VMWare Unity – The ultimate virtualization?
Would it not be cool to have two operating systems interweaved in the same machine in a seamless manner? What if you could be running Ubuntu and alongside with its 'normal' windows, you could just have your favourite Windows applications running as if they were running natively? It would be awesome, right?
Well, if this is still an utopia for you, then you are probably missing out on VMWare's Unity functionality, available since the version 6.5 on their Workstation platform.
What's Unity you ask? I say it is the best damn thing ever invented.
Unity, as I have hinted, gives you the ability of having the applications of a guest operating system 'running under' the host OS. I used quotes because in actual fact, only the windows from those apps are transported from the guest to the host - all the applications will still be running under the guest OS.
So in practice, you can be running Ubuntu (or any other flavour of Linux) and have Adobe's Photoshop or Microsoft Word running right there, alongside Gnometrix or any other of the applications that you can run under Linux. The opposite also works. As a matter of fact, I'm running Vista as we speak and I am developing under Netbeans on Ubuntu. Neat eh?
I cannot begin to address the multitude of possibilities that this opens. It is still buggy but even when you have applications that still can't run on Vista, you can just have a virtual machine running XP and your applications can run straight off along the other windows. It's just the ultimate invention.
I'll leave you with a printscreen since an image is worth a thousand words.
What’s hot?
I am certainly not. My life's about to get shaken up a little and I am going from idleness to a rather busy period, or so I believe.
At this point I have decided I will be applying once more for Google Summer of Code. I applied last year and sadly, didn't get approved. Still, I stuck around an open source project and actually got to do some work on it. The experience was invaluable and I am going for the very same project again. My experience will be a plus and I really am looking forward to be part of GSoC'09.
At the same time, I am having to do research for my final school project: analyzing and proofing the eXplicit Control Protocol (XCP). As exciting as it may sound, it gets a little demotivating when the true goals of our project are, to say the least, blurry. Still, I am aiming to do the best I can.
Still on my thought currently are two school subjects:
- Decision Support Systems - The labs on this subject are turning out quite interesting. The definition of DSS is interesting and it is fascinating to get your hands dirty with data warehouses and with extreme load scenarios. The theory however is kinda boring and dull...
- Enterprise Information Systems - Good ole SAP. It looks like this subject will be extremely intensive and will require a lot of work but it is certainly a nice challenge. Having SAP in my CV will also be a massive stepping stone for the future as SAP consultants are not only very well paid, but the position is also always in constant demand.
For the near future I also have some extra-curricular plans. I have volunteered to be part of the FITEC event, so that should be interesting.
And that's all folks! I better go get some sle.....get back to work I mean! 
Accelero Twin Turbo by Artic Cooling – Review
Recently I had been having a problem. My graphics card (a humble PowerColor HD4850) was overheating to smithereens. Each time I wanted to play a game I would manually pump up the only small fan, increasing the noise tenfold, only to keep the temperature at a scorching 100ºC.
Yes, you read correctly. Under load (running Team Fortress 2) this card would easily reach the 100 degrees Celsius. The funny thing about it? It wouldn't absolutely stutter at all!
After having done research on it, I came to the conclusion that this card was simply hot by nature. Or, better put, the stock cooler is not appropriate for the kind of heat this graphics card generates. There is being hot and there is not having appropriate cooling. This case is most certainly the latter.
My results, despite not having screenshots of it, were of:
- 80ºC idle (with the fan at 40% - which is the maximum I was willing to go noise-wise)
- 100ºC ++ load (with the fan at 80% and a deafening noise that even got my mom scared about it)
Now, while the card was most certainly designed with this sort of temperatures in mind, heat rarely does any good to electrical components. When we're talking about temperatures enough to make your kettle whistle, then you know you should do something about it.
I did.
Today, I bought the Accelero Twin Turbo and at first I was a little reluctant. I was afraid it was just going to be more of the same as the stock cooler, with little improvement. I couldn't have been more wrong. The installation is pretty straight-forward, although, to its own right, the RAM and voltage regulators heatsinks definitely could use more glue. With a little nudge I managed to remove one of the heatsinks so I am still wondering how they will hold up through time (literally).
This cooler packs quite a punch when compared to the stock cooler. It comes with two 80mm fans, attached to a massive aluminum block, which has a copper pipeline system that goes straight to the actual block that attaches to the GPU. Keep in mind that space may be an issue with this cooler; if you are going for CrossFire then think again about buying the Twin Turbo as your graphics card will use up THREE slots on the back of your computer case.
It is crazy, I know, but right now I have the same 40% setting on the fans (this cooler is pluggable to your graphics' card fan power supply) and I get a cool 33ºC . While gaming, it never goes above the 36ºC and that is with the very same 40% !
As far as noise goes, it can't even compare to the stock cooler, which is actually expectable. There is a trade-off between the size of a fan, the amount of air it can move per second and the noise in decibels it produces. Basically, with a bigger fan, you can move the same (or a bigger) amount of air with the same (or less) noise. These two fans are really silent, barely audible. If I push them to 100% then you actually start to hear them, but at 100% they are less audible than the single, stock fan, at 80%.
So if you still needed any proof that this is the cooler for you, look no further. This will solve ALL your temperature problems and I advocate that this graphics card should actually come with one of these coolers by default.