It’s got friggin’ Unity for Linux!!! This looks good…
The VMWare team has just released the second beta for VMWare Fusion 2.0, the company’s popular virtualization program for the Mac.
The new beta adds a TON of new features, as the video above demonstrates. I got a chance to talk to VMWare today about the new beta and it is HOT. I’ll be posting a more in-depth overview tomorrow, but until then, here are some of the highlights:
- Unity 2.0 - The newest version of Fusion is really focused on better Windows-Mac integration. You can now launch Windows programs from the dock or access Mac programs from within your virtual machine. You can also link folders like Documents, Pictures and Music on your virtual machine with those folders on your Mac.
- Multiple Snapshots VMWare has worked really hard to bring a Time Machine-like ease to backing up and protecting your virtual machine. You can now designate how often you want to take full system snapshots of your VM, whether once an hour, once a day or once a week, and how many copies you want to keep.
- Better Video and Graphics Graphics and shading support has been improved for Macs that have higher-end graphics cards, and even integrated Macs can now play 1080p HD video in virtual machines with considerably less CPU overhead.
- Support for more client OSs, including Leopard Server You can now run Leopard Server as a VM in OS X 10.4 and 10.5, even on client machines (virtualizing Mac OS X client is blocked by Apple’s license terms). Support for the latest version of Ubuntu (Hardy Heron) is also available right out of the box with Unity integration. Power users can now designate up to four virtual CPUs per virtual machine, which is great for anyone wanting to take an XServe or Mac Pro to the next level.
VMWare Fusion 2.0 beta 2 is available for Intel Macs running OS X 10.4 or OS X 10.5. New users can try the beta for free and the upgrade path (including future betas and the full version of Fusion 2.0) is free for all existing Fusion 1.0 customers.
via TUAW
Looks like people better get playing the original Gears leading up to November!!! (I know I will be… 
)
Gears of War 2 will feature ‘linked Achievements,’ meaning that Achievements earned in the original Gears will help unlock bonuses in the sequel.
Epic’s Cliff Bleszinski took the stage at Comic-Con to demonstrate to a live audience the E3 Sinkhole level and describe a new “linked achievements” feature for Gears 2 where achievements unlocked in the first Gears game would open features in the upcoming sequel.
He offered three examples of how the system would work:
- Complete Act One in Gears Of War and receive a playable Anthony Carmine in Gears of War 2
- Find 10 COG tags in Gears Of War and get Minh Young Kim in Gears of War 2
- Kill Raam in Gears Of War and earn a playable Raam in Gears of War 2
Questions such as whether all Gears of Wars achievements will be linked to the sequel and what other goodies can be grabbed besides characters won’t be answered until closer to the game’s November 7 release.
via The Escapist
The BBC has announced that it is working on a successor to Tomorrow’s World. This was always one of my favourite shows as a child, (yeah, I know I’m a nerd ), and I’m glad to see something like this making a return. We need some form of popular science show on TV, otherwise the vast majority of people will become ignorant of even the basics of science - but that’s a rant for another day…
Just a month after Sir David Attenborough said it was “very, very sad” that Tomorrow’s World had been axed - five years ago - the BBC has today revealed it is making a “new popular science format for the early evening” on BBC1.
A new science show is one of the BBC’s top priorities for BBC1 over the next year, according to its annual statements of programme policy for all its TV, radio and online services, published today. The SOPPs lay out the corporation’s programming plans for the year to the end of March 2009.
via The Guardian
A great little command-line tool for Leopard:
osx-trash manipulates the Mac OS X trash from the command line, just like the Finder does. It uses AppleScript via Scripting Bridge on top of to communicate with the Finder. You can move files to the trash, empty the trash, and list items currently in the trash.
project page via
That’s it, I REALLY want an iPhone now…
You don’t need Steve Jobs’ permission to watch TV on your iPhone any more. And you don’t need to pay the cable company twice. A native Orb client for the iPhone and iPod Touch popped up on the installer networks overnight, and Orb confirms that it’s official.
The client software allows you to watch live TV on an iPhone or Touch wherever you are, in addition to your music. You’ll need a TV card or adaptor for your PC, of course, to get the live TV. So provided you have an internet connection, there’s no need to perform DIY transcoding using software such as Visual Hub. The client will even transcode the video stream nicely for 2.75G Edge networks. Orb does in software what Sling Media does in hardware.
via
Was round the in-laws the other day and couldn’t help but notice this one in the garden…
A fine way to retire an old web browser. At least it’s found some use… 
If you’re a VMware user and want to play around with the latest version of Ubuntu in a VM (like me), you’ll need to get the vmware-tools installed. Unfortunately, things are not quite as straight forward as the previous release of Ubuntu yet, but it was a pretty easy thanks to this great guide.
The latest version of Ubuntu (8.04 a.k.a. Ubuntu Hardy - the world’s most popular Linux distribution) came out yesterday on April 24th. I downloaded it right away to play with on VMware Fusion, my Mac virtualization tool of choice (though I’ve now been told this works in VMware Workstation and VMware Player on the PC too!). It worked pretty well out of the box, with even seamless mouse support working right away, but I needed, of course, to install VMware Tools too, as any good VMware user would do. From there, things turned sour, and I was bombarded with error messages …
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If you, like most of the world, are a Windows user, having to run things such as anti-virus and anti-spyware programs are just a part of everyday life to try and keep your system running nicely.
My personal favorite, that I install on all the Windows PCs that I regularly have to keep in check (family, friends who haven’t seen the light of Mac or Linux etc.) is AVG. Great news is that AVG plan to release the new free edition of AVG 8.0 on Thursday now with added spyware protection to boot! Great news, and sounds like it could be an essential upgrade.
AVG Technologies plans to release a revamped version of its popular, free anti-malware scanner on Thursday.
Version 8.0 of the software will add anti-spyware and safe search features to its core anti-virus engine. Safe surfing features, that give users warnings about visiting insecure websites all the time not just when they search, will remain a paid feature of AVG’s full fat product.
Both the safe search and safe surfing features use Linkscanner technology, acquired by AVG when it bought Exploit Prevention Labs last December
via
I’m already a lover of Spanning Sync, version 2 promises to have contact syncing between all your Google apps with the Mac address book. This could be very very good. Check the link for a video of it in action.
People know Spanning Sync for its ability to sync Apple iCal with Google Calendar. In fact, more than 70,000 people have used Spanning Sync to do just that. But calendars are only one part of the equation.
Our users tell us that they also need to be able to sync their Mac Address Book with their contacts in Gmail and Google Apps. So Spanning Sync 2.0 does both—calendars and contacts.
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