Wired-"Who's Afraid of the Stevenote? Virtualization Developers Should Be"

[aanhorn]

There have been myriad rumors lately that Apple will unveil some sort of homegrown desktop virtualization solution at monday's WWDC keynote, as one of Leopard's "secret features".

new article today in Wired - http://blog.wired.com/monkeybites/2007/06/whos_afraid_of_.html

Apple has somewhat if a history of aping innovative software projects (Konfabulator, VirtueDesktops) and consequently dominating mindshare in those markets.

What do you guys think might happen on monday, and what do you think VMware and Parallels will do if Apple does indeed decide to enter the virtualization market? In my opinion, it would be a shame for Apple to squash these great software products, especially Fusion.

[Andreas_Masur]

Thanks to everyone for your support and enthusiasm for the

goodness that Fusion brings to Mac folks.

Well...this can actually be immediately redirected to you guys at VMware...keep up the good work.

Ciao, Andreas

[aliasme]

"Leopard brings a quicker way to switch between Mac OS X and Windows: Just choose the new Apple menu item “Restart in Windows.” Your Mac goes into “safe sleep” so that when you return, you’ll be right where you were. It’s much faster than restarting the computer each time."

Interesting - this was NOT covered in the keynote. How can VMware exploit this? Instant on for BootCamp partitions, instant switching into BootCamp, instant switch back to OSX and Fusion?

[HobbitFootAussi]

I think that would be near impossible since the VM won't be identical to the Bootcamp hardware. #1 the memory will be different since if you have 2GB of RAM in Bootcamp, you also only have 2GB in OS X and therefore less in VMWare.

[HobbitFootAussi]

One thing I found interesting. Parallels was shown with Coherence while VMWare was not shown with Unity. Obviously they didn't have time for that, but.

[admin]

"Leopard brings a quicker way to switch between Mac OS X and Windows: Just choose the new Apple menu item “Restart in Windows.” Your Mac goes into “safe sleep” so that when you return, you’ll be right where you were. It’s much faster than restarting the computer each time."

I'm curious how this works - is it essentially writing a suspend file ("safe sleep") for OS X and rebooting into Windows?

Interesting - this was NOT covered in the keynote. How can VMware exploit this? Instant on for BootCamp partitions, instant switching into BootCamp, instant switch back to OSX and Fusion?

What about this enables instant-on/switching? The "much faster than restarting the computer each time" could come from just the safe sleep file and skipping the OS X boot sequence. It might be interesting for a "Give BootCamp VM all resources" feature.

[admin]

They were showing Beta 3 (you can tell by the toolbar) and Vista, either of which would have precluded Unity. Beta 3 is understandable given the release timeframe, and Vista is probably because they wanted to show the most recent Windows. No intentional foul from my perspective.

[Andreas_Masur]

"Leopard brings a quicker way to switch between Mac

OS X and Windows: Just choose the new Apple menu item

“Restart in Windows.” Your Mac goes into “safe sleep”

so that when you return, you’ll be right where you

were. It’s much faster than restarting the computer

each time."

Interesting - this was NOT covered in the keynote.

How can VMware exploit this? Instant on for

BootCamp partitions, instant switching into

BootCamp, instant switch back to OSX and Fusion?

This was actually something nobody should have seen in the first place...

<quote=[url=http://www.macrumors.com/2007/06/12/leopard-and-boot-camp-faster-restarts/]MacRumors[/url]>

I have it on good report from someone attending WWDC that this feature has been nixed.

He mentioned this feature to the Apple BootCamp build engineer. Who responded that this feature will not be supported. The engineer then called the Apple BootCamp program manager who "freaked out". Within an hour it was removed from the website.

</quote>

Ciao, Andreas

[zetsurin]

This certainly doesn't concern me. I doubt I will be buying Leopard anyway. Everything I have seen just amounts to eye candy or something I can easy do with a free or near free tool. I put in my pre-order for VMWare for $39 already and even if Leopard did have virtualisation (doubtful) I would rather the VMWare route rather than buy an OS for a few pieces of visual candy.

And at any rate I think Apple actually need to be mindful of stepping on toes of their bigger third party software producers, as they could easily alienate them.

[aliasme]

I thought the same thing until I took time to watch all the videos on the leopard site and digested the new features. I can't wait to get my hands on it. Time Machine is brilliant --- transparent backup and document versioning that works, and Stacks will certainly help manage groups of related files. Those two features alone are worth the price IMHO.

[aanhorn]

For a lot of us there is no way we can resist buying Leopard, especially after waiting so long for it.

I'll be at the Leopard launch party with cash in hand.

[BostonFrank]

I find that, despite the fact that I'm very happy with Tiger, I too will be buying leopard immediately upon release. I've noticed with Mac OS releases that, even though they may not have true killer changes, they changes that they do have really improve the user experience. Often they are not really noticed until you hop on a machine with an older OS and all the new features that you immediately start to rely upon, are not there.

Time Machine, I think, is "the peoples' backup."

Message was edited by:

BostonFrank

[wingdo]

You're quite right BostonFrank. I can't really think of any great "killer" feature in Tiger or Panther for that matter (I don't use Expose nor the dashboard), but I'd not want to go back to Jaguar either. The user experience does indeed get better every time.

[Andreas_Masur]

You're quite right BostonFrank. I can't really think

of any great "killer" feature in Tiger or Panther for

that matter (I don't use Expose nor the dashboard),

but I'd not want to go back to Jaguar either. The

user experience does indeed get better every time.

Well...isn't it ironic that the keynote was rather unspectacular? Mac OS is already a top-notch operating system that does not really a whole lot ground work. That leaves it up to the fancy stuff they add over time...what I always find interesting is how they manage to implement all that fancy stuff without requiring a 400 GHz CPU, 5 billion RAM etc. as some other little operating system company does...

Right there is the difference between these two operating system...once you laid out the fundament correctly you have much easier ways to incorporate fancy stuff...well as long as the A20 gate is still there...everything is fine... :smileysilly:

Ciao, Andreas