Three's a crowd, so what's four?

2008-07-17

This must be desktop operating system geek heaven - but even as I say that I realise 'm missing out on a whole bunch of 'em. To the point, I have recently come into the possession of a MacBook Pro, which is running OSX 10.4. With that, I've got XP running in a (donated, thanks) VMware Fusion virtual machine - which runs like it's native. Meanwhile, on my old Samsung laptop I've gone for a dual boot with Ubuntu Hardy Heron on one partition, and (also donated, thanks too) Windows Vista on the other. What of Solaris or indeed OS/2, I hear you cry.

Its an interesting set-up. A key question is interoperability - which I define as, "Being able to do whatever I want on any platform, without seeing the joins." I think that's a bit different to the interoperability Microsoft keeps banging on about, which sometimes seems more about keeping the more evangelical chatterati at bay (incidentally, my suggestion was to ask the silent majority what they thought - I believe there's far less anti-Microsoft sentiment out there than some bloggers might imply). But the world of Mac interoperability is questionable - iTunes will only recognise iPods for example. Is it a problem? I honestly don't know - the slickness that the fanboys love so much is a consequence of a tighter control over hardware, and no doubt software specs. Balancing such usability with interoperability is an issue we see in the large in corporate IT shops, and it is no coincidence that CIOs often talk in terms of "One throat to choke." Thinking out loud: would 'proprietary' be such a bad thing, if it just worked?

But I digress. Just one last thing to do is to re-install Lilo, then I'm done.