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An Appleinsider article on Digg claims that “Parallel, Inc. is preparing to make a quantum leap in the art of Windows virtualization software for Mac with [a] new version of its Parallels Desktop software that introduce a refined user interface and greater support [for] Apple Computer’s Boot Camp software. Graphics performance increases of up to 50%, seamless drag-and-drop, tons more features!”

This is exciting news. The ability to run your Parallels software together with your Boot Camp partition is the most interesting new feature. Power users will no longer need to keep two Windows installations – one for rebooting into Windows and one for running in OS X – and can save some much needed hard drive space.

Unfortunately the most important thing has still been left out: support for OpenGL and DirectX. I believe that the main reason owners of the Parallels software still might run Boot Camp on occasion is because they use 3D software or games. Of course, even with some good 3D support in Parallels, hard core game players might still be inclined to use Boot Camp to get every drop of performance out of their machine, since Parallels only virtualizes one processor core. But for most users – those who are not hardcore – basic last generation 3D support would be enough to alleviate the need for the dreaded Windows reboot.

From a technical point of view it might be ‘tricky’ to do 3D graphics since a lot of those unruly games expect to be able to bang the metal, and take control of the whole graphics card. But most 3D games on the Windows platform can somehow run in a Window as well as fullscreen, meaning they must already have some means for sharing the hardware. A good driver pretending to be a 3D card should be able to accept OpenGL commands, and then simply turn around and give them to the OpenGL drivers in OS X for execution. On the OS X side the OpenGL environment would be set up to draw into a hidden frame buffer which then is copied right back into the virtual environment.

Either way, I use Parallels on an almost daily basis on my Mac. It comes in very handy when I need to run Internet Explorer to check what kind of damage Explorer does to the rendering of our websites. :)

See the Digg article. | Digg story

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Introducing YippieMove '09. Easy email transfers. Now open for all destinations.
Nov
30.
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Category: Uncategorized

There are many obstacles when you start up a business. When you start up an online-business your domain name is crucial. Imagine starting a store in some distant industrial area far away from downtown. Sure, you will probably get a couple of customers, but you’ll have to work hard on promoting yourself. You cannot really expect people to just walk into you store because they see you from the sidewalk.

The same thing goes with a domain name. If you have a really long and hard-to-spell domain name, you cannot expect people to just stumble into your website. Sure, some people might know about it through advertisement, and bookmark it, but your customers will be quite limited. In addition to this, it is not very likely that people will remember you address, and promote it by word of mouth.

So what is the catch? Why is it so hard for an Internet-startup to just get a really short and catchy domain name like google.com, myspace.com or facebook.com? Is it really that hard to come up with a catchy name like that?

The answer is no. Coming up with a name is the easy part. A half year ago when Alex and I were starting to make plans for starting up a company we started to brainstorm for a cool and catchy name. This was when we discovered the real catch – finding an available domain name.

I don’t know how many hours we spent on instantdomainsearch to find a both available and catchy domain name. This is when we realized something: the biggest parasites on the Internet are the domain-traders. Sure, you can probably find an available .org, .us or something like that, but if you’re a company you want both the .com and .net.

Why? It’s simple. What these companies do for a living is just to buy up random domain names that someone or some company will be desperate enough to buy for the insane price they are asking for. Sure, this doesn’t sound like a big problem, but I can assure you that it is. Just go to instantdomainsearch and try to type in any letter combination of less than 5 characters, it doesn’t even need to be a word. Is it taken? Sure. Just try to come up with some catchy name of less than 10 characters, and I can almost guarantee you that it is taken.

Well, you might think, maybe it is just some company that bought this domain, because the were about to launch a product by that name. Not very likely. If you look at most of the results you are likely to find either an empty page, a page full with banners or a redirection to a domain-trader.

This is the reason why I argue the domain-traders as the biggest parasites on the Internet. I would not say that they’re worse than pedophiles and that kind of parasites, but from a business point of view, these are the worst. Imagine how more useful these domains could be used if it wasn’t for the domain-traders. Personally I think that the domain-registration should be more conservative.

I know until a few years ago, you needed to have a company or product connected to the domain you applied for in order to get a .se-domain. I still don’t know why they took this limitation away. I think .com should have been restricted for companies, and nothing else. However, that’s a bit too late to change now.

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Introducing YippieMove '09. Easy email transfers. Now open for all destinations.
Nov
27.
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Category: Business

I just got off the phone with the Secretary of State to see how our LLC-application is coming along. We filed the application about a month and a half ago, and still not a word, so I was starting to get worried. Sure, it’s a government agency, but still.

When I finally got through after about 15 minutes, it turned out that everything was OK. The guy I talked to said that we probably will receive our paperwork by the end of this week.

Now I’m really relieved.

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Introducing YippieMove '09. Easy email transfers. Now open for all destinations.

As I mentioned in my article ‘Save $1,285 per Computer and Still Remain Business-ready,’ I’ve been a long-time user of Open Office, and I really like it. However, there are a few drawbacks that have been bothering me lately. Then again, if you add the price of Microsoft Office into the equation, the choice becomes more complex. Sure, hands down, Microsoft Office is more powerful (even though it has several ‘features’ I’d rather be without).

Until recently, I haven’t found any features that Open Office lacks that I really need. However, lately I’ve been doing a lot of statistics, and within this field Open Office does lack some features that Microsoft Office comes with. There is a set of macros called ‘OOoStat’ which make Open Office a better tool for statistics, but it still doesn’t beat Microsoft Office.

Open Office lacks native support in Mac OS X. Since I switched to Mac, this is something that really has been bothering me. Sure, you can still run Open Office using X11, but it comes with some drawbacks such as long startup-times, low performance, and issues with the clipboard (cut and paste). I know the Open Office team is working on a native-version right now, but no stable release is available. At this time, the only workaround as I know of is NeoOffice, which is a Java-based ‘native’ OpenOffice. I was running this for a while, but went back to the X11-version due to NeoOffice’s low performance and high memory-usage.

Open Office is clean, neat and you know what it is doing. Being open source, you potentially have full control of the software. You also know exactly what information is being sent away from your computer (even though tools like Little Snitch can solve this for other softwares). Another benefit with this is that it is much more likely to be secure. So far I’ve never heard of any macro virus targeting Open Office. Sure, part of the explanation for this is the fact that the number of users is lower, but the code is also more well-written.

Open Office also supports export to PDF, Microsoft Office-files and most other common file-formats. Microsoft’s Office on the other hand only support their own formats. If you want export to PDF-files in Windows using Microsoft Office, you need to purchase Adobe Acrobat (or a similar product). I should probably add that if you’re running Mac OS X, you have the built in PDF-exporter, so this doesn’t apply.

To wrap up, Open Office is a great piece of software, but it comes with some drawbacks such as no native support in Mac OS X, and some lack of features. But still, if I were to choose between paying $400-some dollars for a license of Microsoft Office or live with the drawbacks of Open Office, the choice is quite simple. In my honest opinion, Microsoft Office is far too over-priced and the cost is certainly not justified. If you’re working with regular spread-sheets and text-documents, Open Office is enough. Also, if you’re running windows, Open Office runs natively, so you don’t need X11.

Open Office 2.0.4 running in X11 on Mac OS X.

Microsoft Office 2004 running on Mac OS X.
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Introducing YippieMove '09. Easy email transfers. Now open for all destinations.
Nov
25.
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Category: Technology

We had a couple of hours of downtime last night due to a server failure. Sorry about that guys. I know that the timing was bad just after we put up out great hedge funds article.

We’ll invest in redundant servers as soon as we launch our product. It’s hard to justify that kind of expense before our release though.

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