Fusion
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2010 Ford Fusion features 8.5-inch touchscreen
We already saw a demo of the next-gen version of Ford Sync, but it looks like what we saw was just a taste -- our friends over at Autoblog scored some shots of the 2010 Ford Fusion's interior, and it features a monster 8.5-inch touchscreen, which will also apparently make it into the 2009 F-150 pickup truck. It's not clear how much the system will control or how much it'll cost, but you can bet it's not nearly as sweet as the 1979 Atari Riviera. Hit the read link for a couple full size shots.
VMware Fusion 2.0 Beta 1
VMware has just announced VMware Fusion 2.0 Beta 1, the first beta of the second iteration of their very successful virtualization product for the Mac. As you'll recall Fusion allows you to run a host of OSes on your Intel Mac including, but not limited to, many flavors of Windows.The above video gives you a tour of Fusion 2.0 Beta 1's top new features, including: Multiple monitor support (up to 10 displays!) Improved networking and printing Support for DirectX 9.0 Shader Model 2 (this is experimental, and it might not work on your Mac) A refined UI for settings and VM management And that's just the tip of the iceberg. The beta is available now, and best of all the upgrade to version 2.0, when it comes out of beta, will be free to all Fusion users. You can register for the beta program and download the hefty 300 MB installer here.
Slimming down Windows for virtualization or Boot Camp
What madness is this, a post about installing Windows? Well, actually, the folks over at VMware's Team Fusion link to this handy Lifehacker guide to trimming down Windows XP to the bare essentials. Obviously this is of interest to anybody running Windows on a Mac, particularly on a portable with limited hard drive space. So if you should find yourself needing to tread on the dark side (whether in Boot Camp, Parallels or Fusion), it's worth a look. Besides, as I always say, the less Windows the better. It's just a shame you have to build it yourself on a machine running Windows with the Windows utility nLite and can't simply download a pre-built virtual machine.
AMD talks specs on Fusion, continues to release nothing
At this point we've heard so much and seen so little of AMD's Fusion hybrid CPU / GPU chip that we're honestly starting to consider it vapor -- AMD first announced it in 2006, after all. Still, the company's VP of marketing chatted up PC World about new Fusion chips today, saying that a 45nm notebook-optimized version codenamed "Swift" based on the Phenom core would be the first off the line. That doesn't line up with the last roadmap we saw out of Sunnyvale, which had the first Fusion chip based on the workstation-class Bulldozer core, but hey, we'll let AMD say whatever it wants, just as long as see some actual chips sometime soon.
Show floor video: VMWare demos virtualization of Mac OS X Server
At a booth tucked away in an uncomfortable corner of the South Hall, VMware is showing a preview version of Fusion with virtualization for Mac OS X Server (on Apple host hardware only, naturally) running smoothly. We are heading back to VMware to get a more thorough video walkthrough of the app when the crowds thin a bit, but here's a little clip to whet your appetite (after the jump).
More info on Fusion's ioDrive, the PCIe card with massive flash storage
You may remember the lovable yet rascally ioDrive PCIe card from Fusion which we told you about back in the sun-drenched, salad days of September. Well, we've gotten a few more details on the "SAN in the palm of your hand," and we thought we'd share. As you'll recall, the card is meant to deliver very high, sustained read / write speeds, allowing the ioDrive to perform "nearly a thousand times faster than any existing disk drive." Well, the good folks at Fusion have now given the system a price -- the card starts at $2,400 -- and offered up some fresh info, like that the ioDrive is NAND flash-based, will support multiple terabytes of virtual memory, and has access rates on par with DRAM. Which is real fast. Hit the link for a lot more info, and don't be afraid to peruse the company's .pdf data sheet.
VMware Importer makes migrating from Parallels a snap
In our post yesterday on VMware Fusion 1.1 we mentioned that VMware had also included a beta of their new Importer application. However, after using it tonight, I thought it was worth a separate post of its own, because it makes migrating from Parallels to Fusion incredibly easy. The amazing thing is that I converted an old Parallels 2.5 WinXP VM which Parallel's 3 itself had not been able to import successfully!Basically, when you start the Importer it gives you a window in which to drop the Parallels .pvs file (just Win2000, WinXP, Win2003 Server or Vista at this time). It asks you where you want to save the new Virtual Machine and a few minutes later, boom it starts right up in Fusion -- no muss and no fuss. For me the amazing thing was that I had previously tried to import the same image into Parallels 3 and it failed. So basically the upshot is this: if you're running Parallels, but you'd like to give Fusion a try, the barrier to entry has now dropped to next to nothing (besides the hard drive space). I bought Parallels for my Intel Mac as soon as it was released,but given my experience with Fusion (especially with the downloadable appliances), I think VMware has a convert. I fully recommend giving it a try. The VMware Importer is a free download. It's also supplemented by the VMware convertor which will create an image of a working PC that can then be imported into Fusion as a VM.
VMware Fusion 1.1 released
Even though Leopard ships with Boot Camp, lots of Mac users still get their virtual groove on with VMware Fusion, and its super-slick window display tool Unity. Today VMware announced Fusion 1.1, an upgrade that sports some cool new features and improvements: As expected, the upgrade now supports Leopard Better 3D graphics via the "experimental support" for DirectX 9.0 Full Vista and XP support A beta version of VMware Importer, a tool that allows users to quickly import virtual machines (including Boot Camp) Overall better speed and performance All told, there are about 25 enhancements in Fusion 1.1. Pat Lee, VMware's senior product manager for Mac products, told me that this upgrade is "all about giving the user choice." He points out that the biggest advantage of Fusion over Boot Camp is the ability to access your Windows virtual machine on the fly. Lee says that, unlike Boot Camp, it's not necessary to shut down your Mac and reboot into Windows every time you want to get to a Windows app. Instead, just use the Unity tool to co-mingle your Windows and Mac apps right on the same screen. On the other hand, if dual-booting is your thing, you can always use Importer to create a virtual machine.The upgrade is free for existing customers. If you're ready to try it out for the first time, snag a free 30-day evaluation from the company Web site or purchase it for $59.99 with a $20 rebate (US only).
Nickelodeon's three new DMPs
It's not all just questionably-useful tween gear for Nickelodeon today -- the company is also releasing a line of DMPs that would be pretty tempting if they weren't festooned with giant pictures of The Naked Brothers Band and SpongeBob. The $40 SpongeBob player holds 500 MP3s and goes for 10 hours on the built-in rechargeable battery, while the $50 Fission Digital Music Player comes in SpongeBob and Naked Brothers varieties and features a motion-sensitive remix feature that allows you to tweak your tunes by shaking the player. The cream of the crop, though, is the $100 Fusion Digital Media Player (yeah, no hurried parents are ever going to confuse those names), which rocks a pretty nice QVGA screen with what appears to be fairly smooth video playback, 1GB of internal storage with SD expansion, and a selection of preloaded and downloadable games. Not bad -- except for the terrible, terrible shame. Check 'em all out -- including some hands-on shots -- in the gallery.%Gallery-7834%
Qwest picks up HTC S720 as "Fusion"
If our brief time with the GSM variant (the S710 Vox) is any indication, Qwest subscribers should be pretty freakin' stoked about this. The regional carrier has just picked up HTC's S720 Libra, the CDMA radioed version of the manufacturer's slide-out QWERTY smartphone rocking Windows Mobile 6 Standard. The naming is a little confusing -- Qwest calls it the "Fusion HTC 5800" -- but whatever they want to call it, it's pure gold by HTC and Windows Mobile standards. The spec sheet tells of a 2 megapixel cam, A2DP, microSD expansion, and EV-DO all packed into a pleasantly compact (we know from our experiences with the Vox) shell. Grab it now for two bills on contract.[Via Phone Scoop]
CNET Labs benchmarks Parallels and Fusion virtualization products
Whenever two options are presented, it is often a smart move to weight the pros and cons of each and make a decision based on your needs. If you need to push Windows in a virtualization environment, Daniel A. Begun at CNET Labs has benchmarked Windows Vista running in both Parallels Desktop and VMware Fusion. The short of the long? If you really need to push Windows, do it in Boot Camp if at all possible. If Boot Camp is out of the question, VMware Fusion was the winner in heavy duty, multimedia tasks by a landslide, due largely in part to its support of multiple core processors (Parallels, as of this writing, only supports one core per CPU). On the flip side, however, Parallels Desktop is the only virtualization product that supports 3D gaming right now, but as a Parallels owner, I'll still vouch for running your games in Windows via Boot Camp.At the end of the CNET Labs day, both apps still have their pros and cons. Begun hails Parallels Desktop for being the more usable and intuitive of the two (and during my initial tests of both before deciding to buy, I agreed), though I had a much easier time getting non-Windows OSes installed in VMware Fusion (to this day, Parallels Desktop still won't install Ubuntu, and I have received no response as to why). Still, the moral of this particular story is that if performance is at the very top of your virtualization shopping list, VMware Fusion is, at least for now, the reigning champion. Check Begun's full article for more details on the tests and how they were performed.
Dell collaborating with software makers on virtual PCs
Apparently, Dell is working with VMware (makers of Fusion) and SWsoft (the team behind Parallels) to develop new computers with virtualization features for a new line of the company's PCs. According to reports, Dell's chief technology officer Kevin Kettler confirmed the collaboration at the Linuxworld conference in San Francisco. The plans right now are for the systems to tackle virtual versions of Windows and Linux which could run in tandem on a user's machine, though when asked about support for Apple's OS X on the virtual PCs, Kettler said "I can't speculate on that," but went on to say "virtualization is very powerful. It's an environment that would allow many different operating systems to coexist. You can interpret that however you would like." So -- at least as far as we can tell -- not an out-and-out "no."[Via Pocket-lint]
VMware Fusion set for August 6th release
Running Windows is something that most people need to do at some point, that's a fact. Luckily for us Mac users running Windows on Intel Macs is much better than emulating Windows on PPC Macs (I still shudder when I think back to my Virtual PC days). This is because instead of having to emulate the processor architecture, as well as run the software, it is possible to 'virtualize' Windows on Intel Macs. This means that Windows runs in its own little space on your Mac's Intel chip (that's a gross over simplification, but you get the idea).My virtualization app of choice, VMware Fusion, is finally entering the home stretch of its beta. VMware told our friends at Ar Technica that the final version of Fusion will be available for purchase on August 6th for $79.99 (you can preorder it up until the 5th for $39.99). VMware Fusion builds on VMware's rock solid virtualization technology and wraps it up in a pretty Cocoa shell. Check out all Fusion's features here.
AMD updates roadmap: Barcelona "nearly here," all-new chips in 2010
AMD had itself a busy day today: not only did the European Commission file antitrust charges against Intel for interfering with AMD's business in Europe, the Sunnyvale company released an updated product roadmap at its annual analyst conference. With the quad-core Barcelona processor on track for an August launch, the company announced its next-gen mobile platform, "Puma," which will feature hybrid graphics support. Looking even farther ahead, AMD also announced some chips we won't see for a while yet: the all-new workstation- and server-oriented "Bulldozer" chip and mobile device "Bobcat" chip are scheduled to arrive sometime in 2010, and represent entirely new chip designs for the company. The hits didn't stop there, however: AMD's also announced its first Fusion integrated CPU / GPU chip, the "Falcon," which will use the Bulldozer core -- no word on what happened to Hawk or when we'll see this ship. Finally, the company answered speculation that it's looking to get out of the manufacturing game by saying that it's aiming for the "right balance" between in-house and outside fabrication, but that it's committed to its current existing mix through 2009. All in all, it looks like AMD has got some pretty ambitious plans for the future -- but will it be enough to hold off scrappy upstart Hynix? Tons more info, including all the slides, at the read link.[Thanks, Ryan]
Ask TUAW: iDVD, iTunes, Parallels and more
This week on Ask TUAW we've got a bunch of questions about iTunes, some prospective switcher questions about virtualization and personal finance packages, and an iDVD query. As always reader suggestions are most welcome and questions for next week should just be left in the comments. Now without further ado, let's turn to it...
Ford Fusion 999 fuel cell car goes for land speed record
While most of the world is wondering when the car industry as a whole is going to decide on a replacement for the combustion engine and stick to it, Ford's off trying to break land speed records. Ford has released details on a planned 200 MPH attempt for its new Ford Fusion Hydrogen 999 car, which would make it the fastest fuel cell car in the world. The car itself will be cooled through "ice bath cooling" because the front is sealed in order to keep the drag coefficient as low as possible: at this point we're going to transfer you to the Autoblog Green guys. They know a lot more than us about cars, and happen to have a comprehensive gallery of the Hydrogen 999, too.[Thanks, Omar]Read - Live shots of the Hydrogen 999Read - Hydrogen 999 land speed record attempt
Sonnet announces D400, D800 Fusion RAID storage systems
Sonnet's mainly popped up onto our radar for its various iPod accessories, but the company also has quite a few other products up its sleeve, to which it's now added a pair of new RAID storage systems. Boasting support for up to four and eight drives, respectively, the Sonnet Fusion D400 and D800 systems each come bundled with a PCI Express RAID host adapter, which will let you set 'em up in your choice of RAID 0, 1, 4, 5, 10, 50, or JBOD configurations. Fully loaded, the D800 will give you a maximum 6TB of storage, although you can just buy one empty and pop in additional drives as needed (or pop out, as it's fully hot-swappable). Look for it to set you back just over $2,000, with the D400 a comparative bargain at around $660.
VMWare pricing announced
VMWare offers the Windows-on-Mac alternative to Boot Camp and Parallels. This week at WWDC, they announced that their product Fusion will be shipping at the end of August 2007 for $79.99US (pre-order pricing is available at $39.99US for a single license). We've written about Fusion several times here at TUAW. VMWare recently released Beta 4 of Fusion, which product manager Pat Lee called the first "feature complete" version, though there may be another beta release before the final product ships in August.Remember when all we had was Virtual PC? Those were the (agonizing) days, my friends.[Via Infinite Loop]
VMware Fusion Beta 4 now available
Recall that very cool video we posted showing off VMware Fusion's new Unity feature? Now you can try it on your very own Mac. VMware Fusion Beta 4 has just been released and it includes Unity. It also includes: Better support for booting off of Boot Camp partitions Better performance UI tweaks Clearly the big ticket item is Unity, and I wonder if it is a cosmic coincidence that this beta was released on the same day that Apple released Boot Camp 1.3 and Parallels released Parallels Desktop for the Mac 3.0.VMware Fusion is free while in beta, and no release date has been specified.Thanks, Marcus.
VMware Fusion Beta 2 now available
VMware, the top banana in the virtualization market though relative new comer to the Mac, has just released Fusion Beta 2, their Mac virtualization client. Fusion, much like Parallels, allows you to run Windows (and many other operating systems) on your Mac just like you would any other application.Fusion Beta 2 adds some interesting features: Support for DirectX8.1 on Windows XP virtual machines (DirectX is Microsoft's APIs for multimedia applications, i.e. games that use graphics acceleration). Snapshots of virtual machines: take a snapshot of one of your virtual machines, and you can always recover to that point in time. Support for Vista (both 32 and 64-bit flavors) Much better networking: including seamless switching between Airport networks and support for up to 10 virtual network interfaces (very cool, if you ask me) All in all, Fusion is shaping up to be very nice, though they are still missing Coherence mode which is Parallels killer feature. The Fusion Beta 2 is free (while it is in beta).Update: It is true that Fusion Beta 2 is available now, but it was also available a few weeks ago! I am the victim of a poor memory and a tardy PR email. However, now is a good chance to check Fusion if you haven't (see how I saved this post from irrelevance? That's the mark of a pro blogger).
