If you’re a Mac user, virtualization is a pretty neat way to run Windows; sure, Boot Camp is cool, it’s fast and free, but these programs here will allow you to run Windows in a, uh, window; just like launching Safari or Word or something. No restarting to switch between OSX and Windows, both available whenever. The software can be fussy to set up, although I’ve been lucky. If you’ve been holding off testing Windows-on-a-Mac because of your VirtualPC experiences “back in the day,” your time has arrived, it’s a whole different ballgame. Very little compromise. And, it makes the Mac a pretty safe bet for PC switchers – 10 years ago, Mac enthusiasts would wax enthusiastically about how everything is just like Windows, but easier, and the Windows user would get suckered in and be lost and switch back. MacOS may have once been easier to someone starting from absolute scratch, but changing OSes is not the same. I mean, I’m sure learning to drive on the left side of the street is just as easy as learning to drive on the right, but I’d be willing to be that it would require at least a little adjustment for someone with years of experience doing the opposite.

Anyway, if you’ve secretly wanted to take the Mac plunge but were worried about what you’d be giving up from Windows, worry no more. You can have it all. 

I was a Parallels user from August 2007 until this Christmas, almost to the day. Parallels was basically OK. When it works fine, it works fine. Every once in a while I’d have a hiccup or belch that would require hours of work to figure out, or more accurately, to fix without really figuring out. (You can replace a flat tire on a car without knowing why the tire went flat to begin with. Same kind of deal.)

Between the little things, weird slowdowns, subtle quirks, etc., and the big things, like increasingly frequent crashes that required more and more of my ‘free’ time, I started thinking about exploring other options. The Parallels Desktop 4.0 Update promised to right all the little wrongs. Honestly, version 3.0 wasn’t too bad, but the promise of a leap in speed and greater reliability was too much to resist, so I took the plunge. 

I installed the 4.0 upgrade after an unbelievably hassle-ridden purchase process. It took like 14 hours to actually get the software I’d purchased because everyone in the world wanted their update at the same time, and apparently Parallels was caught with their pants down, so to speak. The optimist in me figured that that was actually a good sign – so many people fighting download cues to get the software must mean it’s good. 

When I finally got it, I was very cautious, though. I backed up everything, read all the warnings, followed all the early adopter tips. Unlike some reported, I had a totally hassle free setup. The process of upgrading from version 3.0 to 4.0 redoes your disk image of Windows. It creates an alternate version, of course, so for a while, you have the option of going back. I used the new version for about 2 weeks and then tossed my old one once I was comfortable. It took up a huge amount of hard drive space, otherwise I would have kept it. Anyway, big mistake. Total commitment to the new version, and within hours, I had my first big crash.

Since it was a brand new version, there was very little support for the issues. Lots of people complaining about the same stuff on their support forums, and none of the answers worked for everyone. For myself, after randomly trying things like “uninstalling” and “reinstalling,” and that old Mac tech support trick, “restarting,” I got back up and running something like 7 hours later. As they say, failure was not an option – this is what I work on, so I had to keep at it until it was fixed. Not a great way to spend a Sunday, especially when you don’t know that there’s actually an end in sight. It’s one thing to start a task that you know is going to take 7 hours, it’s another thing to take on a task that you cannot quit until it’s done. It could have been 70 hours. 

Which it was, the day after Christmas. For the first 6 hours after the failure, I tried all the same stuff as I’d done before. I was not initially worried since I’d gone through the same thing 3 weeks earlier. Surely, there was some learning curve that would shave hours off of my fight this time, right? Nope. I spent about 11 hours wrestling with it the day after Christmas because I had work the next day. No dice, and luckily things were slow at work and I got away with the down time. But after 11 hours fighting with it, I thought, “It’s time to try something different.” I jumped through the hoops of converting my Parallels desktop disk image to one compatible with VMWare Fusion. That was its own set of hassles, and while the process actually worked pretty easily and hassle-free, it took something like 60 hours. (I distinctly remember the feeling of alarm when it estimated 58 hours remaining.) So from late Thursday to late Sunday, it was grinding away. I still had my Parallels image, VMWare created its own copy and left the original Parellels stuff intact. And, wise as I’ve gotten in the last 3 weeks, I’ve kept it, just in case.

During the last hour or so of conversion, I downloaded a trial version of VMWare and installed it. It was very easy. With any virtualization software, there’s a little learning curve so you can get keyboard shortcuts working just so, and share the right volumes and get the drivers right, but it was mostly very painless. As of 2 days ago, I got my final couple tweaks figured out, and it’s been great. 

So, my first couple reactions:

Fusion has been dead reliable. Not a single hiccup or crash. I’ve experience Windows slowing down a little after hours of use, but nothing compared to the tragic slowdowns I’d predictably get in Parallels. And as with Parallels, if it gets too bad, a reboot of Windows takes care of it for a while. Advantage: Fusion. (This one is enough for me; give me reliability, or give me something else.)
 
Fusion still works after you shut down your Mac and turn it back on again. Parallels did not always do this. Having to uninstall and reinstall a program several times a month seems pretty unreasonable in the year 2008, now 2009. To be fair, this happened much less with Parallels 3.0. Advantage: Fusion. (If the 2 programs had been equally reliable, this would also be enough to make me switch.)

“SUSPEND” works in Fusion. You don’t have to totally shut down and restart Windows. Parallels had this feature as well, but it did terrible things when I tried to use it. 

If I “sleep” my Mac, Fusion doesn’t cause horrible system crashes. I had bad luck with this with Parallels, even in 3.0. It’s awfully handy to be able to sleep your mac instead of restarting, and it’s nice to let it take a break for the night rather than letting a screen saver spin all night.

Parallels 4.0 felt faster, and Fusion seems to actually be faster. Launching programs, screen redraws, resizing large files in Photoshop, gave the impression of greater speed in Parallels; the mouse was more responsive, etc., just the little things you feel when you’re used to a computer. In Fusion, you can actually feel the effort the machine is making when you’re pushing it with large files or lots of programs at once. But if something “feels” faster and actually takes longer, it’s sort of a wash. Bear in mind that this is pretty unscientific. My work has me doing the same tasks over and over, and I’ve done them for years, so I notice the difference between 5 and 10 seconds; it took me a little while to realize that Fusion was actually taking less time on some operations because it felt slower. Neither program is a dog, per se, they’re as fast as anything I ever need when they run right. Advantage: none – in a perfect world, the software would be fast AND feel fast.  

Features: Parallels seems to offer a lot more little goodies; I haven’t made a chart and counted them, but it definitely feels that way. I also never used any of them, so I don’t remember what they are. I’m sure there are people out there who have done great things with them and revolutionized their workflow, but all I really ever wanted or needed was a reliable platform that ran Windows XP fast enough for me to work on. Everything else is icing. So I’d probably give the icing advantage to Parallels. The cake advantage, not so much.

As far as the mundane day to day stuff they both have to do in order to do what they do, like sharing volumes between the Mac and the PC or sharing an internet connection with the Mac, they both did fine. They’ve both shared my printer just fine, although it took more steps in Parallels – Fusion worked right out of the box. They both see my Wacom tablet just fine, and they both politely try to figure out what to do if I plug in a camera or iPod, and they both remember what my preference is when I specify one. And with persistence, I eventually got both of them to support all my favorite keyboard shortcuts.

(Valuable tidbit for Fusion users: it may be common knowledge, but it took me a long time to sort out that turning off all the mouse-button options will allow your keyboard shortcuts to work in Photoshop, or for ctrl-clicking selected items from a list. I hated living without them, and Parallels didn’t remap CTRL-mouse out of the box so it was a new issue for me.)

I liked Parallels OK, and if it weren’t for the major time-suck it had become, I’d still use it. Software virtualization isn’t that sexy in the big scheme of things, so this isn’t a Porsche vs. Ferrari choice, it’s more like picking a new brand of milk because the old brand makes you break out. Fearing that you’re not going to be able to work, and not knowing how long it’ll take to get back to being able to work are deal breakers for me, I’ve got enough to worry about without dreading the next inevitable big software crash.

A casual perusal through the Parallels support forums has an embarassing number of “I asked for help on this 11 days ago, and I still can’t run Parallels” kinds of messages. Downtime with current, commercial software releases should not be measured in days; partly, it’s the software testing and QA and all that, partly it’s their support, and however you slice or dice it, downtime is not attractive, and downtime without an obvious path to remediation even less so. I am not a casual computer user, and keeping Parallels running had become larger than my interest in learning enough to do so. There are absolutely smarter, more experienced people than me all over the world, but in my opinion, you shouldn’t have to be one of them in order to purchase and use a piece of consumer software. That’s all I’m saying. 

If I had to guess without knowing anything about either company, VMWare seems to be the more cautious company; they seem to test their software more thoroughly and since they have far fewer devastating bugs, they have far fewer maintenance releases, and their marketing sheet probably has 30% fewer selling-point bullets as a result. Parallels takes risks, pushes the envelope, but in my own experience, represent bleeding-edge rather than cutting-edge progress. The result is jagged progress; additional features and claimed extra performance, but at the tragic expense of reliability. I mostly love using Windows in virtualization, it’s the best of all worlds when it works right, and I remain hopeful that both companies will continue to improve their products and advance the state of the art. But as someone who NEEDS the software to just work, Fusion’s my answer for now. Once you take reliability off the table, as Parallels has for many people, none of the other improvements matter. 

I’ve read of frustrated Fusion users who have switched happily to Parallels and found their bliss with exactly the opposite move as I’ve made, so your mileage may vary. All I can say is, thank goodness for options.

I didn’t learn my lesson, apparently, so life gave me a second chance today. I’ve been at my computer off and on for about 9 hours today - so far - fighting the same issue I’d solved a couple weeks back. The same fix didn’t address the same problem, so I’m left to wade through support forums and attempt veeerrrryyyyy slllllooooowwwww processes like uninstalling and reinstalling and uninstalling and reinstalling.

To be fair, this isn’t a Mac issue at all, it’s an issue with a specific piece of software. But helping an ailing piece of software gives you a look under the hood of an OS, and man, the stuff involved with maintaining MacOS these days is largely beyond me. I’m not a UNIX guru; I can get around a line prompt with some basic stuff, but man, this stuff’s a little ugly. And, it seems, necessary to know about.

Anyway, I’ve decided to try to test the idea of “improving” vs. “just fixing.” I hope it’s not a Tool Time exercise in futile optimism. I’m trying to jump through the painful hoops of moving away from Parallels Desktop, a heartbreaking piece of software that’s cost me a Sunday a couple weeks ago and now a December 25th of family time, and also painful because it’s so, so close to being what I need without quite getting there. (The catastrophic crashes that happen with alarming regularity are really the dealbreaker. I could live with any of the other hiccups I’ve encountered.)

This process is a pain in the ass, lots of chicken-and-egg issues. I have a laptop sort of working so I can work tomorrow, it’s not ideal but I can get by. I’m about 10 minutes (2 or 3 restarts) away from bashing my head against the next shot-in-the-dark stab at a solution. If I can just get a foothold and back up my stuff, I’m going to move away from Parallels to VMWare Fusion, a reportedly less sexy and more reliable piece of software that does exactly what Parallels does, hopefully without some of the life-sucking catastrophic failures.

I’ll spoil the ending; it’s still worth a read. The answer is that they’re not. Not exactly, at least. Long before Atari 2600s and Apple IIe computers, people were into phrenology and Salem witch hunts and all sorts of other stuff. I’d give some modern examples, but everyone believes some pretty dumb stuff and I don’t want to step on toes needlessly. The verdict is that computers and technology have a role in our dumbening, but it’s just the current tool of choice. If it weren’t for technology, we’d be getting dumber in another way.

The part of the article that I really loved:

Jacoby argues that long-standing American values like rugged individualism and the need to question authority have metastasized into reflexive anti-intellectualism and disdain for “eggheads,” “elites,” and pretty much anyone who might be described as credentialed. This cancerous irrationalism isn’t pretty, but it isn’t technology’s fault, either.

So our national zeitgeist is one where someone who has developed an expertise is worthy of distrust and ridicule? Sort of, actually. The Bill Gateses and Warren Buffets of the world may have something to say about it, but there’s also an element of truth to it. The movie Idiocracy would ridicule people who used big words as “talking all faggy.” (And if you haven’t seen it, the big words weren’t that big.) Women have know about this for ages – act dumb or be popular, to greatly oversimplify. Presidential elections aren’t won on issues, they’re won on who people would drink beer with. To greatly oversimplify – again – one big battle being waged in this campaign right here, right now, is to prove who’s both the most qualified and who’s the least elite. Seems like a pretty narrow niche; good enough, but not too good. Too much good and you’re elite. Not enough good and you’re not good enough. Or something.

The article also hints that technology is also a promising un-dumbening tool. Wikipedia is statistically more accurate than the Encyclopedia Brittanica. I guess. (Take that, you bastards!) Lots of effort by lots of people go into accumulating and sorting humankind’s best and hardest-won information. The problem is that there are lots of people working awfully hard at stuff that’s just not as good. The thing that the Googles of the world have not yet sorted out for us is how to judge information qualitatively. We keep hearing “take it all in and make your own decisions.” If I’m reading contradictory stories about John McCain as a POW from 2 sources I don’t know, that’s not the handiest approach. I’m left to judge the information on purely subjective reactions; who spelled better, which presenter has nicer hair a used a prettier typeface? “Just sort it out” doesn’t work that well for people like me who take in tons of information from tons of sources. I’m not even saying that there’s One Right Answer or anything so narrow, but for people seeking out information that will justify their belief that the world is flat, certain information is just not useful. But mindset-prioritized information won’t help anyone doing real research because all most people use internet research for is to validate what they already know. It’s human nature empowered by technology, and it’s a double edged sword.

Meat eaters love anti-soy propaganda. Vegetarians think anti-soy propaganda is perpetrated by the dairy industry. There are big expensive studies from passionate groups that prove it both ways. How do I find what’s true? Not what justifies my stance, but what’s really and incontrovertibly true?

There has to be a better way, and I don’t have a suggestion. Interesting times, and Google-like spoils to the first group that starts to untangle qualitative information ranking. Even user voting is sort of useless; read an Amazon forum. If you go to an Anti-Apple forum, all the Apple people come in and vote down dissenting opinions regardless of their merit. Read a McCain forum; anything pro-Obama gets voted down. And vice-versa. Post on craigslist; whoever has a critical mass can flag off the opinions of the opposite group. In a certain way, it’s a purer form of governing than the democratic-republic form of the US, there’s nothing representative about it, just one person one vote. But it’s also as impure. People who hate war will vote for a warmonger because they also hate abortion and vote for the anti-abortion guy. In big groups. After a certain number of weeks of American Idol, it becomes personal; people stop voting based on any kind of performance virtue and give in to blind “I just like him/her” votes. I don’t even know if it’s bad, but democratic voting on information accuracy or quality on the web isn’t likely to improve the accuracy or quality of anything, it’ll just filter out views with less supporters, an entirely different matter.

It gets into dumb and ugly abstractions at some point. What IS truth? Is there only one? Is it even worth seeking? How do you have absolute truth in a relativistic world? How do you maintain relativistic perspective in an absolute world? At one point is a truth “unpopular” or “controversial” and at what point is it just “untrue” and therefore worth eliminating from mankind’s pool of knowledge? And who judges it? It’s sort of a nightmare. And it leaves science to solve philosophical and ethical questions – an unfair burden, but one that’s often unrecognized, and one that science often accepts without complaint. Until I hear of a solution that factors in some very convincing perspective on what “true” really means and how to maintain it without bias, I guess I’m left to make my own decisions.

I guess it’s a perfect time to learn a little more about quantum physics, I won’t be confused by any sort of background or qualifications from my past. I’ll just take it all in and make my own call.

For the odd soul that ends up reading this (Hi, self!), expect lots of dramatic changes as I mess with templates and all that.

To be perfectly clear, I’m just kind of crumudgeon-ish when it comes to cell phones and laptops – you’d think that someone who spends more hours working on a computer than sleeping would have some tolerence, but I spend enough of my time around that stuff that I feel resentful when it creeps into my away-from-the-computer time, so the whole “everyone has a laptop in every coffee shop” thing means I don’t go to coffee shops any more. I’m old-school enough to resent the guy in the corner of the otherwise quiet coffee shop engaged in his loud, Bluetooth-enabled conversation with nobody. (I don’t begrudge anyone those activities, I just don’t want to be around them in my spare time.) My own voice mail points out that I go for weeks at a time without even knowing where my cell phone is, so I encourage people not to leave messages there.

Last week, I got a “smart phone.”

Here’s the thing; my day gig has created a new kind of stress for me, and I’m trying to adapt to it and work around it. There are big changes in my biggest client, and after 5 or 6 years of a constantly crushing workload, I suddenly have big windows of time where nothing happens. Not constant free time or anything like that, but not continual wall-to-wall action every day, either. It’s been hard, actually. One client in particular says things like “I will call you in 5 minutes,” and then doesn’t talk to me for 3 days, so I spend weird, nonproductive days in front of the computer waiting for the important work to arrive. Sometimes the 20 minutes only turns into 4 hours, sometimes it does turn into a couple of days, but waiting for the work is much more difficult than doing the work, so I get crazy. I don’t know that I’ll have a 3-day empty period until the 3 days is over, and it’s just a terrible use of time. And when something does finally come in, these days it usually needs to be done quickly, so I have to know about it. I’ve been a little trapped. 3 days of nothing followed by work that NEEDS to be done in 14 minutes makes me crazy, but I have to be here in case it happens. And it happens.

Enter Smart Phone. Now, I can receive and respond to emails away from my desk. I can’t actually do work, per se, but I can find out if a fire has started that I will need to help put out, and I don’t need to dread either stepping away from my desk or returning to it. It may not sound like a big deal since people have been doing just this years, but in my own life, I realized that if I can go outside to play with my daughter for even 30 minutes instead of checking the weather again while I’m waiting for the phone to ring, that’s 30 minutes well spent, and I want them. I haven’t needed to use technology in this way up until now because I’ve been overloaded with work, but now, even if my “away time” is only 200 feet away, I’ll take it. 

I also wanted to plan for contingencies on an upcoming trip I have; I’m visiting a place where I won’t have convenient access to an internet connection, and there’s every reason to believe that I’ll need one at at least some point while I’m gone. Enter the Smart Phone; I have it set up so I can use the phone as a modem, and I can connect to the internet wherever I have a decent signal, no wires, just magic. It’s not exactly breakneck speedy, but it’ll work. (I liked the iPhone when I was shopping, but their data plan specifically prohibits using their phone in this manner, so I had to cross it off the list. Life goes on; I don’t hate Apple, but we’re not close like we used to be.)

So the idea is that if I’m busy with work, I sit here and I work. No problem. And if I’m not busy with work, I can walk away for a little while without worrying about what I’m missing. If it works out to give me even the tiniest extra freedom, it’ll be worth the price of actually needing to carry my cell phone around, having it on at least some of the time, and even answering it. My cell phone habits still lag generally 10 or 15 years behind everyone else’s – I’m old fashioned enough to hate talking while I drive, and if I get a call while I’m eating with someone, I’ll excuse myself and take the call outside, that kind of thing – but I have to admit, getting a little more wired may actually make my life a little better. Of course, I may just end up spending a lot more every month to still be stuck in front of the computer, but that’s at least partly up to me now.