Virtually amazing
Synchronicity. Not just an album by the Police, or a term from a long since over psychology lecture. Rather, a moment when a number of people arrive at the same moment with the same idea. No, silly, not when the train comes in.
I began this morning with a blogscan that brought up Microsoft Virtual PC would now be free (sort of) in order to go head to head-on in the market against VMWare. We’re about to commit some serious rackspace in the server room to virtual machines so I was interested. A comment mentioned that the Mac people had a similar product in Parallels, so off to reap that corn. Brought a print of the article to my neighbour who is moving to Mac in a very real sense.
About the same time, another neighbour showed up with his new download of Parallels, to see if we could virtually run XP on his new MacBook Pro. Sense the moment.
Well, the install of a virtual PC on a Mac went flawlessly; there’s even a workaround for the missing mouse button. The ability to “rotate” your desktop between two operating systems is a definite “Neat!”
So here we are. The race to be virtually all things to all users is underway in the office. I’ve downloaded a copy of VMWare for Linux to push things in that direction, and after the dust has settled (vacations are virtually dusty) we’ll see what has been synthesized, if not synchronized in our attempts to have/be/do some/all/no things at once.
