Boot Camp Beats Parallels?

I promised pictures from my weekend, and so here are a couple of my favorites (not sure why it got so pixelated, but if you click on them you'll see the normal quality versions):


The top one is one of my cousins and the bottom one is my brother's fiance with their puppy Freddie (who was much more loveable this weekend). You can see all the rest from the weekend over here, and I think I took a number of surprisingly great shots. Sorry for the delay of this post (I fudged the time at the bottom), but I was knee deep in Physics homework (I know, what's new?). Moving along, HeraldNet wrote a little article about their experience with Boot Camp versus their time with Parallels Workstation, which provides a virtualization for Windows within Mac OS X, and it looks like the prefer Boot Camp! Sound kind of weird? Shouldn't it be better to run them both at the same time? Well, first off, Parallels isn't completed yet (then again, Boot Camp is still in beta itself), so maybe we can expect more out of the retail version. Their concerns seemed to be little annoyances: like not being able to play DVDs (yet), lack of native graphics drivers, and slight issues with installing XP on it. I would think another concern would be the memory management since I would guess there to be separate virtual memory address spaces, but the performance hit could've just been more from the graphics drivers. I don't think it should be such a big deal to have to boot between using either OS because it just sounds weird to use the two simultaneously since they're so different and would likely only serve to confuse and frustrate you as you have to flip through two sets of hotkeys and such. Anyway, the lesson to be learned here is to stick to Boot Camp until Parallels is actually read to release (they've just fallen into a lot of buzz talk with the release of Boot Camp, so it's really not their fault that they're getting criticized).

There may be more Macs to load XP onto very soon with strong rumors of an Intel-based iBook being announced as soon as next week, which would make sense since it would fall in line with their financial release. I would actually be more surprised if it wasn't announced since this has been something people have been quietly discussing for a little while now. If you use Microsoft Word, then you should definitely read this list of great tips since it's unlikely that you're truly the master of it you may think you are. Say what you want about OpenOffice or LaTeX, but MS Office is the best word processor out there (just admit it, already). Do you find it hard to keep up with the dozens of Google services that have sprung up over the past couple of years? A comprehensive list of them has actually appeared on Wikipedia, which Google would do good to imitate on their own site. At least they finally started up the Da Vinci Quest. If you want to see some really awesome looking blogs, then I refer you to this list of some really neat looking ones. I wish I had that kind of visual creativity! If you hate .NET, then you can use this as fuel to your fire to support Java instead. And lastly, I just think it's cool how cars are getting smarter with how you drive to balance out the car's weight distribution and such for a smoother ride.

I'm pretty sleepy, so I'm going to zip through the movie news. There's an official trailer for Clerks 2 available, and it's pretty good, but I still prefer the Internet-only trailer. There's also a trailer out for Disney's Meet the Robinsons, but it's really nothing special, in my opinion. Resident Evil: Afterlife is now definitely on its way to production, as confirmed by Sony Screen Gems. Never saw the second one myself, but I don't think the series will get much better since it didn't sound better than the first. All I have left is pictures. There are a couple at IGN of the ghost ship from the next movie in the Pirates of the Caribbean saga, and it looks a lot like the first one to me, but I haven't seen that movie's ship in a long time anyway. A mysterious LJ has stumbled upon a number of new pictures from Marie Antoinette, and they look visually incredible, but it's not like that says much about the movie itself (though I do hope it turns out well).

Now for some Monday Madness:

1. What was the highlight of your weekend?
Probably just relaxing late Saturday night at my brother's place when his puppy inched her way over to my lap and let me pet her without her biting me much (she was mostly just licking me).

2. What was the best meal you ate this past weekend?
Probably the barbecue at my brother's place complete with paneer, ribs, chicken, sausage, and fajita meat.

3. Did you spend time with anyone special?
Most of the family members who mean the most to me, so yes.

4. Did the weekend seem to drag, or go by too quickly?
Way too quickly! I knew it was flying by as it was happening, and I knew I'd feel sad to come back to all the work I had this week (especially that Hellish Physics homework).