March 31, 2007
Computing Nirvana
I've been threatening to do it for months. Last week, I finally did it. I jumped ship from the Evil Microsoft Monopoly, and purchased a MacBook. The decision was tough. I've been a loyal Dell notebook user for years. My work involves using several proprietary Windows applications. But over the last few weeks, all of the pieces started falling together.
The three year maintenance contract on my current Dell expired, so it was time to get some new hardware. I spent some time looking in to a replacement Dell, only to find that everything comes with Vista now. I wasn't too keen to jump in to a new version 1.0 operating system that boasts that it's the most secure Microsoft operating system ever (right).
Then I discovered Parallels. I could run my proprietary Windows applications on the same desktop as all of my new Mac applications. Time to switch!
A couple of thousand dollars later, and I'm the proud owner of a black MacBook, along with the uber-cool bluetooth keyboard and mouse. Parallels has this cool feature called Transporter that allowed me to make a disk image of my existing laptop, and install it into the Parallels environment by replacing all the required drivers inside the image so that it will run inside of Parallels. I was skeptical at first, but several hours later, after transferring 50Gb of image from my Dell to my MacBook, I was ready to boot up the image. It works! No, seriously - it actually runs. I can run in a window, or full screen, or this incredible mode called coherence which allows the Windows applications to run seamlessly with the Mac applications without the Windows desktop. I can even see Mac bluetooth devices inside the virtual machine, so things like syncing my Windows Mobile smartphone still works.
Needless to say, I'm completely hooked. The Linux junkie in me loves the fact that a Unix command shell is just a button-press away. The corporate side of me loves the fact that I can run all of our proprietary applications. The creative side of me loves the fact that everything just works. I've now got MacOS, Windows and Xwindows applications all running seamlessly on the same desktop. I have a machine that actually goes to sleep when I close the lid - and more importantly, it wakes up quickly and successfully when I open the lid again.
If you've ever looked at a MacBook and wondered if it would ever work in your corporate Windows-only world, the answer is a resounding YES. Take the plunge. You'll be glad you did.
Tags: Apple | MacBook | Parallels | Windows | switch | nirvana |
Posted by Ian at 10:24 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
March 21, 2007
Micro blogging. A two word summary for the latest web 2.0 craze called Twitter. Mash this up with some other web 2.0 stuff and you get TwitterVision.
Tags: Twitter | Twittervision | Web2.0 | Web 2.0 | Blogging | Micro blogging |
Posted by Ian at 02:29 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack