The Future of the OS Wars Oct 2, 2006
Today, your choice of operating system is a critical one; for tomorrow's computer it won't matter nearly as much. Rapidly improving virtualization technology allows you to run multiple OSs simultaneously on one computer as "virtual machines," each with its own selection of programs. In five or ten years, your choice of operating systems could become as mix-and-match as your choice of Web browsers is right now. One key factor driving that trend will be hardware innovations that make existing virtualization run smoother and faster. AMD and Intel are shipping CPUs with hardware support for virtualization. Apple's adoption of Intel CPUs points the way to a multi-OS future as well, and the company's BootCamp software permits dual-booting into Windows. Parallels virtualization software lets Macs simultaneously run Windows (and other OSs), much as VMWare and Xen do under Windows and Linux. One day, virtualization could free us to run any app in any OS, at any time. To unsubscribe send a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the subject unsubscribe. To change your subscription to digest mode or make any other changes, please visit the list home page at http://accessindia.org.in/mailman/listinfo/accessindia_accessindia.org.in
