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that could be interesting

Interesting even more if Leopard implements the use of Windows APIs to allow users to run Windows programs without Windows.

Whoa.

MW: Property, as in your ar$e is mine. (Refering to M$ of course)

Intel has stated on more than one occasion that they hoped Apple would broaden their (Intel's) perspective, and that Apple hasn't disappointed.

My feeling is that if there is a marriage, of sorts, between Intel's Unified Interface technology, and MacOSX, the lead influencer of how it looks and operates will be MacOSX.

Running Windows software without windows is the atom bomb. If they could somehow make it so that it looks like an OSX app, then its all over.

Darth Avenous. reimpleneting windows API's (aka the linux wine project) is a massive undertaking and MSFT isn't going to license them to Apple. People who thin this is an easy thing to do are really out of touch of reality.

Just as I had suspected. Look for great things in 10.5!
Only God knows how I hate Windows.

Nice... doing web browsing and emails through a VM, that's pretty sweet! Reading emails in the VM, making it basically impossible for buffer overflows or script-kiddies to take over your machine, keeping address book and other information outside of that VM. Then when you reply or forward it transparently moves it to your host system and allows address book use, etc...

Same idea for web browsing... the browser could be running on a VM without any visual difference or speed hit, any buffer overflows or vulnerabilities can be kept insulated from your system.

Of course stupid people can always download and run trojans... there's no solution for that short of every application being signed by the OS vender, and we DON'T want to go down that road.

and MSFT isn't going to license them to Apple.

Apple already has Windows API's.

Anyway the Linux Wine project mimicks Windows API's, do you really think M$ would license their API's to the open source community?

Apple has had Mac OS X running on x86 based processors for years, who know what else they have been doing.

Kensfield Quad core Intel processor - Cinebench Multiple CPU score 1649

PowerMac G5 Quad (dual Dual Core 2.5) - only 1016

Apple has access to Windows pattens (XP APIs) for those years they shared access to each others pattens when Microsoft bought a bunch of Apple stock. That window has since ended (no new Vista API pattens), but Microsoft needs to remain backwards compitible, so XP APIs still work fine.

Can it be done, no idea. But it would be interesting.

How come this Intel patent "hints" at Apple's plans for Leopard? Yes, this adds potential but it implies nothing about Apple's intentions.

While this doesn't necessarily mean that Apple will use this technology it does go along the path that Apple has been following. They have pretty much gotten rid of just about every roadblock that people had with switching. Incompatibility (gone), price (gone), speed (gone), and windows runs slow in VPC (gone. Now they can possibly run just about any piece of software in the Mac OS. Steve has been working hard to make the Mac OS the most versatile OS and this would just be the next logical step. Seriously, the excuses for not switching would all be gone.

Regardless of the API situation, the Wine project has demonstrated that any attempt to reimplement Windows is misguided. The core problem is that Windows shouldn't have been implemented in the first place; it's a hodge-podge of interim measures with a lack of an intelligent overall structure.

The Vista effort has demonstrated that even Microsoft cannot implement Windows with any success any longer. The beast is too complex and lacks the modularity that comes with a good design philosophy. It's time to buy Windows, not repeat it.

er... BURY Windows, duh.

MegaMe: "Apple has access to Windows patten(t)s (XP APIs) for those years they shared access to each others patten(t)s when Microsoft bought a bunch of Apple stock. That window has since ended (no new Vista API pattens), but Microsoft needs to remain backwards compitible, so XP APIs still work fine."

Uh, no. Buying another companies stock does not give you rights to anything including patents, except perhaps in bankruptcy proceedings. Having your stock owned by another company doesn't give you rights to their holdings, even in bankruptcy. If there was any cross licensing done, it was done regardless of any stock transactions.

Fedex seems to be doing pretty well. I suppose because of Imac Shipments

OSXI

Btw., why does this site look so much like a Microsoft site? And what's with the text ads?

New desktop ideas. Look here!

http://honeybrown.ca/Pubs/BumpTop.html

@ Chris:

The Microsoft/Apple agreement specifically gave Apple access to technology within a certain timeframe. It's a fact that Apple had access to the Windows XP APIs. It remains to be seen whether they took advantage of that.

I can't imagine that they didn't.

MegaMe + Chris:

People, people!! The word is spelt: P A T E N T, patent... geddit?! My god, you've all got a dictionary sat at your fingertips through widgets. It ain't hard to check.

Oh, and by the way MegaMe, "compitible" is spelt compatible.

Schools.... what are they good for, really...!

absolutely nothin' ...say it say it again now

hard to unnerstan spelin eror when da wird is in da hedlyn of da artikul!

Notice to all.......... when tiger came out, there was multiple previews even before the prelude to the launch..... has Apple done any previews with this upcoming product??? NO!!... Why would you not preview a product, why be even more secretive about a product than you typically are???
We are going to see something that may or may not seem as big as it's eventually going to be.
Ånd also of importance is this, Put your copy of Pirates of Silicon Valley in, forward to the part where Jobs and Woz are with Captain crunch and Jobs says something like.... " It's like in those other countries where the Army guys overthrow the government and the first thing the do is take over the newspapers and phone lines, they take control over the way people communicate, information is power."
Now, how much control is Apple ultimately going to end up with over the way we communicate? I personally don't have a clue, but I do know that they have a giant start in the process.

late

Strange things are afoot at the Circle K.


Something big is coming.

Charlie,

The word is "S P E L L E D" not "SPELT." Get it? My God, you've got a dictionary at your fingertips, USE IT. Especially if you are gonna correct other peoples grammar errors.

How ambitious. Maybe instead Apple might, oh I don't know, fix the fucking Finder. If they can do that and add seamless virtualization then great, but for a company that can't even bother to fix the Zoom button, or the full disclosure feature, or implement real FTP functionality, I will remain, as ever, dubious.

And thanks, macaholic, that 3D desktop looks pretty promising. I still wonder about determining content, though. Unlike Clutter, documents like PDFs are harder to thumbnail and achieve some functional representation of the document's content. The demo looked a lot more reasonable when they demonstrated it with photos and larger web page snapshots but when dealing with a bunch of nondescript and similar icons, it becomes less functional (though still possibly better than the current paradigm).

Don't be silly, Trevor. "spelt" is a perfectly valid Britishism.

Trevor,

The phrase is "My Dog," not "My God." Use you unified desktop interface or get the hell out.

In normall UK English, 'spelt' is a common and accepted past tense and a past participle of 'spell'

UK and the USA - two counties seperated by one language.

I'm scared!

What we know now, may never come to use, if technology advances this quick.

Windows (win-DOH-z), n. A 32-bit extension and graphical shell to a 16-bit patch to an 8-bit operating system originally coded for a 4-bit microprocessor which was used in a PC built by a two bit company that couldn't stand one bit of competition.

MDN magic word: "word"

Glorified hardware bootloader for any virtual machine.. notice they dont say virtual OS.. lets boot into mame, or boot directly into an application, each app can have its own GUI and file system if you wanted it to.

as long as intel is supporting it, it will save apple some resources so they can concentrate on making the best os and handheld devices.

Woof-x, didn't want to offend a dog... I was just quoting Charlie's original post with "My God."

Wannabe, Britishism? Maybe, but in America I was taught "spelled."

No coverage of defective MacBook Pro batteries yet, MDN?

http://www.macfixit.com/article.php?story=20060622103345459

As someone who is vaguely familiar with what went on with the Microsoft purchase of Apple stock and many of the other deals between the two at the time (not all of which were made public), I'd like to know what patents people believe were cross licensed. Additionally, I'd like to know how cross licensing of patents (and this did happen to some extent, just not to the extent many people believe) means Apple got rights to the internals of Microsoft's Windows APIs.

True, the developer's side of those Windows APIs is somewhat defined and available to Apple (this being one of the core issues the EU has with Microsoft at the moment: Microsoft does not always properly document APIs for developers). However, Apple having access to the developer's side of APIs is NOT the same as knowing the proprietary information about the internal ways the Windows OS implements those APIs. If Apple has (or even had) all of that it would be almost as if Apple had access to Windows Source Code -- and you know Microsoft will never license the Windows Source Code to Apple.

To those grammar and spelling police officers in this forum. I game it up a long, long time ago. Proper, formal use of the English language is a dead art. I rarely find anything today that has more than a few hundred words strung together that does not have at least one glaring error. I'd wager there are extremely few here who know how to conjugate the pluperfect subjunctive form of an intransitive verb -- or even know what I mean by that. (Just for the record, I'm a physicist by training, not a grammarian.)

Trevor,

Spelt may not be American but it is english.

Get a real dictionary.

It should have been "gave" rather than "game". Stream of conciousness typing is not always accurate.

Well Trevor, in America we do use "spelled", but if you look in an American dictionary like Merriam-Webster you will find "spelt" listed as a British version.

If I read (listened via text-to-speech) the patent properly it seems Leopard will work neither like Bootcamp or Parallels.

It seems the Intel chip can run multiple OS's simultaneously and totally independently. Or you can have one OS (probably Leopard) as the Guest OS and the other virtual OS's windows show up and are controlled by the Guest OS. i.e. it seems to act like Citrix but better. Windows would run beside and independent (i.e. no viruses) to MacOS X, yet the Windows' windows would appear as Windows' windows within the MacOS X desktop. Plus they can share the graphics hardware, peripherals, etc but under Leopard's control.

Thus the is no either-or dual boot, nor a Windows desktop in a window, but the two at the same time, with the MacOS interface always present (except for Windows' windows) and in control.

That patent document will give me nightmares of VM 110 and VM 200, etc.

MW: 'basis' as in Apple has covered all the basis.

Just had a look at this bumptop video -- wow, what an amazing concept. I would love to have this integrated in the finder, maybe as an expose-like feature, which you can activate and deactivate ie. back to the normal finder.

Probably still a lot of quirks to sort out there, though (Where ARE the filenames? Where DO the application windows open?), but still would suite my messy style of working much more, I think...

Although, chances for something like this to turn up in Mac OS X are low -- remember, in the very first OS X demo, His Steveness initially didn't even want to allow us to put icons on the desktop. That changes in the public beta release after an outcry among the masses.

Oh, and it's spelt "spelt" as well as "spelled" - the internet is international, guys, and some of us are in the UK.

I meant "That *changed* in the public beta release..."

Better to correct my own mistakes quickly!!

Let's get the grammar trolls back on topic...

What about what Darth Avenus said in the second post? Enable mac OS X to run MS Windows programs without MS Windows?

I actually thought of something similar, but unfortunately this thread fell to the grammar trolls, and nobody else speculated further in the direction of what I was thinking. How about MS Windows as Classic? That is, MS Windows programs running like applications did in Classic (Mac OS 9.x).

How would that be possible? What would Boot Camp have to do with it?

The concept of Boot Camp would enable people to install MS Windows in a separate partition, and perhaps other operating systems. It's from this partition the MS Windows OS would be run from in virtualization mode, i.e. as a secondary OS. So, no MS Windows desktop and no Taskbar, hence no Start button or little programs next to the clock in the Taskbar: just the program window. That's all.

Perhaps actually provide a menu bar for when a MS Windows program is active. Obviously the MS Windows programs has it's own, so the menu bar in Mac OS X could potentially have that single menu from MS Windows name "Start". The only point would be to have a list of MS Windows programs, perhaps customized in a similar way as in the X11 app. Then you'd have a listing of just the apps you want. Then again, why not just have an MS Windows program in the Dock? Yeah, no menu bar needed...

You'd still need to have MS Windows and hence buy it separately, and potentially you could still boot up into MS Windows, just like you could with Classic. Drag and drop would work between MS Windows windows and Mac OS X's windows and desktop.

The main issue would be file access between the two partitions. On the surface, any sort of file access by MS Windows programs of the Mac OS X partition could make it vulnerable to the actions of MS Windows viruses. And yet, that may not be an issue if no other programs other than system programs and the programs you start up are allowed to run, then viruses could never start up. And potentially, viruses shouldn't get installed if the MS Windows partitioned is never booted and made use of. But then again, if it was easy then why isn't that done by MS Windows already? Must be more complicated than that...

However, there would be some potential drawbacks because of the restrictions, such as some programs not functioning fully if they have to do something that might need other resources. Ideally, allowing MS Windows programs access to files on the Mac partition would make it unnecessary to save files to the MS Windows partition. But if Spotlight traversed the partitions anyways, then it wouldn't really matter...

But if something like this becomes true, then we will potentially see the "Classic effect". The MS Windows programs will have the look and feel of MS Windows programs, i.e. they won't fit in visually and people will want the native version so it'll have the true look and feel of a Mac OS X app. Performance will take a slight hit during virtualization, not much but enough to be slightly irksome and nagging to not have to use virtual mode.

Another question: which MS Windows OS? If it initially only supports MS Windows XP, then that could discourage adoption of MS Windows Vista by people wanting to have a computer that would run both Mac OS X and MS Windows. MS Windows Vista may not even be necessary for any programs at that point in time since it won't have been released for very long, if at all yet, and older programs would work just fine. That's the basic "upgrade/don't upgrade" dilemma.

What kind of dynamics would happen with Microsoft and its OS from such a result? Probably more of a loss of home users than corporate users initially. And yet...


MDN word: seemed, as in "It seemed like a good idea at the time..."

To Shadowself: I know how to conjugate the pluperfect subjunctive form of an intransitive verb.. but uh.. I just can't quite remember.

It's been a good many years since I heard someone use THAT KIND OF LANGUAGE, young man.

Thomas, Darth and others -

The holy grail is for OS X to run Windows applications, Linux application, etc... within OS X, and not require installing Windows, Linux or any other OS on an OS X machine to run those OS specific applications.


This can be done, but there are some assumptions going on here:
1. Apple has Windows API's. This assumption is really a rumor - a rumor brought about by one journalist who claims inside information. Robert Cringley of PBS (AKA iCringley). While Bob is a great columnist and at times has had a solid track record on Apple, no one can substantiate any of this, or deny this. Thus, people are left to build speculation based on XP API's in the hands of Apple.

I have done the very same, and while it would be a shot right into the hull of Redmonds flagship OS, it is simply speculation and we should keep that in mind.

2. There is no two. The other theme going on is Boot Camp is a teaser to what will become a Parallels-like product built into OS X Leopard.

I would love to see #1 take place, but it would appear #2 is the more realistic road - a first step if you will.

If #1 is accurate, then this makes sense regarding the recent rumors of Apple working hard for developers to deliver a Unified XCode of sorts, allowing C+ types to compile Windows and OS X apps in one dev. environment - the same game as Universal building in XCode.

Doing this would destroy the no more OS X applications if a Mac can run Windows apps. theory. Rather, it would open up OS X to thousands of Windows-only developers with very little additional investment, which is totally counter to todays dev. reality.

~Steven

trevor
haha good one

"Running Windows software without windows is the atom bomb. If they could somehow make it so that it looks like an OSX app, then its all over."

Lets think about that.

You run Windows Apps, they look just like Mac OS X Apps.

Software companies love this idea, and produce only one kind of app, the Windows one, as it handily serves both markets.

An atom bomb yes, but directed against Native OS X Apps, not against Windows or Windows apps.

Native OS X software disappears. The vurtualization and OS X APIs become unneccesary baggage being carried along to run what would be only Windows apps on the system.

How does that end? Mac OS X becomes a Windows clone, or disappears in favor of Windows.

Unified desktop interface in OSX 11! If the patent was just applied for it will be sometime before it bares fruit.

>"It should have been "gave" rather than "game". Stream of conciousness typing is not always accurate."

No, spelling "gave" as "game" is always inaccurate. I call it holier-than-thou backpedaling.

Just for the record™, I'm a lowly beggar. Thanks for being so kind as to let us know you are a member of a privileged caste.

"Apple has had Mac OS X running on x86 based processors for years, who know what else they have been doing."

Are we going to repeat this line for every far-fetched rumor pulled out of someone's ass for all the rest of time?