One of mother earth’s true evolutionary oddities, the duck-billed platypus baffled scientists when it was first discovered by Europeans along Australia’s Eastern coast in the eighteenth century. While technically a mammal, the platypus lays eggs, sports a duck-like bill, spends much of its life in water and hides a venomous spur. In a way, the platypus is similar to one of the tech world’s true oddities: The Mac-toting Vista-lover. Seemingly a contradiction by nature, the Mac-toting Vista-lover (MtVl, for short) owns a Mac but exhibits a great deal of excitement when confronted with the prospect of running Vista on the Mac (a few recent studies have shed some light on this strange phenomenon).

Well, freaks of nature though you may be, someone out there has heeded your call. Paralells, makers of the Desktop that bears their name, have announced a public beta for release candidate 2 of the latest iteration of Paralells Desktop. In addition to fully supporting running Vista side-by-side with OS X, the new version will boast full-support for USB 2.0, CD/DVD burning within virtual machines, converting VMware/Virtual PC/Boot Camp drives and partitions to Paralells and better drag and drop functionality. Parallels will also boost the software’s coherence mode, which further blurs the line between Windows and OS X (not to mention, sanity and insanity). If this sounds like your bag, waddle that marsupial tail of yours over to the Paralells site to participate in the beta test.

For more on the Parallels beta:
– see this Engadget article
– or Paralells’s website