Peter S. Magnusson's dashboard

That's pretty much it, especially if you have an Intel Mac since Mac Office 2004 runs in emulation mode if it's not a PPC platform (on the "Rosetta" technology, which is actually licensed from Transitive). Parallels' emulation is "virtualization", using the VT support on the newer Intel chips, whereas the Transitive technology is runtime binary translation, which is slower (pardon the geek talk). The short version of the difference is that emulation (Rosetta) actually slows down the CPU, whereas virtualization (Parallels/VMWare) just requires more RAM and disk space.

Thor is spot on here. What I would add is that you are permitted to "defend" yourself. I had some issues historically, both for myself but more importantly for my previous company (Virtutech) and it's main product (Simics).

One of the strategies I adopted was to create a user page [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Psm] where I put my bibliography. That way I (or others) can easily refer to that page in discussions around notability. Once I put that in place, the problem went away.

That might all smack of self-promotion, but I don't see it as a problem since everything is being clearly labeled and attributed. It's a common tradition in academia, of course, and nowadays with stuff like LinkedIn the approach is becoming widespread in business in general.

As already noted, Parallels consumes a serious chunk of cpu time even when there is "nothing" on the PC going on. This is because Parallels has a hard time determining exactly what constitutes "nothing". You can improve this somewhat if you know some Windows admin, so you can configure your XP box to be completely stripped of all the services and stuff that you don't need. This is also something that I expect Parallels to be able to improve with time. Their challenge is to have heuristics in their VM engine that can figure out what is actually "going on" inside the XP VM, and that takes time to figure out. Especially since, if they get it wrong, they can exasperate other aspects of the user experience, in particular UI response time.

Another performance effect is that running a full, separate OS (NT or XP or Vista) takes up a lot of memory resources. MacOS X won't "know" exactly how to page this stuff, so if you don't have plenty of RAM on your Mac, this can create various issues.

A full XP+Office installation on your HD also takes up quite a chunk of disk space. So you need to budget your HD carefully, especially if you (like me) prefer to be able to have your whole digital life on one laptop (gigabytes of old email, archived files, music collection, photo collection, etc).

One final note: VMs do a great job of "freezing" these days. I have only tested Parallels for this but I think VMWare is equivalent. Basically, you have a ready-booted XP box on your HD that you can "start" real quick if you need to. When you no longer need the Win apps, you just hit command-Q and it just goes away, frozen in time on your HD until you next need it. In addition, the MacOS X file cache is managed so well that the second time you start the same VM, it will pop up for you very, very fast (unless you've run a lot of memory-intensive applications in the meantime, but that's often not the case).

Hope that helped.

I think Microsoft has done so much co-engineering between Windows parts of the code and the applications, that for Office to work on other platforms they have to carry with them a lot of what otherwise would be system code (and shared). That triggers all manner of performance and bloat issues. It also prevents them from doing a good job of performance tuning. Remember also that for x86 platforms, both MSFT and INTC have excellent performance tuning tools, not to mention third party stuff. This was never the case for PPC platforms. Of course, MSFT has not yet announced native x86/Mac support for Office (gee, wonder why).

I've installed Parallels (the VM) and Office 2007 on my MacBook Pro and I'm reasonably happy with it (the VMWare product is supposed to work reasonably well, too). Office 2007 is (gag!) actually quite elegant (much more intuitive) and supremely feature-rich. But of course this is a huge resource hog - you need the whole XP stack. So you really need a second generation (+) of a Core 2 Duo system with max RAM to expect it to be practical. In reality I go sit by my PC when I want to do some serious work on Office documents, but at least now I can access and do minor changes when on the road.

If MSFT actually did a proper port of Office 2007 to MacOS X, it would be awesome. They announced in January that Mac Office 2008 will be available in the second half of this year, and will support both PPC and x86 Macs. See their press release at [http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/pr...]. It remains to be seen how genuine an effort at making a top-notch product they will deliver. But Apple has doubled their market share in laptops, so MSFT might actually care.

So I'm looking forward to Q4. Leopard + Mac Office 2008 has the potential to be seriously cool!

Note that both the VM software (Parallels as well as VMWare) have evaluation licenses, as does Office 2007, so I highly recommend trying out the combo (if your HW allows it).

Re: renaming, remember that you can get the same effect through Settings by telling the iPhone to "forget" a network.

not quite true. as best as i can tell, the iphone will show all the calendars, but won't distinguish them. but you won't "miss" anything. and, anything you add on the iphone side will slide into your mac side as whatever the "first" calendar on your list is. there seems to be no way around this for now (the "general settings" function offers no option for calendar).

i warmly (pun!) recommend laptop stands. i have one for home/office use ("iLap 17", there are many sizes ) and one for travel ("Macally Icepad"). they not just insulate your lap, they help air circulate under your macbook, and they also provide better friction and angle control, so they help with ergonomics as well.

great info Amy.

having used the iphone in the bay area since launch, i'll add my subjective datapoint. basically, edge is almost always available (but not invariably), and the speed varies dramatically. it is sometimes competitive with wifi (as far as iphone-end-user experience goes), and sometimes it slows to almost a complete stop.

edge is good enough that i can generally use the mapping/traffic feature and email while in the car.

i kind of view edge as i viewed the analog-vs-digital in the old days. if wifi is available, then i have great performance on the device. if it isn't, then edge is my fallback that works reasonably well.

now, this means that if the bulk of your environment lacks wifi, you will not enjoy the iphone experience in the same way. (add to that the fact that safari on the iphone doesn't remember passwords very well, making stuff like starbucks tmobile support a hassle)

Yeah, the bluetooth on the iPhone does *nothing* useful (except headsets which in my view isn't very useful). You can confirm this when you do the pairing between your macbook and the iphone; it will show you what "services" are available, and report "none".

Not being able to synch wirelessly is one of the nice WTF experiences of the 1.0ishness. I didn't expect to be able to use the iphone as a modem for my macbook (tho i would love to), bt i certainly expected sync to work.

The in-seat power stuff has been flaky on a lot of airlines/planes I've noticed. E.g. on transatlantic flights I usually try to fly SAS since they were the first carrier to have wifi on all their international flights. But the power plugs in their seats are so iffy it's a 50/50 proposition to get any power during the trip. And inevitably the crew have no idea why.

Hm. I thought *all* United flights had this on some of the rows (at the front of the economy section). Are you sure your flight didn't have any? (It's 5 extra inches btw, so yeah it's a big improvement, especially for those of us who like working on laptops during flight.)

Whether you actually get seated in one of those rows depends on a number of factors, like your class of ticket, if you're a "Economy Plus Access" member, what your frequent flier status is, how full the flight is, yada yada.

no! when in doubt, first try and reset the application by pressing and holding the Home button. see the basic support info at Apple at http://docs.info.apple.com/article.ht...

What are your settings on your home linksys network? i'm not sure it can be fixed, i know tech-savvy friends who have not gotten their home wifis to work with their iPhones, so there must be some basic issues here. personally i run with no security settings on my home wifi (i'm happy to share with neighbors) and the iphone works fine.