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You don't have a clue what these VM's are, do you? It's VMWare or Virtual PC.

Now, times are different. Companies like Yahoo and especially Microsoft are aggressively investing in building the kinds of complex yet user-friendly search capabilities that Google has. Microsoft will soon have a search engine that rivals or exceeds the capabilities of Google's search engine. Google is doomed.

Internet-search tools is not the only market with a low barrier to entry. Another such market is the market for virtual machines. Consider the virtual machine monitor (VMM) sold by VM Ware. It did excellent marketing of a very simple idea -- and a very old idea. VMM was invented by IBM and has been around since the 1960s. The theory of VMM has been well documented and understood in the scientific literature. VMWare took the idea of VMM and simply applied it to the x86 chips. VMWare's genius is in marketing its product as though it were a revolutionary breakthrough. Most of its customers bought the marketing campaign with hook, line, and sinker.

Microsoft is now investing millions of dollars in VMMs and purchased the key VMM technologies from Connectix. Microsoft has succeeded in creating a VMM that rivals or exceeds the capabilities of the VMM sold by VMWare. VMWare is doomed.

Unlike both Google and VMWare, Microsoft has an R&D budget of billions of dollars. Microsoft can defeat both Google and VMWare in their respective markets. Despite public declarations to the contrary, both Google and VMWare are warily aware of Microsoft's R&D might and are working quickly towards an IPO while there is still chance for an IPO. If you buy stock in either Google or VMWare, you might as well just burn the money. It will be worthless.

... from the desk of the reporter

Not quite.

Windows could be ported to PPC, sure, but it still wouldn't run any of those programs which are only compiled for Intel. As you suggest, most people would just buy Windows/Intel anyway, since it's cheaper, so it makes no sense to develop for Windows/PPC.

It is possible to run Windows on an Mac today. I run Virtual PC on my iBook for those rare moments when I need to run Windows-only software. (Not very often). It runs with the performance of a Pentium II 400 MHz, approximately, and I assume one of those Dual G5's would do a pretty good job of emulating a low-end PC. :-)

Virtual PC is far more useful than a port of Windows to PPC could ever be, because it runs Intel software.

"Microsoft has updated their Mactopia Web Site to include a section on Virtual PC. It's taken them since February 2003 to do this.

Q: What is the duration of the transition period after this transaction?
A: The transition period is approximately six months from today (February 20, 2003).

I am also a professional programmer, so I can relate to your worries about development restrictions on a non-PC platform. I've been running VirtualPC on my second-hand TiBook for awhile now, and I can testify that it works quite well for PC development purposes.

On a 667 Mhz laptop, i can use visual studio without complaints. Yes, it's slower than it would be on a P4 notebook. Let me tell you why I don't care: optimization! ...I find I write better code on trailing-edge hardware, because any speed issues become extremely obvious where the same code would SEEM fine on my Athlon box.

But then again, maybe I'm a maniac. ;-)

Anyway, based on my experience, I'd suggest that you not rule Apple out yet... Unless you're doing hardware drivers or video games, the emulation won't be a huge issue... And the reliability and design on these laptops are almost everything the zealots say they are :-). Check out the Connectix web site if you're interested in more info.

That's why I only run Windows in a Virtual Machine... (the software for which Virtual PC happens to be owned by M$ double-d'oh!)... but is that my fault? $#!t! Does he have to buy^H^H^Hinfect everything?!

How about running Linux on Windows? Then maybe people would be more inclined to test the waters of the Linux world. Think of it as a way to migrate users off of the M$ titty.

Mac-on-linux looks cool and I'm keen to try it out, but is there anything that does the other way. i.e. Running Linux in a window on my Mac?

I don't know if there is a way to natively run a PPC Linux in a window within Mac OS X. I use Virtual PC to run an x86 Linux (Knoppix).

JP

I think it would be more accurate so say that Mac OS X is gay. It clearly wins in the fashion stakes, and expresses a strong preference for interfacing with others of the same type (which is not to say it won't interface with others...).

Mac OS X is a freaking slut! It'll do anything it can get its hands on.

File sharing? Sure -- straight NFS with Unix hosts; kinky SMB with Windows; AppleShare AFP with other Macs, even old ones. It'll even play with weird new tricks like WebDAV, and it can mount an FTP server as easily as mounting a local disk.

Executables? No problem. Trick it out with the right gender-bender, and it'll run Windows programs. Lots of Linux and Unix software just takes a recompile and a little teasing -- those perverts at Fink specialize in fitting Debian parts into OS X ports.

And then there's all the perverted things it'll do in emulation ...

Virtual PC on OS X runs Windows 2000 perfectly.

You should have got the PowerBook...

No super-computer runs Windows.

Actually, some personal supercomputers do run emulated Windows.

No large-scale database runs Windows.

No large-scale database runs Windows on the server side (except possibly for a few isolated MS SQL data centers), but most commercial database management systems have a Windows front end available, and a DBA may be listening to MP3s on the same machine he administers the database from.

No militaty flight simulator run Windows.

No "military" or no "United States military"? Rumors have gone around that the terrorists who performed the kamikaze attack on the World Trade Center had practiced the attack using Microsoft Flight Simulator. Who knows what other countries' air forces train on?

No bank runs it's federal transations on Windows.

But a lot of banks run the client side of the online banking applications on Windows. "IE only" anyone? Account holders buy records.

Sure, MS has most the desktop video-game market, most of the simple spread-sheet market and simple document creation market to itself - but nothing really of importance.

Importance? We're talking a band here. A band's job in the market is to produce recordings that a label publishes. The people who buy records are the people who play desktop video games, write spreadsheets, and create simple documents.

Enough, that they should have a .tar .

And rent twice the server space, when almost everybody who has GNU tar probably also has a copy of Info-ZIP's UnZip lying around?

They stopped selling a Red Hat Guest OS Pack well before the buyout was announced (someone I know found it missing in January but I think it went away in late Fall 2002). It's disappearance might still be tied to the buyout or they might have decided that it wasn't profitable (possibly because of how frequently Red Hat is updated compared to Windows).

The VPC for Windows Technical Reference PDFis still online and contains information about running various non Microsoft OS's. Even though it says "for Windows" almost everything applies to the Mac version as well because the emulated hardware is the same (yes, you can move virtual drive files between Mac and Windows versions of VPC).

The Connectix forum for VPC for Mac (as well as the one for Windows) also has a section dedicated to iscussing Linux/Unix as a Guest OS and another for "Other OSs." The forum moderators (I assume they work for Connectix) do participate in some discussions.

They stopped selling a Red Hat Guest OS Pack well before the buyout was announced (someone I know found it missing in January but I think it went away in late Fall 2002). It's disappearance might still be tied to the buyout or they might have decided that it wasn't profitable (possibly because of how frequently Red Hat is updated compared to Windows).

The VPC for Windows Technical Reference PDFis still online and contains information about running various non Microsoft OS's. Even though it says "for Windows" almost everything applies to the Mac version as well because the emulated hardware is the same (yes, you can move virtual drive files between Mac and Windows versions of VPC).

The Connectix forum for VPC for Mac (as well as the one for Windows) also has a section dedicated to iscussing Linux/Unix as a Guest OS and another for "Other OSs." The forum moderators (I assume they work for Connectix) do participate in some discussions.

Don't forget that OS X can also run XP apps.

Before Connectix, he worked at Apple as a Senior Software Engineer.

Per his resume, his work at Apple included " Researched, designed, and implemented second-generation 680x0 emulator for PowerPC-based Macintoshes. New emulator design involved "dynamic recompilation," or on-the-fly code translation, from 680x0 to PowerPC instruction sets. Implementation required extensive knowledge of both 680x0 and PowerPC architectures and optimizing compiler techniques. Several patents pending in the area of emulation."

I'm very interested in seeing whether he stays at Connectix or goes somewhere else. Like back to Apple.

Here's his resume. Connectix Executive bios are here.

This whole "two computers in one case! yay!" thing is tired. Move along, nothing to see here.

Ever tried their support ? They suck. I've been waiting over two months along with a host of others on their support forums for somebody from Connectix to answer a list of problems. They might read the forums but I'll be damned if they actually answer posts there.

See the forum pages at Connectix and read the tales of woe. I've got an HP printer whose software can crash the VPC repeatedly!

They happen to be two different companies...

VMware

Connectix

Not really a problem.

Go take a look at what's available for Macs these days, and then try to tell me that a machine/OS that can run M$ Office (though I prefer OpenOffice, even on Windoze) PLUS a ton of GNU stuff PLUS -- if you really realy need it a whole fookin PC or two.

I'm running Win2K Server (for SQL Server crap) and, just because I *can*: FreeBSD 5.0. Oh -- all at the same time.

I'm not one of those "creative" types, either -- I just wanted the best machine I could buy for getting stuff done, and after more than a decade of rolling my own PC hardware, I Switched(tm). Apple finally put something together that, taken as a whole, can't be matched on any other platform.

Does anyone know if Solaris 9 will run on Connectix Virtual PC and VMware?

You want a shred of evidence? Fine, have a look at the iPod's copyright screen. Big Pixo logo there.
Another shred? Here you can read about the iPod Pixo connection, too. And here.
But if you want more than a shred, why don't you have a look at the Pixo OS? Yep, looks like the iPod's OS. :)

interoperability. I agree with Knife_Edge that Apple is encouraging cross-platform interoperability.

• Apple includes a notable Java environment.
• Apple promotes (see the "Use the best tool for the job" heading) Virtual PC.
  
• fink
• Appleworks provides file-format interoperability with common Microsoft Office applications through the use of MacLinkPlus tools.

• Virtual PC (or VMWare or whatever), whereby various different OS installations are contained within their own virtual file systems (usually a single file of over three gig).
• Video capture, whereby raw footage from my digital camcorder is dumped down onto the hard drive ready to be edited. Those files can be pretty vast as well.

Cheers,
Ian

He could run Windows through Virtual PC but not for games. Connectix web site

...is some idiot to try to run Windows apps inside WINE running in Bochs under VMWare.

But what about Virtual PC?

And don't tell me you didn't all think the same thing as soon as you found out what Bochs was.

Actually, I must admit that I tried to run an OS that has been installed on another (physical) partition.

I wouldn't recommend Windows on any platform if you can get away with it, but Yellow Dog Linux is a perfectly decent linux operating system for the Mac. If you don't want to sacrafice your Apple-branded OS, Mac On Linux allows you to run Mac OS X inside Linux. For added variety, VirtualPC will allow you to run Windows under Mac OS X under Linux.

>I'd like to see this program offer a choice. Do you want a MacOS, M$, or some flavor of unix on your free laptop?

Yes. That's what they did.

They gave them a machine that does MacOS, M$, or some flavor of unix on your free laptop.

doofus.

Bochs?

It's slow enough that WinME complains it's too slow to install (or maybe I didn't configure it right). The only problem is that sometimes it might emulate things a little to fast (1 second on the host computer may equal 5 seconds in the emulation).

Somebody else suggested VMWare, which is ok, but I couldn't get the sound to work in DOS (and I'll know when it will work with my trusty must-have-a-sound-card-to-install game called Privateer 2).

Virtual PC is another PC emulation, but I haven't tried it yet.

if apple can do it

The Classic application environment is more of a virtualized native environment than it is emulation of hardware.

Carbon vs Cocoa, on the other hand, is like Winelib vs Qt, just a different toolkit to access the same underlying graphics system (Quartz or X11).

the onus isnt on the user to recompile

But if your proprietary software publisher refuses to recompile its application for your hardware platform, tough shit. One more reason for free software.

if apple can do it

The Classic application environment is more of a virtualized native environment than it is emulation of hardware.

Carbon vs Cocoa, on the other hand, is like Winelib vs Qt, just a different toolkit to access the same underlying graphics system (Quartz or X11).

the onus isnt on the user to recompile

But if your proprietary software publisher refuses to recompile its application for your hardware platform, tough shit. One more reason for free software.

I'll have to find a different distro now due to RedHat's stance on multimedia, but the princicple will stay the same. Don't want to pay for Windows? Fine. Don't use it then.

For the record I run two XP boxes - one desktop, one laptop - and a few different Linux distros courtesry of Virtual PC for Windows

Cheers,
Ian

No. But it runs faster on multiple CPUs when you're also running a dozen other processes, including Virtual PC, which itself is running another six or seven processes.

Cheers,
Ian

Maaaayyyyybe, they're just running an old version of this with this.

Well, you never know...

blocking Mac users

They are not blocking all users of Macintosh computers or Mac OS. A Mac user merely has to install Connectix Virtual PC, which comes bundled with Windows XP Professional OEM Edition. Buy it now for $250.

When Apple figure out how to get Windows apps working on MacOS (don't think it'll happen myself)

Connectix has already figured this out. Buy the Virtual PC 5 emulator for Mac OS.

There is BOCHS, but it emulates every x86 instruction, rather than being optimized for specifically running an OS. The developers (in the FAQ) do not recommended for the purpose you intend. I have not tried it.

Plex86 touts itself as *the* free (as in speech and beer) alternative. I have not tried this either.

Connectix makes Virtual PC, which is not free. I have not tried it.

Hmm. Now that's seriously disappointing - video encoding is what I mainly had in mind. That and a tiny amount of Photoshop - I can live without dual-CPU for that though, as my Photoshop usage isn't that high.

There are other things I do with it - I run various virtual machines using Virtual PC for Windows, and I like the isolation that running on a dual-cpu gives me. Even if the virtual machine starts chewing its way through my CPU power, it generally only starts massacring one at once, thus leaving my native OS and GUI nice and responsive. I'd be looking for a hyperthreaded machine to give me the same advantage. Does that sound likely?

Cheers,
Ian

Get a Mac. You can still run Linux and Windows and neither can cause catastrophic damage to your system. As a bonus, you get a pure UNIX system as opposed to a UNIX-like system.

File sharing companies are, at the very best, a dubious bunch. Experience has shown tht they will try to screw up your machine in some way.

So...let them. They'll find some way of doing it eventually anyway. The trick? Just make sure the 'machine' is a virtual machine. I personally use Virtual PC for Windows, but VMWare would do just as well.

Make a blank virtual machine, install your P2P clients on it and take a back-up of that file. Then use that machine for nothing but P2P. The result? Spyware is useless, because there's nothing happening to actually spy on. The machine gets too spyware-ridden? No problem - delete the current machine and restore from that fresh backup you took.

Cheers,
Ian

I quite agree, So lets do that :)

Wrong!!!

This isn't about gaining marketshare, this is about putting the screws to major developers who are dragging their feet (like Quark).

Apple's done this before with success. Remember USB? It came to the PC world first, but nobody moved on it because the PC manufacturers weren't getting rid of legacy ports, so peripheral manufacturers stayed on the "Most Compatible" route of PS/2 and Serial. It took Apple introducing USB-only iMacs to jump-start the USB peripheral market.

I mean, good grief, how long did it take the PC industry to drop 5 1/4" floppy drives? The 3.5" came out with the first Mac in 1984, and 10 years later PC's still had both drives. And the 3.5" drive is definitely a technology that has overstayed its welcome; but the fact that it continues to hang on means that suitable replacements took much longer to come to market.

It's good that Apple is driving their market, not just trying to make everything backwards-compatible until we have this overbloated OS running on overbloated hardware. Apple's got the balls to do what most of the PC world won't do. Believe it or not, the market will adapt; Apple has proven this.

Wanna run legacy DOS games? Drop a new hard drive in that old Pentium 233 you have laying around. Or buy VirtualPC for Windows. You've got options. But don't suggest that an entire sector of the tech market should slow progress because you want to play a "golden oldie".

Interesting stuff. Reminds me of some informal tests I did on my Mac OS system running the PC hardware environment emulator Virtual PC.

What I don't get from the article is why performance and compatibility is so poor, given that WINE is a virtual machine, according to its circular acronym ("WINE Is Not an Emulator"). Sounds like WINE doesn't link very well to the existing native hardware.

Based on these results I would suspect greater compatibility in Virtual PC (Windows or Macintosh version), although these emulators don't officially support many games since graphics acceleration isn't available in these games. Most of them should run in VPC, but slowly.

There must be a common link to all the games that don't run in WINE. I know that video acceleration isn't required for Diablo 2--so that's probably a starting point.

Jeez, Mac OS X doesn't have to boot into a M$ env to handle M$ apps. We either use the real thing or just boot Windows within Mac OS X. And if we are feeling really unproductive, we can also boot Linux x86 within Mac OS X.

...your loss I guess. OS X on a TiBook make a wonderful combo...

Well, there's trade-offs to every choice you make. Buy Windows to use all of the available software, and you open yourself to numerous security holes. Install Linux, and spend your time ranting about the lack of software. Buy a Mac and you have fewer hardware options available.

However, Mac has something that you won't find elsewhere... the ability to run OS X concurrently with any x86 OS natively on top of an x86 emulator. Linux has a clunky Windows emulator, and Windows has a clunky (now useless) Mac emulator, but only on a Mac could you run any actual PPC or x86 OS.

What about proprietary application software for Linux that is provided only as a binary for Intel x86 architecture?

well, you load up virtual pc and get to work.

thank you for playing, please make sure to try again.

File sharing is a dubious business at best, and most of the companies involved in it will try to manipulate your machine in one way or another.

So...let them. Let them prat about with your machine to their heart's content. Let them install all the spyware in the world. Let them share every file that's ever been placed on it. Just one thing - make sure it's not a real machine.

In other words, make use of the virtual machine programs kicking about. VMWare for most, Virtual PC in my case. Use that machine for nothing but running your P2P clients. No email, no web browsing, nothing. Just run your clients and enjoy. Let them spy on everything happening within that machine, because the only thing happening on that machine is the running of their own software.

Cheers,
Ian

This is where an application like Virtual PC comes into its own. I have a clean virtual machine, with W2K installed (and kept up to date with patches etc.), a few file sharing clients and nothing else whatsoever. This machine is never used. Instead, I make a copy of it and run that. Then, every couple of weeks or so after the adware has become unendurable, just delete the copy in use and replace it with a new copy from master.

Works perfectly. Spyware can try spying all it likes - I'm not using the machine for anything except use of their own networks, so there's nothing there for them to look at. Also, even if I am '0wn3d' through some obscure hack, it's only an isolated virtual machine and it'll only exist for a maximum of a week or two.

Cheers,
Ian