Phasor Burn

Hey Leo! Leo Laporte! Are you paying attention to this?

Sure, you still have to be careful about naming actual sites, products, and companies using the term “podcast”, (or “iPod” or similar) but to actually use the term to describe a *cough* netcast *cough*, is A-OK by Apple.

Over the coming months digital sales continued to increase whilst physical sales continued to fall, which saw more and more artists entering the top 40 early, and fewer and fewer singles entering the chart directly at number 1. Whilst initally the proportion of digital sales to physical sales in the combined tally was relatively low, a majority of singles are seeing more than 50% of their sales coming from online.

Need I say more? Physical media is on it’s way out.

VMWare made some noise earlier this summer when the rushed out a pre-announcement (vapourware…) of a VMWare Workstation-esque product for Mac OS X at WWDC 2006.

They have a sign up page where you could pre-register to get access to the beta. Recently, some people apparently did get access to the product, code named Fusion (but not me, unfortunately, although I do not have an macintel at the moment anyways).

I’m glad to see that there is actual code out there now. For a while it sure looked vapour-ware like to me. I imagine two of the reasons for pre-announcing were to acknowledge that Parallels is already there but some people may already be VMWare users itching to use their software on Mac’s; and secondly that OS X is a growing market for savvy developers, qa folk, and system administrators.

The usual bunch who are out on the bleeding edge of technology and need tools to enable development/test/deploy for multiple platforms without necessarily needing to haul around 4 different notebooks, multi-boot them, or have multiple machines under their office desk.

VMWare, however, is taking it’s sweet time. Yes they need to make sure the product is fit for use before releasing it, but pre-announcing just to steal some of Parallels’ thunder is bad karma in my mind.

I almost did the coffee | nose thing today when I read an article on how to convert VMWare appliances (aka VMWare Workstation) images to work with Parallels.

It’s not very complicated at all. For the simple case it practically amounts to a straight up dd. Not quite that easy but just about. Very easy for someone comfortable with the command line.

Admittedly some of the appliance images may have gotchas related to scsi vs ide, drivers vs emulated hardware and so forth. Still nothing most competent UNIX admins with VMWare GSX/Server/ESX/Workstation experience couldn’t overcome.

Hurry up VMWare. Your lunch is about to be eaten (even more so) in the Mac OS X market. Put up or shut up.

What happens when you discover an sophisticated 2000+ year old astronomical calculator.

Then while you use modern technology to decode the devices purpose and accuracy , someone posits a possible link to this incredibly accurate map from the 14th century

A map which may have ancient origins, older than when Greek, Indian, Egyptian etc peaked

Perhaps as far as 13,000 - 9,000 BC. Or, at least some time when the Antarctica coastline was free of ice (~4000 BC). Here’s the book on Amazon.

Things that make you go “hhhmmmmmmmm….”

It’s a shame we lost the Library of Alexandria. Who knows what other hints of ancient advanced civilizations we may have lost knowledge of.

I’m finding this a little late for halloween this year, (hey some of my bloglines subscriptions sit unread for weeks at a time). Anyways, for laughs check out this snarky history of Halloween.