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Intel Invests $218M in VMWare, Preparing for IPO
RulerOf writes "TechNewsWorld is carrying an article detailing that Intel has made an investment in VMWare for $218.5 million in anticipation of VMWare's imminent IPO. With an expected value of $23-25 a share, VMWare's IPO shows a value of $950 million. This investment brings Intel to an approximately 13% ownership of the EMC subsidiary, and helps to strengthen ties between the two companies. According to the article, 'VMware's virtualization platform runs on Intel architecture and most deployments of the tools are on systems using Intel chips.'"
VMware's association with intel brings to mind some questions related to Trusted Computing. Now setting aside whether or not you like trusted computing, it does enable some valuable applications so it's going to happen. Now is all the implementations I've seen described there is a progressive trust is creates as each layer of the os-middle-ware-applications-data validates the next layer is unaltered. And all this starts with some trusted boot loader.
it's difficult to see anyway that around not having this seed trust be in some piece of unalterable hardware. And even though they are not doing trusted computing I would specualte that apple puts in a few hardware doo-dads so the software can validate it's running on apple hardware. (they may not be taking advantage of this yet but I bet it's lurking).
So then since it's likely that intel will be making the trusted computing hardware, will they grant the ability to emulate the hardware to their VM?
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
Bootcamp is NOT like vmware...bootcamp is just a boot manager that lets the intel mac reboot into windows...it probably has some bios emulation stuff, but its no vmware. Vmware runs different virtual systems simultaenously....not just one at a time.
From http://www.apple.com/macosx/bootcamp/
Run Windows natively
Once you've completed Boot Camp, simply hold down the option key (that's the "alt" key for you longtime Windows users) at startup to choose between Mac OS X and Windows. After starting up, your Mac runs Windows natively just like a PC. Simply restart to come back to Mac.