update to Fusion, the popular virtualization app.

Version 2.06 was released yesterday. The 289 MB download includes multiple fixes for running Fusion in a 32-bit Snow Leopard environment. The release includes enhancements for better 3D performance on Macs with Nvidia cards under Snow Leopard.

There are also the usual assortment of other bug fixes.

You can download the update here for free if you’re a registered Fusion user. You can get detailed release notes from VMWare at this page. Users who upgrade should note that VMWare Tools does not automatically update when you do the upgrade. You’ll have to install the tools from the Fusion menu bar.

When I opened my older version of Fusion this morning I was not alerted to the update, which was a bit of a surprise. Your mileage may vary, so I and am passing the info along to you in case you don’t get flagged on it.

Happy downloading.

TUAWVMWare Fusion 2.06 hits the streets originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Fri, 02 Oct 2009 15:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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