A better solution
Posted by Nick Loadholtes on 4/6/2006 filed in Apple, BloggingToday after seeing the millionth headline about Boot Camp, I had a thought: “What if instead of rebooting you could just do a virtual session to do your Windows apps?” Apparently I’m not the only to think this. I read on Gus’ blog that Parallels is releasing a VM for the Intel-Macs.
I think this is a great idea. It will allow potential converts to do their windows based work while staying in the Mac environment (i.e. not rebooting). I think that is a win-win situation for everyone (well, except Microsoft in the long run). My next thought was “Wow, it would be cool if this came integrated into OS X.” Again, I wasn’t the first one to think this up.
In keeping with my car analogy in yesterday’s post, I think an application like this would be the equivalent of hanging fuzzy dice from the rear view mirror. Goofy, but it can be removed quickly. 
April 7th, 2006 at 12:40 am
i think it is no trivial undertaking.. to build a VM for windows. it’s not a matter of biasing your attention to a few select APIs.. you must support everything. u never know when a client app might trip a mine calling a subroutine you neglected to implement. plus there’s so many versions of windows out there, with underdocumented or deprecated APIs littered about.. vestiges of the past orphanned by one too many service packs. the huge effort involved in building WINE Windows Emulator is testament to this. for similar reasons, i have doubts about the practicality of porting Microsoft .Net Framework to linux, as in the ROTOR project.
April 7th, 2006 at 8:06 am
True, but these VM’s are different than WINE, these are simulating the hardware, so the OS that is riding on top never comes into the equation. VMWare (which allows you to run other OSs from Windows) is an example of this.
These VMs simply make the new OS think that a computer has just booted up, and lets it do its thing. Its essentially running a computer inside of a computer. The big thing about this one is that now that the Macs are running on Intel chips, there isn’t a need to have a translation layer like there is for the Motorola chips. The end result (from what I’ve heard) is a faster VM experince.