VMware Fusion vs Parallels

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I’ve used VMware products literally for years. Without them, it would have been a lot harder to run my business. So when I ended up buying a MacBook Pro as my main machine, the first program I bought for it was VMware’s Mac offering, Fusion.

It worked, mostly. And over the last couple years, it has gotten better, but I’ve always gotten the impression that it was something of a red-headed stepchild for VMware. They’re very slow to release updates compatible with new versions of operating systems, and with a new version of Ubuntu out every six months now, that’s kind of important. Worse, they have never supported any Linux compositor, so I can only use more recent versions of Ubuntu in “classic” mode… I’d never even seen the new Unity interface in action, let alone used it.

VMware Fusion has other failings too, minor but very annoying:

  • Several versions ago, it started telling the VM that the system is almost always plugged in, regardless of whether it is or not.
  • When I’m away from my external mouse and have to use the trackpad, trackpad taps have always gotten “stuck” in the Linux VM. The system notices that you’ve tapped only after you move the mouse cursor a bit, which leads to some very annoying problems.
  • VMware does not support IPv6 on virtual machines. Not too important right now, but it will be, and I’d like to start playing with it as soon as I can.
  • The big one: hard drive accesses are REALLY slow, and I still get a lot of “IOwait” even after making this change. This might not be entirely VMware’s fault, but I have no way of proving or disproving that right now.

My current 20GB virtual hard drive is also getting full, and I wanted to rebuild the virtual machine anyway, so it was time to look at alternatives.

The first thing I noticed yesterday, when I started, was that VMware Fusion v4 had just been released the day before. I eagerly perused its features and changes, only to find that it had only two things that I wanted: full OS X “Lion” compatibility and “Time Machine-compatible snapshots.” Whoopti-do. Sorry, that is not worth upgrading for. Worse, it seemed rushed, because there were lots of reports of problems with it.

Then I checked out Parallels. From various forums I’d already heard that they updated it for new OS versions very quickly, and that it fully supported Ubuntu’s compositor and newer Unity interface, so it started out with an instant bonus. I discovered that they’d just recently released a new version too, v7 (likely why VMware Fusion v4 was rushed into release too early), and there’s a special offer for “cross-grading” from VMware Fusion for only $30 right now. I also discovered that their virtual machines fully support IPv6, and that they provide much better support on their forums than VMware does. Even better, they offer a free two-week trial, which I jumped at.

I haven’t fully finished setting up my first virtual machine yet, but so far I’ve proven that it does fully support Ubuntu’s new Unity interface. (I’m not sure I like the new interface, but it does apparently eliminate the memory leak problem in XOrg that I’d been battling for a while now, by eliminating X itself. 🙂 ) So far it also seems much faster, I’ve seen very few “IOwait” indications in the System Load Indicator applet.

We’ll see if it remains that way after I’ve used it for a couple weeks. If so, I think we’ve got a winner.

“Citizens against Governments”

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This one is interesting because it’s what a lot of people are thinking, in one form or another:

[…] Everywhere we look, citizens are chipping away at the power of government. And behind much of it is the Internet. […]

The basic idea is that politicians play politics, at the expense of those they’re supposed to be serving. There’s no way to eliminate that without eliminating politicians, which (for the moment, at least) we’re not ready to do. But the Internet has the potential to both inform citizens on the important issues and give them a way to make their voices heard.

The British government recently opened a website where people can submit petitions and sign them. The promise is that any petition that gets more than a certain number of signatures will be debated in Parliament. It isn’t working, as far as I can tell — last I saw, there were at least a couple petitions that had gotten the required signatures, but Parliament claims to be too busy to deal with them — but it will. The people will eventually find a way to make it work, likely through junior politicians with no entrenched power to lose from it.

That’s the future of government. It has to be, if we’re going to survive.

Democracies are a vital feedback system for nations of people, designed to make decisions and do things for the common good of all citizens. The nature of the current system ensures that small groups of people will sometimes be able to seize the reins and try to drive the entire system off a cliff for the small group’s gain. So far, in the US, no such group has been able to completely crash the system, but it swerves closer to the edge every time they try. The only way to prevent this is to spread the power out, so it’s not concentrated in a small area that can be hijacked by those with malicious intent.

To make it really work, we’ll need some way to blunt the effects of ignorance, prejudice, and spin, but if we can find a way to do that, we can finally get closer to the ideal stated by Lincoln in the Gettysburg Address: a “government of the people, by the people, for the people”.

“Nissan car secretly shares driver data with websites”

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I started programming about thirty years ago, before I hit puberty. I don’t remember how difficult it must have been for me at that point to follow program logic or think on all the different levels that a developer has to while designing something, but I do recall the thrill I got when I figured out the algorithm for centering a line of text on the screen — something that would be very basic to any programmer with any experience at all.

That’s why I can’t really understand how something like this would be allowed to happen.

Granted that car company engineers are not known for the programming expertise, and that the programmer responsible for writing that code probably wasn’t aware of exactly how it was going to be used. Regardless, someone had to know, and that someone should have seen the potential security problems of sharing that information right away, and said something.

Software looks easy to do. For the most part it is — for the first 80% of designing and coding a program. That last 20% is the most important, and contains a lot of subtleties that will bite you in the ass if you’re not experienced enough to know about them beforehand. The last 20% also takes at least 50% of the programming time, so it’s the part that most often gets skipped when schedules or budgets are squeezed.

If you want professional-grade programming, hire a professional software developer. Or contract the work to a company that specializes in software development and already has people with the expertise you need. Don’t just tell an engineer to write it, or hire the copy-boy because he’s cheap, and expect to get something professional-grade.

“Waiting for Thunderbolt–one port to rule them all”

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I sympathize with this fellow’s wish. I’d love to have a single really fast connector for everything, including video. I don’t know that it will ever catch on though, outside of Apple computers.

I lived through the time of serial ports, parallel ports, AT connectors, PS/2 connectors, and the like. USB caught on, not because it was infinitely better (which it was), but because it united three things that none of those other things did: generality, speed, and power.

You have to have lived through that period to really understand how tortuous it was getting near the end. Keyboards connected through the system’s only AT connector, or later the dedicated keyboard PS/2 connector. The mouse used the dedicated mouse PS/2 connector, or the serial port. Printers connected via the parallel port, or (again, though rarely) the serial port. Everything else had to use the serial port. There were no other connectors, unless you bought and installed a special adapter card, and with the exception of the ridiculously expensive SCSI interface (primarily for hard drives), everyone had their own proprietary version.

I had an external hard drive at the time, which used the parallel port and a wall-wart power adapter. It worked on nearly every DOS system, once you loaded the drivers, but on most systems it read ridiculously slowly because parallel ports were designed to be one-way only. There were only maybe four or five signals from the device back to the computer, and some of those weren’t available or reliable on all systems either. To add insult to injury, the cable was painfully thick and hard to work with, and parallel ports were inevitably on the back of the computer, where you couldn’t see them without pulling it out. And let’s not even mention bent pins making the ports useless.

I also had one of the really early webcams (though the term “webcam” hadn’t been invented at the time). I believe it used the parallel port for data too, but you had to plug it into either a PS/2 port or a power adapter as well because the parallel port didn’t have power and the PS/2 port (where it was even available) was designed explicitly for keyboard and mouse and couldn’t be used for anything else. The parallel port was also ridiculously slow; even at the pitiful resolution it offered (320×240? I don’t recall), you could see the picture slowly update. If I recall correctly, you might get three or four frames a second.

Serial ports were used for every general-purpose device that didn’t absolutely require the speed of parallel ports, but it was far slower. I had a very early digital camera too, and you had to transfer pictures via the serial port. If you had more than a couple pictures to transfer, you started it and went to get a coffee, because it would take a while.

The USB standard fixed all that. It was still slow by today’s standard, but it was general, bidirectional, and provided power, and everything moved to it very quickly (except keyboards, they’ve only really moved to it in the last few years, because PS/2 ports were getting rare). It allowed things that simply weren’t possible before too, such as laser mice, and the connectors and wires were small enough and reliable enough to be convenient.

What similar killer advantage does the Thunderbolt connector offer? It’s faster, and it can handle video as well. We’ve had faster before, in the form of IEEE 1394 (a.k.a. FireWire), and it was adopted by a few people who needed the speed but never caught on generally. Video? We’ve got video, at least eight major standards for it (“standards are great, there are so many to choose from”). Is that enough to drive people to adopt it? I doubt it, though I might be wrong.

Will anything take over from USB? Maybe. An adapter that provided speed, video, and bidirectional power as well — so that you could charge your laptop simply by connecting it to your monitor — that might provide enough impetus to drive people to it. If two or three of the big manufacturers made it the only way you could charge laptops from them, it would really take off. Short of that, I don’t think so.

“Man of Steel, Woman of Kleenex”

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Back around the time I was born (yeah, way back there), science fiction great Larry Niven penned this amusing article about Superman.

He got some of the bits wrong, or maybe it hadn’t been established at that point that Superman’s abilities started manifesting slowly around puberty. I’m sure that the superpowers he posits for the Man of Steel’s sperm could be entirely dismantled by any real fan with a few sentences as well, though as I’m not one of them, I’m not sure how. Regardless, the article should have any casual Superman fan rolling on the floor with laughter… though trufans tend to be just a wee bit too serious and argumentative about such things to see the amusement factor. 🙂

(As it turns out, it hadn’t been established at that point. The Superman from “the Silver Age of Comics,” which ended about the time that that article was penned, did have his abilities before puberty; that was reimagined later, probably in response to the article itself.)

“In online game, Tea Partiers make ‘zombie’ targets”

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I nearly wet myself laughing at the description. If your politics lean toward Tea Party conservative, you don’t want to read this.

(I’m not sure why, but the game sounds familiar… maybe I’ve seen similar pictures on The Daily Show or something? I don’t seem to have blogged about it before.)

“Why Is It So Hard to Find a Suicide Bomber These Days?”

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A very long article, but the basic gist of it can be summed up by this paragraph from the middle:

[…] To put this in context: Out of more than 150,000 murders in the United States since 9/11 — currently more than 14,000 each year — Islamist terrorists accounted for fewer than three dozen deaths by the end of 2010. Part of the credit for this is surely due to the law-enforcement officers and community members who have worked to uncover plots before they could be carried out. But fewer than 200 Muslim Americans have been involved in violent plots since 9/11, most of them overseas, so credit for the low level of violence must be due primarily to the millions of Muslims who have refrained from answering the call to terrorism.

Why aren’t there more terrorists? I’m sure it’s a combination of things. The article lists five possibilities, but doesn’t mention the (to me) most obvious one: evolution. A successful terrorist must have sufficient intelligence to be competent at it, sufficient gullibility not to see through the cynical manipulations of terrorist leaders, and very violent tendencies, among other things. The combination is extremely rare, and every time a suicide bomber attacks (which, by definition, each can only do once), he removes himself from contributing his genes to the next generation.

Terrorists are an endangered species. They probably won’t become extinct any time soon, but they’re well on the way to it.

(Via Schneier on Security)