Listening to: Hard To Beat - Hard-Fi

I used my Parallels installation in anger today (a bit of Windows server admin, SQL Server work and a touch of .Net web dev). What a magic concept! A really really powerful way of computing. Initially I was concerned about the performance issues… but given the vast majority of my windows work is glorified text editing development it doesn’t seem to cause too much of an issue… I have definitely had to used slower computers to develop software. The virtualisation technology works fabulously.

The most eye opening thing about this is how it completely commoditizes Windows. Need a Windows machine? Just flash it up and run it for the period you need it. Worried that you’re about to do something that will kill your Windows image (and this is the bit that will get interesting from a license/legal point of view) - copy the files that make up your Windows installation and install onto them. In this context Windows really becomes another app for MacOS X - another virtual machine (albeit very sophisticated) alongside all the others. Computers that run on computers… scary and very very powerful. I think the next few years are going to be a lot of fun.

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 10th, 2006 at 2:26 am and is filed under Software. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.