Windows Vista Beta 2 5384 available for Public Download
Get your copy here! Hot of the press! Microsoft has released a public beta of Windows Vista Beta 2. They are using a download manager (somewhat like bittorrent) from Akamai that frankly sucks. It keeps stalling and saying it has lost the connection. I wish there was a torrent up there of this file since that is a much better way to download than DD or Akamai's crappy download manager. What a joke.
Hey Lenovo, don’t fix what isn’t broken!
I just bought a Lenovo Thinkpad T60, the second Thinkpad my company has purchased since IBM sold their PC & Laptop division to Lenovo. I was extremely disappointed to find out that the docking system that has been the same as long as I have had a t-series thinkpad, and to be honest, one of the big selling points of the T, is now different!!!
Bittorrent getting your WRT54G down? It may be a bug in the firmware.
I was recently playing around with µTorrent and I ran across the following information on problems with the WRT54G. Luckily, I am using DD-WRT on all 3 of the WRT54Gs that blanket my house. This is one of µTorrent's recommended firmwares and there is a fix!
It seems that the WRT54G keeps logs of all connections for 5 Days which very quickly brings down the router when you have a ton of connections opening up through bittorrent, or any other P2P application. This little trick saved me a ton of time!
Virus on Yahoo Messenger: Gai xinh ne , gai xinh ne : http://xrobots.net/Gift/?file=Gaixinh.jpg
It seems that one of our business partners is infected with a virus that tries to spread itself through Yahoo Instant Messenger by sending the following message to all those on the persons list.
Gai xinh ne , gai xinh ne : http://xrobots.net/Gift/?file=Gaixinh.jpg
If you click on the link it is an exectuable Gaixinh.jpg.exe which I assume will perpetuate itself.
Onmac.net downtime
Well, it looks like something has gone wrong again. The server that we're hosted on is up and running but apache is not. The site went down around 6:00 pm CST 2006-03-22. I've only now 8:00 am CST 2006-03-23 been able to get a hold of the guy who can make things happen. I tried to get it fixed last night but was unable. Sorry for the downtime! We're going to be back up asap.
Windows XP on the Mac is Over – Work is just beginning.
Wow, what a fantastic week. I am really excited that I have windows running on my Mac now. The week has been super busy and I've had barely any time for Veronique or for my day job. It's crazy, especially since I will be travelling next week. The rate of progress since the solution came out is immense. Just looking at the wiki and watching it grow was incredible. Not to mention all of the activity in the chat room and the forums . Im looking forward to continuing my support of development and assisting those involved in any way I can.
Zesthost is not first class
I signed up for zesthost hosting for my project windows XP on an Intel Mac and I have to say that I am really really disappointed with how poor the hosting is. As I write this, the site is currently down. Since I signed up it has been down at least 10 times that I noticed - and who knows how many more times. It is constantly slow to load when there is not significant traffic and the host hasnt done anything to make it better. They told me they would move it to a new server, but I can say that if this is their new server I am on now, that it sucks.
Update : After receiving a lot of traffic last night my 125gb per month account is suspended? I have been getting around 8000 hits a day prior to yesterday when it spiked to 30,000. That does not generate 125gb of traffic in half a month considering that there is nothing but images to download on the site. This is quite ridiculous.
Update: Some have pointed out that it is more likely due to the processor demands rather than the bandwidth.
Update: winxponmac.com is up on a different server - windowsxp.onmac.net, forum.onmac.net and windows.onmac.net are not. I have been trying since 9:30 pm CST last night to get in touch with Zesthost but have had no luck until now - 12:30 pm CST the next day. Im going to try and pay them more to put me on a better server to get the site back up - I know it looks bad and Im sorry for the downtime.
Rackspace saved the day. We are now hosted on a 5-node cluster with true professionals at the helm. I have to say that my experience with rackspace has been top notch since we moved there 2 days ago. It sure beats mediocre virtual hosts.
Debit Cards leave you more susceptible to paying for fraud
I just saw on CNBC that Debit Cards are not afforded the same protection by the federal government as are Credit Cards. For example, if you use your debit card at Best Buy and the company that processes Best Buy's transactions loses a laptop with 10 million names, addresses and card numbers, the people who used credit cards are safer. If you use a debit card, it is more difficult to put a hold on your account, and also more difficult to reclaim the money from fraudulent activity. The legislation was passed through the government prior to the widespread use of Visa / Mastercard branded debit cards. Unfortunately, this legislation does not cover these cards. Just remember - if your credit card gets stolen, you are not liable; if your debit card gets stolen, you might be!
Funambol – The Open Source Push Email server
Like many on-the-go businesspeople, I am addicted to my blackberry. I wouldnt say im addicted to the blackberry, as much as I am addicted to push email on my mobile phone.
I am in the unique situation where I have an influential decision in what technology the rest of my office use for this task also, and we recently purchased Blackberry Enterprise Server for the office. We did this about 6 months before Microsoft released their Service Pack 2 for Exchange 2003, which among other things added a free push-email implementation. In order to use this, you need to have a phone running Windows Mobile 5.0 as its operating system. At this stage there are only a couple on that market with this technology so it will be a little time before this is more widely adopted.
At the same time as Microsoft is rolling out their free Push-email, RIM, the maker of the blackberry devices is fighting a legal battle. This is distracting RIM from competing in the market place that they dominate and giving M$ an advantage. It is predicted that by the end of the year, Microsoft will replace RIM as the number one player. That's not such a bad thing. Microsoft's software is free per user, whereas RIM is charging $1499.99 for their Small business edition with 5 licenses and $2999.99 for the Enterprise level with 1 license. The only difference between the two is the cost of each additional license.
So, it looks that without drastic changes, RIM is on the way out. Microsoft is going to change the model for push email and bundle it as a standard for their email server. They will seek to make money licensing their Windows Mobile 5.0 OS to cell phone makers.
Exit Blackberry, Enter Funambol
At the time we were purchasing Blackberry Enterprise Server, I was also looking at open source alternatives. I couldnt find any. Today, I learned about Funambol. Funambol is an open source alternative Push Email server, that appears to be able to connect to anything and everything under the sun. It can use exchange, MAPI, pop3 as its data source, and push the email to Blackberry, Windows Mobile 5.0 as well as SyncML enabled phones (which is apparently a bunch of em). It's free to use at the moment and is still in beta. It is anticipated that the paid version will be more feature rich when it comes out, but the free version will still be functional.
This is a great step forward and I am curious to know how people are finding Funambol. Does it work? How well? How does it compare to Blackberry Enterprise Server / Exchange 2003 w/ Push
Mac OS X and Xen Optimizer? Is this relationship the future of Windows on the Mac?
I had a really interesting conversation with a guy from founder of XenSource, Moshe Bar last weekend. He sent me an instant message and since these guys will may at some point be able to provide an alternative to dual booting the Intel Mac, I was interested to learn some more.
What I found out from him was pretty interesting stuff. For those of you that are unfamiliar with Xen and what it does, I will try to explain in a very high level way (which is the extent of my understanding). Xen loads right after the computer boots up, and loads into memory. Xen sits as an interface between the operating system and the hardware. This gives Xen the ability to allocate resources when running multiple operating systems; i.e. virtualization. You are able to run more than one OS, not running one on top of another, but side by side, simultaneously.
I bet some of you are thinking: What is the cost to my resources to run Xen? Xen costs you approximately 1% of your system resources to run it. Not too bad.
At the moment, the Xen guy told me that using Xen, he is able to run Windows XP Linux and Freebsd on the Intel Mac, (his iMac) but not Mac OS X. What??? Well, that's what he said. I would really like to see that. The time frame for Mac OS X running on Xen is likely 4Q '06. This, however, is his pet project and not an official XenSource project.
The other interesting thing we talked about is how Mac OS X currently interfaces with the hardware. I am really unfamiliar with much more than the buzzwords, so I will do my best to explain. Currently, Apple uses the Mach Kernel to interface with the hardware. However, "Mach" is essentially outdated and causes a lot of the bottlenecks with programs having to create a lot more processes than necessary to get the job done. The guy from Xen told me they have been talking a great deal with the Apple guys about replacing Mach with Xen. This is a really big deal! This would be consistent with reports that Apple has filed patents related to Virtualization.
The reason Apple has not switched OS X to use Xen instead of Mach yet according to the guy at Xen Moshe is because XenSource has not yet implemented the system to support the intensive graphics requirements of Mac OS X.
My prediction is that in OS X 10.6, we will see some sort of fast-user switching between operating systems. Is that realistic, or am I just dreaming?
EDIT: I have corrected this - apparrently he has not been able to run Windows yet since he says this requires Intel's VT CPUs.
Update: I referred a reporter from Computer World to Moshe Bar, the guy with whom I spoke. In this article, Moshe clarifies some of the things I was confused on. I got a few very key details wrong.
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Suggestions on how to boot Windows XP on the Intel Mac
Here is a condensed list of suggestions received from users during the day. None of these qualify as "the solution" but they may help the community get closer
- Boris Writes: Gateway's Media Center computers utilize EFI and have a special modified version of Windows Media Center 2005 that allows it to boot. If someone could get their hands on the modified version of MCE, I think applying the same fix to XP would be only a matter of hours.
- Mailinux Writes: i found another way to run windows and lillo(i was surfing and i found this...
http://linuxbios.org/index.php/ADLO
this may require some work... but seems easyer than writing anefi extention(seen this in a famous article on running windows on mac) but mabe doing this is possible: boot from efi->boot linux-bios kernel->adlo->windows or lillo - Here are some references that I found:
- http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/device/storage/GPT-64bit.mspx
- Implementing EFI on 32-bit systems [ppt]
- Thomas S. sugggested: A nice french guy was able to compile the free emulator bochs as a universal binary... a nice step between
- Computer Guru posted on his blog, a step by step potential solution. Problem is, he has no mac to try it on
How is the winxponmac contest going so far?
Thank you for all the support the mac community has shown so far. I spent 5 hours last night after work trying my best to make the update as accurate as possible. Unfortunately I missed a couple of people and for that, I apologize. If I missed you, please send me a nice message asking me to make sure to put you in on the next one!
The contest is going great and it is getting wide coverage around the net. I have had interest expressed by several parties saying they are working on a solution, but no solutions as of yet. If you are working on a solution, please let me know so I can keep track of how many people / teams are working on it.
Best of luck to all trying, there are a lot of us counting on you!
Also, on another note, one donor suggested that we set a minimum of $10 to add a link to your website on the page. I dont want to discourage people from donating smaller amounts, however it seems that there are some out there using the site to post junk websites, and links to "get me a free ipod" etc... I dont have the time to check the links, but figure a spammer will be less willing to spend $10 to get their spam link on the site, and a real supporter wont mind not having a link for less than a $10 contribution. This is a learning process, so for everyone who posted a link for $1, dont worry! It will remain on the site. Otherwise, new links cost $10.
Thanks again for everyone's support and sorry to raise the rates on links. I need to keep my sanity! I cant spend 5 hrs a night updating links at $1 a pop.
Why does the contest specifiy Dual Boot
A bunch of people have been asking "Why Dual Boot?". The answer is pretty simple. When I came up with the contest, I wanted to have a goal that even the enthusiast could achieve. Most of the other alternatives prior to the intel mac- VMWare, Virtual PC are all using Virtualization. There has been a lot of talk about the Duo Core being able to do Virtualization at near native speed. I think it is unrealistic for an individual to write this software. I agree that running Windows XP virtually in Mac OS X at near native speed is the ideal way to accomplish the task of working on both operating systems. So given that virtualization is out and with the early success of people getting into the EFI bios, I thought I would focus the contest on incentivizing these people to expand their work. Furthermore my understanding of the functionality of GRUB 2.0 and ELILO was that it should be possible to get those to load as the boot manager on the Intel Mac.
I hope this clears up the confusion about why this solution was chosen. If you still have trouble understanding, think of it like the Ansari X-Prize which intended to kick-start commercial space flight. They didnt start sending tourists into space, but Spaceship One's successes got Virgin Galactic going. I want to kickstart the Windows on Intel Mac community. Even if this is not the exact method that people will use next year, it is a start to achieving our goals.
Why I’m not using Fundable.org at winxponmac.com
I was checking out fundable.org as an alternative to using paypal on winxponmac.com. This site was recommended by several people during the day today. I wont use Fundable.org for several reasons.
- They take 10% if your goal is met. (average so far with paypal is 4.4%)
- You have to set goals and limited time frames - it isnt possible to have an open ended fundraiser and I dont want to shoot too low for the prize in this contest. The time frames were 25 days or 15 days. I expect the contest may last longer
- Pain of switching - I thought about adding fundable as an alternative, but that 10% commission didnt sound very good to me.
Hope this explains why I decided to stick with paypal even though it is administrative hell! I spent 2 hours updating the website tonight with people who have donated. There are over 120 donors and counting!
Why run OS X and Windows XP on an Intel Mac
There have been a lot of speculators on the net as to why you would need to dual boot / run both Windows XP and OS X on an Intel Mac. Aside from my personal preference for OS X and Unix based systems, Here are my lists why I need each one for work:
Reasons I need OS X:
- Presentations - Keynote is miles ahead of powerpoint. I can copy and paste from illustrator, drop in pdfs and the transitions are gorgeous. We have received many WOWs from customers when using Keynote
- PDFs - I generate reports where I have Excel files embedded in Word Documents. In windows, the colors in the embedded excel file dont print. In my Mac in Office 2004... no problem!
- Unix - I sometimes administer the company Debian web server. Running xwindows on Mac OS X, I am able to load up xemacs on the server or other x based programs. I doesnt work as easily using free software for windows.
Reasons I need Windows:
- Microsoft Access - I use it as a front end for SQL Server 2000. I havent found a good alternative where I can easily copy and paste data into excel
- Microsoft Outlook - the mac email client (corrected: Microsoft Entourage) doesnt cut it when talking to Exchange server 2003
- Windows File Sharing - There are a bunch of great websites like macwindows that tell you how to connect your mac to a windows domain. It seems like every update from apple breaks the connection. Not to mention if you are on wireless and it drops! The samba / windows file sharing support in Windows is a lot more resilient. P.s. I am on a Windows Server 2003 domain which seems to have more trouble than earlier versions
Im sure I can find a bunch more if I think about it, but these are the ones that are in the forefront of my mind every time I try to totally switch to one or the other.
Contest to dual-boot Windows XP and OS X on a new Intel Mac
I started a contest to boot Windows XP on an Intel iMac or Macbook. The contest address is: winxponmac.com but please Digg my post so the cause can get more support.
Coverage of the contest:
Mesothelioma is worth a lot of money
According to Cyberwyre, mesothelioma is the highest paying search term on Google Adsense! Wow. I never knew a disease could be so profitable. If you see it on my website, please, please click on it. I bet you probably have mesothelioma, or at least need a lawyer to help you out on your case. You probably have poisoning from asbestos if you live in a really old house that hasnt had the insulation redone.
Macbook Pro – In the mail!
I ordered my MacBook pro on Friday as a replacement for both my IBM desktop at work and for my Powerbook G4 1.25 Ghz as my backup / presentation computer. Im really excited for it to arrive, and I am taking a little bit of a gamble that someone will figure out how to make it run windows pretty quickly so that I can switch between the two operating systems. Should be pretty great. The main thing I am worried about now is when I will get natively compiled updates to previous software programs - like adobe photoshop etc... Anyway, I like being on the cutting edge.
Macbook Pro – You have to go backward to go forward – especially when there is a brick wall in front of you
Lets face it. Apple hit limitations with the architecture on their old Powerbooks. Sure, they could upgrade the screen, they could put bluetooth on, put every bell and whistle you can think of. Did that give the user more Power? Not really. It gave the user a portable swiss army knife. Sure, it's nice to have all of these things on my 1.25 ghz powerbook that I bought a couple of years ago when it came out. What did I really want? More power. The linked article at unsanity serves as an excellent disclaimer. Buyer beware!!!! The MacBook does not include "XYZ"! Apple did a good job covering up the "missing" features by really hyping up the good things about it. Keep in mind though that this is a new platform for Apple. It is a big feat to switch to the x86 platform and this is their first try. I would bet that this new laptop is A.) better than 90% of the intel based laptops out there, and probably the best first attempt by a laptop producer to make a laptop around an intel chip. There are going to be problems with it... sure. Even on my Powerbook, my magnetic latch doesnt always close properly (or stay closed) and sometimes I get electric shocks from the Aluminum shell. There are many nice features that are missing, but if you dont like the laptop, dont buy it. Register your complaints with apple and if enough consumers want it they will build the features in.
I am looking forward to getting one of these babys and honestly, the only thing holding me back that the article had mentioned was the potential problem loading Windows XP. I am pretty confident someone will find a workaround, and until then my 2500 will stay firmly in my pocket.
