The Battle for OS Supremacy

The Evil Empire has just recently announced the Beta 1 availability of the next generation operating system to replace Windows XP. Formerly code-named "Longhorn", it is now called Windows Vista and is set to be released by 2006.

What are we to expect from this but another batch of promises? Current reviews of Beta 1 have already been lukewarm. It seems that the only things that have changed are better icons and other eye-candy stuff, and some added searching features. Even IE7 looks almost exactly the same except for the tabbed browsing that they obviously got from Mozilla. As we speak.. hordes of internet users have been moving to Firefox because of security issues and the extra features. You would think that the Evil Empire would do more to combat this one right? Especially if you remember how they killed Netscape Navigator years ago when they bundled IE free of charge with their OS. I hear that there will be developments on Avalon and AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) on IE7 though, so that's something to look forward to.

There are rumors that the hardware requirement would need a minimum of 512 DRAM, standalone graphics card with DirectX 9.0, plus all the eye-candy will need a lot of juice from a fast processor. Another rumor is that the installer itself will need to run on a DVD drive, as Vista will not ship in CD format. Getting more and more demanding aren’t we? With Linux, my old x486 DX4 could still be used as a mail server!

The corporate monkeys from the Evil Empire did however promise that most of the "new" power features would be included in Beta 2. I'm not holding my breath for that.

This comes interestingly in time with news also that hackers have recently been able to find a way to bypass the chip that prevents Mac OS from running on non-Apple PCs, or your regular garden variety Intel/AMD processors (which is a helluva lot cheaper btw).

Everybody knows that Mac has recently made OSx86 available to developers. OSx86 is a Mac OS version that is supposed to run on Apple's next generation hardware called "MacIntels" which will run on Intel Processors instead of PowerPC processors. The significance of the hack is that it raises the question... "Are MacIntels really any different from the regular PCs?"

What is more surprising is that the tweaked version of OSx86 seems to run faster on regular PCs than the hardware it was meant for. Looks like Steve Jobs is in for a very important decision in the near future. Will they finally make the Mac OS commercially available for regular PCs? If so, then Apple will have to drop the HW and simply go OS only. So will we finally be able to have Macs for the price of a regular PC? Only time will tell, but this is certainly worth the wait.

Somewhere in the audience, a penguin is watching smiling...