As I mentioned before, I’m trying to consolidate the number of websites that I have to maintain. My young-technologies.com domain was badly out of date, and didn’t really have any useful information. I decided to redirect all of it’s pages to this site.

The only page that was getting real traffic on that site was the Subversion virtual machine appliance, which I created a long time ago. I decided to move that page to this domain. That means that I have only one page to manage instead of an entire domain.

If you haven’t seen that virtual appliance, it’s worth checking out. It’s basically a fully functional Subversion install on Ubuntu linux, with WebSVN installed to view it in a web browser. It’s been downloaded over a thousand times, and it’s now being hosted using Amazon’s S3 service.

While the appliance has found a new home, I’m not sure if an when it’s going to be updated. If there are any future announcements about it, they’ll be made on this blog.

Two days ago Intel dropped the price on the Q6700 (2.66Ghz) processor in half. Newegg currently has this processor for $299, and you get Unreal Tournament 3 for free.

Before the price drop, I was recommending the Q6600 (2.4Ghz) because of its low price. Right now, it’s going for $229.99.

If you’re not going to overclock, and you don’t plan to take advantage of all of the cores, then the Q6700 is probably a safe bet because of the slightly higher clock speed (10% higher).

If you’re trying to save money at all, or you plan to overclock, the Q6600 is still an amazing processor. It’s easy to overclock to 3Ghz, while still running extremely cool.

Both of these processors would be great for a VMware server. Paired with some fast hard drives, and a couple gigs of memory, you could easily run 4-8 virtual machines (depending on what they’re doing of course).

It’s amazing how cheap it is to build what I would consider a fairly top of the line machine.

Apple could come out with a killer technology that would increase their sales like nobody’s business.

VIRTUALIZATION

I know what you’re thinking. Everyone has virtualization products for the Mac. VMware, VirtualBox, and Parallels to name a few.

Here is the problem, virtualization is a pain in the ass. The average person would have no idea how to do it. You have to:

1. Create a virtual machine and know what hardware specifications to assign it.
2. Have access to an OS CD to install Windows, Linux, or another OS. If it’s Windows, you’ll need a retail or volume license copy.
3. Install the OS in the virtual machine.
4. Configure the OS, and install the software you want to use.

If you get to that point, you still have to start up the virtual machine every time you want to run a Windows program. Parallels has really made progress due to the fact that they create coherence mode, which allows you to use your Windows applications seamlessly in OSX.

Now we’re do the biggest problem. You have to decide how to allocate your resources. Let’s say you have a Macbook Pro with 1GB of RAM. If you give the virtual machine 512MB of RAM, that may be too little, or it may be more than you have to sacrifice. You shouldn’t have to make that decision.

Step 1 to solving this problem is somehow sharing the memory. The OS should be smart enough to evaluate what is running, and fit it all in.

Step 2. Now, lets take it a step further. Why should I even have to configure a virtual machine? I don’t want two file systems, just show me one. I don’t want to have to start, suspend, or stop the virtual machine.

So now imagine with me for a moment. This means that you could use your Mac to run Windows programs. I’m not claiming that it’s easy, but imagine if Apple could say that they can run all of their software AND 99% of the Windows software that is available. The productivity and beauty of a Mac, and the support of the Windows software industry.

Would you switch if it were possible?