Ace25 said:
Will this know open up our macs to the windows world of viruses??
The malicious code would need to be written specifically for OS X. By default, Windows XP does not natively read/write HFS+ partitions. Using something like MacDrive though, it does open up the possibility to inject OS X specific malicious code or do something nasty like deleting files on your Mac volume as you would not be protected by the usual OS X authentication methods while running under Windows. This is some of the known dangers of dual booting as opposed to virtualized solutions where things run in their own sandbox.
demallien said:
I haven't been able to discover if they've implemented the acceleration option available for QEMU when it's an Intel processor emulating an Intel processor. Anyone know if this has been done?
There is a virtualization module for QEmu called QVM86 (which will be a kernel extension for the universal binary of Q) being worked on which will replace the emulation code. Not really sure how far along that is coming but it should bring a nice speed boost.
IJ Reilly said:
I think better methods are coming along, including the BAMBIOS project, which would add complete BIOS support to an EFI system. Then, all you'd need is a standard XP install disk.
Exactly. The winning method is great as far as it being a proof of concept but it is still a hackjob and nowhere near a mainstream solution. This is basically just the starting point to something simpler and refined. For dual boot, I personally am looking forward to Amit Singh's BAMBIOS since they are striving for transparency which will work without a need to hack together an installation CD. While the blanka/narf bootloader is pretty nice, I'm hoping BAMBIOS comes up with something that is integrated with the current Mac volume chooser like
Clay's graphical boot volume chooser so that it shows up with the press of the option key.
Twenty1 said:
Am I the only one thinking that the MacBU at Microsoft should be paying a lot of attention to this? If I'm working on the Intel Virtual PC development team, I've just learned of a great way to install MS Windows on a Mac. I now just need to develop some sort of user friendly installation and I'm almost done.
They are but it is probably out of their hands. Originally during MacWorld, a marketing manager for the Mac BU was
quoted in eWeek (January 10) as saying, "We are committed to moving forward with Virtual PC". In
Microsoft's official Q&A though, that has been changed to "were working with Apple to figure out the best way to bring this technology to Intel-based Macs. Well have a better idea once we have the new machines and can accurately evaluate just what is required to transition the product.".
I believe the Mac BU were overruled at a higher level. Jim Allchin (who has a notorious dislike for that group) might have had something to do with it. There was also an
interview with him a few weeks later where he addressed Vista on Intel-based Mac's. The relevant parts is where he says they have no plans to bring Vista to the Mac and about Vista being targeted at the sizeable business market where Apple has no real presence. Microsoft is known for their paranoia and there might be some techno-politics involved to insure that Intel Mac's (while highly unlikely to be considered in many corporations anyway even if they could cleanly dual boot; which will be the only sanctioned way since many corporations will not want to invest time in training their people to learn OS X as people are already familiar with the way Windows works) sales don't accidently get a helping hand from them.
aegisdesign said:
I hope you can see why being able to run Windows applications at full speed is a bad thing for the Mac market in general. It may not be bad for users in the short term but in the medium to long term you want strong Mac development, even if it means that excludes the heavyweights from the Windows world. Many Mac only developers exist because the big Windows only companies don't bother with the Mac.
And this is where this same argument falls flat on its face. Before all of this Intel switch even happened, these developers saw no reason to develop for the Mac anyway. They had an exclusive PowerPC-based Mac OS X market to deal with as well. Yet many chose to stay out. Why? Because of that thing called marketshare. Neither did you hear developers telling potential customers to go and run their apps under Virtual PC for Mac.
So what has changed with moving to Intel? From the developer perspective, it is still a Mac. From a user perspective (for those who have a need to run Windows programs), the ability to run Windows programs is no longer going to be tied to slow emulation. Additionally, this trait opens up a whole new ballgame with regards to the way different markets look at the Mac platform as it will offer ways to legally run the two main consumer desktop operating systems on a single piece of hardware. This holds more relevance to the home market and niche business markets that are dual platform (where a single box has an economic impact by lowering hardware costs as well as expenses related to lowering that electricity bill). Within that realm is the potential to increase marketshare and part of that will depend on the solutions for running Windows on the Intel Mac (hack jobs naturally won't cut it which is why some of us are going to wait to see how BAMBIOS will turn out for dual booting). If the Mac market can grow, that provides developers a better metric for considering a native application. The dual boot/virtualization crowd is a smaller fraction of the overall market and software vendors like in the past aren't going to tell the non-technical customers to jump through hoops to run their programs in those environments.
