December 19, 2006
John Rizzo, former MacUser editor and publisher of the excellent Web site MacWindows has written an informative piece at MacCentral regarding some of the options for running Windows programs on a Mac. After writing a book in the early ’90s about Mac telecom that included a chapter on working with PCs, I actually started a more reference-oriented cross-platform site back in the mid-’90s with the domain xplat.com. I probably could have fetched something decent for that goofy domain name at an auction. Easy come…
In his article, unlike on his site, John doesn’t discuss Win32 API products such as CodeWeavers’ CrossOver. These don’t run Windows on a Mac, but do what most users would probably prefer, which is to run Windows programs on a Mac. However, he does mention an interesting option that will be offered with the VMWare technology for the Mac that will enable “appliances” — preinstalled Windows apps ready to run at nearly native speeds on Mac OS.
Apple has accurately juxtaposed the tradeoff among Boot Camp, virtualization products, and API-compatibility products as one that progressively sacrifice compatibility for convenience. It continues to stick with the most compatible approach in Boot Camp and must tread carefully in terms of supporting its native developers. However, I still think that, for most Mac users, virtualization technology is a better tradeoff than Boot Camp, and Apple would benefit by selling Macs with more RAM to accommodate two simultaneous operating systems.
Regardless, I don’t agree with the point that, “at some point in the not-too-distant future, most Macs—especially those in business and educational environments —will be running multiple operating systems.” Many? Sure. But not most unless Microsoft offers some aggressive pricing to Mac users
December 11, 2006
I just accepted an invitation to attend a session at CES about high-performance or, as the invitation puts it, “HD” audio. The invitation notes:
While MP3s offer convenience, the quality of the audio experience is greatly diminished. High-resolution audio — or HD Audio — heightens that experience and demonstrates that consumers need not sacrifice quality for convenience.
And so continues the home audio crowd’s self-defeating crusade against MP3. Instead of embracing this popular format that can produce very good audio at high bitrates and expanding its market, the high-end continues to cling to the compact disc and lament the failure of SACD and DVD-Audio.
Lossy audio compression is here for the foreseeable future; it’s part of the ATSC broadcast specification and it sounds fantastic. I’ve seen only one company that truly is combining “no compromise” digital audio with most of the flexibility of media-independence; Unfortunately, I doubt that more than five percent of consumers woud appreciate the quality advantage that uncompressed audio has over, say, WMA encoded at 256 KBit/sec.
Can you imagine if video vendors acted like this? “Oh, sure, MPEG-2 lets us put a whole movie on a DVD, but you don’t want the compromise of compressed video, do you?” To the contrary, DVD manufacturers are embracing new codecs like DiVX and Windows Media, while the Blu-Ray and HD-DVD camps are moving to even more efficient encoding schemes such as VC-1 and MPEG-4.
This strikes at the heart of a theme that I have turned to again and again in the past year – the need for consumer technology providers to strike a better balance between quality improvements that have traditionally driven industry growth and flexibility. Show me the benefit of these marginal (in terms of customer perception) quality improvements achieved with the same level of convenience that especially unprotected MP3 offers.
