04/18/2006: "I know you don't care..."

...but I called this!

I said to the guy in the Apple store (who, incidentally, had NO idea how bootCamp works) that a more realistic (and useful) technology for people like me would be one like VirtualPC, except better, because it wouldn't need to emulate the whole computer (like making a software version of the hardware to fool windows into running), it would only need to run Windows® as an application; taking advantage of the hardware already there. I couldnt' think of the word for it, but now I can, and it's Virtualization.

Here it is: http://www.macworld.com/news/2006/04/06/parallels/index.php

I actually heard about it a week ago, but couldn't find an article that summed it up so nicely.

Another really cool thing is that you can run multiple OSs at the same time, so I could, theoretically, run WindowsXP and Windows2000 and a couple of flavors of Linux at the same time...although that would be very RAM intensive.

So, a virtualized OS won't run as fast as a solo-OS, because, dude, Operating Systems are HUGE apps and require a lot of resources, some of which it will have to share with the other OS that is running as the principle OS, but it's supposed to be WAY faster than Virtual PC, which is what I use now to run Windows 2000 and IE6 for testing web sites.

So, for people like Jocie, who are looking for a Laptop and need Windows because the Real Estate Industry as a whole seem incapable of making anything based on open standards, so that even web sites require IE6 to run correctly, this could be a real solution. BootCamp into Windows at the office, and maybe once you get home, if you need to use IE6, virtualize it.

For me? That's all I'll do. I don't think you'll find me booting into Windows often. Although I would probably take advantage of a few PC-only pieces of software...like TiVO2Go...although it's unstable as hell.