Tag Archives: Oracle
Installing VirtualBox and Windows 10 on a Mac
Instructional video time!
I have created a video that walks you through the process of setting up Oracle’s VirtualBox hypervisor on a Mac, and using it to run Windows 10. In a window. On your Mac.
It sounds complicated, but it’s not. I explain it all in the video, however a hypervisor simply allows you to set up logical machines, each of which can run an operating system and act as a separate PC! You can have a machine running Windows, a machine running Linux, and even multiple machines each running a version of an OS (On my Mac, I have a machine running Windows 10, a machine running Windows 7, and a machine running Linux Mint, as you will see).
You can use VirtualBox on any OS, so you don’t have to use it just on a Mac. If you’ve always wanted to experiment with Linux and find out what the deal is, you can set up a VM and have at it! It’s insanely useful, not terribly difficult to set up, and free, so I encourage you to give it a try.
Links shown in video:
VirtualBox and extensions: https://www.virtualbox.org/
Download Windows 10: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/software-download/windows10ISO
Virtual Machines and My Time With Windows 10 (image heavy!)
As we all know, especially if you read the Windows 10 reveal post on this very blog, Microsoft recently announced that Windows 9 was going to be Windows 10. They skipped a whole number for various theorized reasons, but response to the new OS has been cautiously optimistic. This was helped by Microsoft’s standard practice of releasing an early build that people could download, install, and play with if they were so inclined.
It’s not an alpha release, in which the software is very early, very unstable, and only tested by people inside the company, it’s more closely related to a beta, which is a later, more refined but still buggy pre-release version tested by the public or outside testers/focus groups. Rather than call it either of those however, it’s what Microsoft labels a ‘Technical Preview,’ a current, non-optimized and incomplete yet generally functional version of the still-one-year-away Windows 10. It may have bugs, it may crash, it may behave erratically or unexpectedly, it may even destroy all your data, but you agree to take on that risk if you decide to download it and give it a try.
So of course I downloaded it!
But I’m aware of the risk, and I would never install it on a machine I actually use. Well, not quite anyway. I use what’s known as a ‘Virtual Machine,’ which is a simulation of dedicated hardware on other dedicated hardware. To put it more clearly, I installed it in its own little corner of my Mac.
News for Friday
A lot is going on today, so I thought I’d provide briefs of some of the bigger stories that are happening rather than three gargantuan posts. I’ll put those off until next week.
iPhone 6 finally becomes available
The first, and I suspect biggest, story of the day is that the iPhone 6 is finally being launched, and people are going crazy all over the world. Unfortunately, all that excitement can lead to some problems. For example, here is a video of a guy in Australia, the first person to buy one over there, dropping it on the concrete right after buying it.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YbehPQfu3K0
Then there’s the guy who decided to perform a drop test of the new phones immediately after buying them. Kids, please don’t try this at home.
Larry Ellison steps down
Larry Ellison, co-founder of business-software powerhouse Oracle and fifth-richest man in the world is stepping down from his executive position at the very company he co-founded. Although he hardly wants for money, there is some speculation as to why he is doing it and if the timing is significant; he’s 70, after all, but you’d never know it. He will stay on as the Chief Technology Officer, though, so it isn’t as though he’ll have no impact, in fact, he’ll better be able to steer future developments and change from the new position.
Larry Ellison
Toonotown Rewritten comes out of beta, opens for everyone
In mid-2003, Disney, wanting a piece of the online-gaming pie, released a kid-friendly yet surprisingly clever online game called Toontown Online. In the game, whose art direction and settings were based somewhat on the cartoon world of Who Framed Roger Rabbit, players created a humanoid, bipedal toon from a variety of animals (you could be a horse, monkey, cat, dog, that sort of thing), and went into the streets of Toontown to fight cogs. Cogs were black-and-white corporate stereotypes such as pencil-pushers, glad-handers, and micromanagers who were trying to turn Toontown corporate, convert all houses and shops into towering skyscrapers, and remove all of its color. Using gags such as throwing pies, squirting water from a flower, and dropping safes, players would have to defeat the cogs and return the color and the buildings to the town.
Toontown Online
Well, Disney being Disney, they shut it down in September of 2013 to focus on other ventures. What’s incredible here is that a team of 20 people located all over the world and led by a teenager in Maryland, recreated the whole thing, even made improvements, supplied their own servers, and are opening it up to the public today under the slightly new name of Toontown Rewritten, with no intent of ever charging for the experience. I’m surprised Disney didn’t quash it immediately, but they’re in a tough place. The whole project is such a labor of love that to do so would foster significant ill will, but I can’t help but think that if it becomes more and more popular they will be forced to step in in some manner.
