04 Jul

Good reasons for switching to Fusion

Wednesday July 04th 2007, 8:16 pm
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Vmware’s Fusion is not released yet, still the RC1 feels so much better than what Parallels is offering now with their 3.0 release. Here are some good reasons to switch:

  1. Fusion does not crash - I have been running it the whole day already without any crash, neither a kernel crash nor an application crash. With Parallels I have the latter every hour or so at least.
  2. When clicking on one of the Dock icons of Windows application, sometimes (often in fact) Parallels does not come into foreground anymore. You can suspend Parallels though and resume it as a workaround, but the next point relativizes this solution.
  3. Parallels Suspend/Resume in version 3.0 is not stable - sometimes it works, then other times it just stays there telling me it is resuming right now.

I really have no idea how the quality assurance team at Parallels was able to oversee any of these points. Any one of them would a good reason alone to do the switch.

And a small collection of less important differences:

  • sound playback in Fusion is with less noise, i.e. less interruptions
  • Coherence is smoother than Unity in Fusion
  • Drag’n'drop works in both, but running OSX apps from Win and vice versa is Parallels only
  • Resume/Suspend seems faster in Fusion (and stable in fact, compare above 3.)
  • CPU consumption of an idle Windows XP gives >10% in Parallels, but only half in Fusion
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24 Nov

Showing blue teeth

Friday November 24th 2006, 10:32 am
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On every visit of the CeBIT computer show you are overwhelmed by the number of small manufacturers, most coming somewhere from Asia, presenting their products on a few squaremeters, all of them looking the same. Without much pride they present tons of their products in some glass boxes, one next to each other. Probably none of them is very unique. Anyway, what can one expect from such a company? Probably their development department is not very big, occupied to get the newest thing ready for the market (which is not the same as getting it ready for customer though). Can you expect quality or some kind of support from them?

Anyway, half a year ago I had ordered this nice Bluetooth headset Clip S35. Until today I never really used it. Not that I didn’t want to. It neither worked with a USB Bluetooth dongle (even had contact to the dongle developer. By looking at the Bluetooth stack logs, he claimed that the device does not adhere the standard. Who knows if he is right), nor does it with my Sony mobile. With the latter it pairs and connects correctly, but switches off automatically after a few seconds.
A look into the manual tells the victim owner of the device:

So they sell a Bluetooth device and do not guarantee that it works as such. Great! But fortunately they have a compatibility list of the mobiles that are supported. Strangely they only list one mobile there which works out of the box to use the stereo playback (my primary reason to select the device originally). Also my Sony w800i is listed to work as a (non-stereo) phone headset, although it doesn’t for me.

Great, another gadget that just does not do what it should. Note for myself for the next time: look for quality, for devices from well known brands which are proven to work. A look at the whois entry of http://www.itechdynamic.com/ shows me what I feared already: Registrant: C H Keith, Ho - Level 12, Metroplaza - Tower 2, 223 Hing Fong Road - Kwai Chung NT - Hong Kong, NA na - HK. I am sure they will be in Hannover again next march for the CeBIT, and probably present their newest products again in a big glass vitrine, and I will walk along and will not notice their 3,5m^2 booth, or maybe I remember their logo and stop by. But unfortunately they cannot help me because they already only have the next generation high quality products there, ready for the market, not for the innocent customers who will expect them to work.

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