No, not Mountain Lion, though that’s kinda important, too. (Official Heathen rec: As with all major upgrades, wait 3-6 months.)

I mean the all-important question of “what virtualization platform to use?” Since the Mac platform migrated to Intel chips, it’s been possible to run Windows in a window at near-native speeds — I do it all day, even running SQL Server and IIS locally, with completely acceptable performance.

Now, your needs probably aren’t my needs, but few are the Mac folks who don’t have at least one Windows holdout program they can’t quite get rid of. (For my mom, it’s Quicken, for example.)

Up to now, the go-to options for non-techie types were VMWare Fusion, from a company that made its name on server-side virtualization in high-availability environments, and something called Parallels (no link; keep reading for why) from a company that just does Mac desktop virtualization. For me, that choice has always been pretty simple: Go with the guys who do this for a living on lots of levels. They know more.

Historically, Parallels has performed pretty well, too, and in some areas was actually better than Fusion (mostly graphics, which doesn’t matter to me). I generally gave no recommendation to folks beyond “pick whichever of these is on sale.”

That’s no longer true. Parallels, apparently, actively spams its users with in-app advertisements and sales pitches, and makes it very difficult to turn this off, even to the point of deleting messages on their support forums sharing the command line (!) required to do so.

Their statement on the subject is a cornucopia of weasel-words and bullshit:

We use in-product notifications to share several types of information with our customers. First, and most importantly, we share information about product updates which are generally related to compatibility with OS X, new features and product enhancements. Second, we occasionally share special offers from Parallels or other third party companies who provide special deals for our customers. Many of our customers rely on the information about product updates and appreciate the special deals for products that are of interest to them.

Individual notifications can be turned off by clicking the “don’t show this again” button. However, because customers need to receive important product information, there is not a mechanism for customers to completely disable notifications.

This, of course, is a lie; there IS a terminal command you can issue to disable it. That line is:

defaults write com.parallels.Parallels\ Desktop ProductPromo.ForcePromoOff -bool YES

Parallels isn’t shareware or freeware. It costs real money — typically about the same as Fusion, which is nearly a hundred bucks. It’s absolutely inexcusable that they’re insisting on this spamming behavior, and doubling down by (first) lying about the fact that it CAN be disabled and (second) trying to keep people from discovering this truth.

Do not buy Parallels. Send your dollars to VMWare. They’ve had plenty of time to address this; it’s clear this behavior is deliberate, and that they have no intentions of changing. Vote with your money.

(h/t: Fireball.)

Apparently, it’s possible on some Android devices to allow Facebook to take over and manage your address book based on your friends list.

Yeah, I know, right? What a HORRIBLE HORRIBLE IDEA.

If you reacted as I did, it should come as no surprise to you that this turned out to be a horrible, horrible idea.

Don’t outsource that kind of thing, people. Especially don’t outsource it to a “free” service that makes billions by selling information about you, and that has a financial motive to push you away from normal channels of communication and towards methods that rely on a private service.

Facebook will fuck you if you let them. Keep as little information there as you can, and don’t let them worm their way into other aspects of your life. It’s not worth it.

Hey Heathen! How do YOU use Facebook?

Glad you asked.

Lock down your profile

Only some friends can see my activity. I decided long ago that I’d accept requests from most people I know, or have known, but most of those distant connections go into a group that can neither see nor comment on any activity on my wall.

Sanitize the info in your profile

I keep essentially ZERO personal data in my profile. Not my job, not my real world address, etc.

Never use your Facebook login on other sites

This ought to be easy. Doing this gives Facebook access to all your activity on any site that uses your Facebook credentials. Seriously, don’t do this.

Use a dedicated browser

This is the biggie. I don’t go to Facebook with my regular browser. I use Chrome for most of my web activities, and I allow Chrome to store some limited login information about various sites. That makes my life easier. On the other hand, Chrome is also configured to explicitly block most ads as well as nearly all site-to-site tracking methods.

This means some sites won’t work right for me. I’m okay with that. When I run into a problem site, I switch over to Safari, which is set up with much more permissive settings — but it’s also set up to purge all local cookies and data every time I quit. Chrome runs for weeks at a time on my laptop, but Safari is quit and restarted every time I need it to protect my privacy.

Because Facebook is so craven and shameless about snooping on its members, I only ever visit Facebook with Safari.