Fast work by the team behind Parallels, means Windows 8 is now very usable running in a virtual machine on your mac…
Today, Parallels announced an update to their Parallels 7 virtualization software platform which will add Mountain Lion as both a host and a guest OS, allowing developers (and anyone else) to demo Mountain Lion on their main machine without making it susceptible to beta bugs. ML early adopters will also be able to test Parallels 7 on their Mountain Lion Macs.
via 9to5Mac
Arstechnica have an excellent post on a new Windows 8 featured call Storage Spaces, which is basically the successor to the original concept of Drive Extender in Windows Home Server, a concept that so many were fond of…
With Storage Spaces, physical disks are grouped together into pools, and pools are then carved up into spaces, which are formatted with a regular filesystem and are used day-to-day just like regular disks.
Storage in a pool is then distributed among one or more spaces. Each space can have its own redundancy policy, with three kinds of fault tolerance offered: 2-way mirroring, 3-way mirroring, and RAID 5-like parity. With the mirrored options, a space’s data is stored either twice or three times within a pool. With the parity option, the system will compute additional information and store this within the pool. If any disk in the pool fails, the data can be reconstructed using this additional information.
The systems strength lies in its flexibility, simply create a space, even one that exceeds the storage you currently have, then just add new disks to the pool and regardless of how large they are or how they are connected, the pool will manage the expansion and optional migration.
The most interest detail came to light in the recent consumer preview of Windows 8, that storage pools are in fact included in the client now.
I’m sure the whilst users of the original Windows Home Server are very pleased to see the idea live on, I am sure there will be no upgrade path, other than what was involved in moving to Windows Home Server 2011, copy your data off and rebuild your server from the ground up, which is a long and fairly painful process.
If you’re testing out Windows 8, the odds are that you’re going to try installing software that will complain about the inability to find support for .net 2.0, .net 3.0 or .net 3.5, but rather than having to download any software, the answer is already baked into Windows 8, all you have to do is launch the Programs & Features control panel, select ‘Turn Windows features on or off’ and then tick to install .net framework 3.5 (which includes the support for previous versions).
It’s a similar story with Windows 8 Server, but this time you need to add it via the server manager, adding additional features option, rather than the Programs control panel.
I’m sure this need will go away as developers are basically going to have to support .net 4.0 framework in order to avoid this additional, not very user friendly step.
As I’ve been using a Windows 8 tablet, I came up with one neat fix for syncing bookmarks between my Mac and the Windows 8 tablet using Xmarks.
Xmarks is effective for syncing for one simple reason, it works across many platforms, and in the case of Windows 8′s Metro IE whilst there are not bookmarks per se, when you type in a keyword, it will rank bookmarks at the top of those suggestions, together with matching sites you have visited. This means that bookmarks are still important and it is worth having a clear and memorable titles on them. In order to sync with Xmarks, you will need to download the addon for IE (which is really a desktop app which syncs with the folder that IE uses for bookmarks), this means that is will only work with the full Windows (not the coming Windows on Arm systems), but once setup works faultlessly to keep your sites in sync.
Download the addon from xmarks.com to get started.
So in order to test Windows 8 you have to use it the way you would normally use a computer, I use the excellent LastPass password manager, which unfortunately doesn’t work in the Metro version of IE, as it doesn’t support addons of any kind (a big step backwards if you ask me).
Hope ever there is a small glimmer of hope in the form of LastPass offering a service called IE Anywhere, which is meant as a standalone app that hijacks any browser and adds the ability to use passwords store on LastPass.
For me this works surprisingly well in the Metro IE, the main cavate is that you need to be a premium subscriber to LastPass (worth it for the multiplatform apps and just because its a great service and a reasonable $12 a year cost).
This trick won’t work with the WOA (Windows On Arm) based version of Windows8, as it needs to run as an app on the desktop.
Even if it provides a route to have your passwords captured by Windows 8, it’s better than the alternative of manually inputing all your passwords for any existing LastPass users.
[footnote: Windows has a new system called SmartScreen which blocked this app from being used if downloaded in IE, so I'd recommend using another browser just to get going]
Update: after a recent reinstall I couldn’t get this to work anymore, it turns out that Windows 8 was updated to run in protected mode, something that can be disabled in the desktop IE settings, then it works fine. Fhew!
For those who have been playing around with the latest Windows 8 Consumer Preview and use the excellent DVBLink virtual tv tuner service, there is a fix on hand to get the client app to play nicely with the small update made to the way Windows Media Center handle addons.
Whilst the win32 app install and picks up channels in the desktop app, and media center sees your virtual tuners, it will fail to find any channels listed.
This is because the MCE addon that syncs the channels is missing. Luckily there are some simple commands that fix the missing app and register it in Media Center.
Start by opening up a command windows (CMD), with administrator rights (tick from the new start menu and hit run as administrator from the app bar at the bottom).
This send it there commands…
via DVBLogic Forums
