My shopping cart..
- Energy drinks.
- Energy bars.
- Energy backups.
Guess what I do for a living. 🙂
After a few grumpy emails between myself and our Account Manager, I’m happy to report that we have purchased the GA release and it’s working well. If you are using Parallels Server for internal development purposes and not for hosting, they will extend a more reasonable price per machine: $200 + $50/year maintenance. I think that’s a very reasonable price point for our usage, and am happy to pay it.
This likely has more to do with meeting end-of-Q2 sales quotas than attracting my dinky business, but regardless, a win is a win! Thanks!
Today marks exactly seven months from the day I switched to the Dvorak keyboard layout.
Key Observations
Other Conclusions
Fresh from my inbox..
Parallels Server for Mac will be available soon. As a thank you to all participating Parallels Server for Mac Beta users, Parallels is offering an exclusive discount on a single Parallels Server for Mac license. Purchase this new software for only $700* – a 30% savings.
Hmm… well, the product has been working fairly well for us at OpenRain, but I’m not sure $700 per major version is going to be worth it as opposed to buying another cheap Dell machine and running VMWare Server on Linux for free, which we already do in some of our hosted environments. Here’s the kicker in tiny font at the bottom of the email explaining the asterisk after “$700”..
* The limited-time discount offer is limited to a single server from May 30 – June 30, 2008. Annual maintenance is required at the time of purchase, starting at an additional $249.75 per year. For academic pricing and volume licensing, register now or contact Parallels Sales at +1 (425) 282-6400.
So that’s $950 for the first year of our first system alone. Hmmmm…
Some of the worst infrastructural issues OpenRain has had since inception has been border hardware. We’ve been through all typical COTS models you’d find at Best Buy, but all have had issues with at least one of..
But this latest POS–the Netgear FVS114–really takes the cake. Check it..
We’ve reproduced this issue with FireFox and Safari from multiple machines inside the network. Way to go, Netgear! (Might want to get on this one.) I’ll be buying some real hardware online in about 15 minutes.
Prior to moving into the new OpenRain office (announcement coming in June), we used OS X’s magical .local addressing to find all our servers. This allowed us to keep almost everything on DHCP, which is trivial to set up and administer. Little did we know, however, that this was being the root cause of many internal issues.
Case in point: do not use bonjour-based DNS for your core network services. Use a proper DNS server from the start. DNS is a cornerstone dependency of all the other services provided by your Leopard server, so any performance issues you introduce at this level will carry through to your entire infrastructure.
Apple,
My software development firm–OpenRain in Arizona–spends buckets of money on your products. Stuff works pretty well in general, but you really need to address these issues. Really.
I recently returned from a week-long trip from Costa Rica. These are best frames from the trip and are intended for large format viewing. Flickr royally sucks at that (everything is shown low-res by default), but you can nab higher-def shots with a few clicks if you have a 24″+ monitor and would like to fill your screen.
Contact me privately if you’d like copies of the highest resolution RAW sources. (JPEG == Yucky.)