Fazal Majid's low-intensity blog

When I got my first Intel MacBook Pro, I purchased a license of Parallels Desktop, which was then pretty much the only game in town for PC virtualization on Mac OS X. At some point, when I got my Mac Pro, I switched to VMware Fusion because of the initial bugginess of the Parallels 4.0 initial release, and the competitive upgrade was almost free. When I upgraded to Snow Leopard, I switched back to Parallels because Fusion doesn’t work when you boot Snow Leopard in a 64-bit kernel, which I have now made the default on my Mac Pro (Fusion 3.0 was just announced, with 64-bit kernel support).

Pretty much the only apps I run in Parallels are:

• Microsoft Money 2001 (I need to write a webapp to replace this)
• IE8 (for testing purposes only, of course)
• EAC (sometimes gets better secure rips than Max)

When I installed Parallels 4.0, I was shocked by how much integration between the Windows VM and OS X is enabled by default. I don’t trust Windows one whit, and the last thing I want is for a Windows VM to become a vector for Windows malware to infect my Mac. I disabled all the integration features, and only access Windows files via file sharing where OS X gets to read and write Windows files, but the Windows VM stays securely sandboxed in its ghetto. Hideous Windows icons in the dock are also a distraction.

Parallels and VMware have been focusing on adding integration features to their virtualization products. They probably believe there are few performance optimizations left to be achieved, but if they continue with reckless disregard for security and the contamination of the OS X user experience with Windows ugliness, I will have to switch to VirtualBox, as its spareness looks increasingly like a virtue.

No wonder the SF Independent School District is in such trouble…

I am more than a little ashamed of my government’s defense of the pedophile rapist Roman Polanski. Unfortunately, it follows a pattern of making excuses for criminal behavior by people with literary or artistic talent, such as Villon, Lacenaire, Céline, or Althusser.

The Economist has an excellent article on how Indian mobile phone companies cut costs. They have an ARPU of $6.50 a month yet operate with a 40% gross margin. If US cellcos were run as efficiently, they would have a 1200% gross margin on the $51 monthly ARPU!

The time has long come to stop coddling grossly inefficient and anti-competitive cellular carriers in the West. They are no longer fledgling businesses in the shadow of landlines, quite the opposite, in fact. One good place to start would be to require them to offer consumers the choice of carrier for international calls and for roaming, as is the case with landlines. Their rates are simply extortionate.

From the Reddit list of questions to xkcd author Randall Munro:

At the EFF organized reading tonight in San Francisco: