I’m not talking dual boot here, where you choose which operating system (OS) you want to run when the computer starts. I’m talking about working happily away in Linux, feeling a need to run a Windows application, then firing up XP in a window as though it were an application itself, and then running the Windows application there. When done, one can then shut down Windows or effectively alt+tab back to Linux.

How is this magic performed? Through the emergence of virtual machines. A virtual machine is a computer created entirely in software. Once you’ve created one on your desktop or notebook, you can then install any supported operating system on it, and run applications within it.

Here is a screen shot of Windows running in a virtual machine under Linux. The window manager being used here, WindowMaker, isn’t from by one of the standard, windowsy software developers like KDE or Gnome, but I like it.

The reverse is also an option — running XP and firing up Linux. While this seems a somewhat odd choice, eschewing the stability and security of Linux as the host OS in favour of an OS not noted for these qualities, it would be an interesting option for the Windows user wanting to try Linux without messing at all with their hardware. (If you’re interested in giving Linux a shot, there are a lot of distributions out there, but the most popular at the moment are Fedora and Ubuntu. I recommend the Kubuntu flavour of Ubuntu for Windows users, as it’s the most Windows-like.)

But first you have to create that virtual machine. For PCers, the software to use is VMware Workstation. It’s a bit pricey at $189.00, but the 30 day free trial is completely functional, and once it expires you can use the free VMplayer to continue to run any virtual machines you’ve created. At the moment, VMware does not support OS/X, so PC users can’t use it to create a virtual Mac (or are on their own if they try). VMware also has a free product, VMware Converter, which offers to “virtualize” an existing Windows install, but I haven’t tried it so won’t comment, other than to say it looks interesting.

Mac users are especially blessed in that they can use all operating system families that run on Intel/AMD processors, with OS/X as the host and virtual machines for the others. The software that performs the magic is called Parallels Desktop (cost, $79.99). It looks as though Parallels has released a product for the PC as well for $49.99, Parallels Workstation. I may give that a try. If the Parallels offering is as good as VMware Workstation, that could be bad news for the latter, though VMware still seems to regard developers, not home users, as its primary market. I get the impression that Parallels has a better appreciation of where this market is going.

Virtual machines are limited only by the hardware resources at hand. Each virtual machine eats a chunk of RAM and consumes CPU cycles. Until recently, that meant they were mostly used by software developers with enterprise level hardware to play with. But thanks to the ever increasing power of run-of-the-mill PCs, and, in the case of the Mac, Apple’s brilliant decision to go with multicore Intel processors, they’ve now become an option for ordinary mortals.

Microsoft, ever wary of potential threats to their monopoly, will not allow regular versions of Vista to be run on a virtual machine. Instead they require those wishing to do so to buy a special, more expensive version called Vista Uber Alles. (Okay, the real name is “Ultimate”.) Vista Business and Enterprise are allowed as well, though Enterprise is the really good one mere human beings can’t buy, and shouldn’t look for through, say, unlicensed channels like thepiratebay.org. It probably hasn’t been cracked yet, anyway.

My solution? Forget about Vista and run Windows 98SE, or 2000, or XP, ideally in the corporate version that doesn’t require activation. Again, don’t go looking for the corporate XP at a site like thepiratebay.org; if you do, the BSA will get you.

Friendly BSA Representative

While I am a die hard Linux user, I do acknowledge there are some things for which Windows is better — backing up DVDs, for example. Of course, the best Windows software for this can’t be downloaded from the developer’s sites since they’re afraid of corporate lawyer assassins, so you have to know how to look for it and not get infected with a lot of spyware/adware/trojans along the way. Which just reinforces my love of Linux, especially the culture. And now, not being able to run Windows software isn’t a problem. Because I can.

But it might not be long before I switch platform to Mac. OS/X, Linux, and Windows, all running on a single machine? Sweet.

- o -

I wrote in an earlier entry about Bill Gates actually becoming critical of some Digital Rights Management (more accurately known as Digital Restriction Management). Now Steve Jobs has joined in the criticism. Apparently iTunes has to have DRM because the record labels insist. It’s not Apple’s fault.

Too late? You already have data? Ok, then follow these 4 steps.

1. Never share or lose control of your data.
2. Become a multibillionaire.
3. Create a facility for launching things into the sun.
4. Launch your data into the sun.

Note that the above assumes no one develops a means of temporal snooping whereby they can look at your data in a time before you launched it.

Sadly, it is too late for many of us, as we’ve shared data and in some cases let it slip completely out of our control. And becoming a billionaire can be such a lot of work, especially if your parents weren’t billionaires.

Never regard data on the internet as ephemeral. Anything you cast out there may wash up in nooks and crannies where they will remain lodged until entropy is allowed to take its course. Google has copies of messages I posted to news groups in 1996. Their demise could be hastened by the obliteration of Google from the face of the earth, via direct hits with nuclear weapons on all its facilities. But somehow that doesn’t seem likely, so we shouldn’t count on it.

The Wayback Machine has copies of my web site from 1997. And do you know what is going on with your ISP’s hard drives? What do they back up, how many back ups do they keep, and for how long?

For that matter, what about your own hard drive? I hope that by now most people know that simply deleting a file from your hard drive doesn’t mean the data is gone. Most file systems simply delete your filename from the hard drive partition’s table of contents, effectively rendering the space the data occupies unprotected and therefore available to be overwritten. “Shredder” applications can be used to really delete the data, typically by overwriting it and thus making it harder, though still not impossible, to recover. However, the more difficult it becomes to recover data, the less likely anyone is going to want to expend the resources necessary to recover it. (Here’s an interesting video about recovering the data of the long dead.)

If you want to be really certain, and cannot afford the launch-into-the-sun strategy, do this: “shred,” then open up the drive, take out the pretty silver disks, and melt them. Or at the very least run a strong magnet over them, and then take a sledge hammer to them. Or if you aren’t that concerned and want to create a quantitative love letter, overwrite the entire content of the drive with the simple text “I love you” over and over again until there’s no space left, then remove the drive, remove the pretty silver disks, and present them to your beloved (you may need to boot a live linux cd if the operating system you usually use is on the drive being overwritten. I like Knoppix). For a bit of quality rather than mere quantity, fill the drive 14 times, each time with a different line from Shakespeare’s sonnet #18, or #29, or one of the other romantic ones (not the “give it up, babe, you’re not getting any younger” ones).

As for any stuff that’s already loose on the internet, there’s not a lot you can do. For future reference: when participating in anything that might hurt job, marriage, political, or other prospects, seriously consider using a false name or nickname.

It is possible to put a positive spin on all this. In the far future, maybe analysis of that post I made to a forum criticizing someone’s spelling of “lose” will help historians of language identify the transitional period during which “lose” acquired another o. There’s no longer any need to write a great novel; the immortality of each of us is assured by all the data that escapes our computers.

Sing, ye gods, the anger of us all, for countless spams that fill our in-boxes. Many a brave soul has attempted to filter them to a junk folder, only to have filters fail in the face of bogus text. And who is it who must bear the blame? It is the nephews, the brothers-in-law, the co-workers, the ones known as “good with Windows” who support clueless Windows users, for in so doing they also support the pestilence that plagues the people, because Windows was not born to be a networked operating system.

Or so Homer would have written had spam existed in his day. The Trojan War is nothing compared to the War on Spam, with its perpetual escalation of measure and countermeasure. When users attempted to use spam filters that worked by analyzing content, spammers added content to messages to make them appear more like non-spam to the filters. When blacklists threatened to block spam from spam sites, the spammers joined in league with the virus and trojan writers to subvert that most easily subvertible of operating systems, Windows, and turn compromised machines into spam servers.

There is plenty of blame to go around. We could go back to the early days of the design of the email protocols and blame their designers for not having enough foresight to build in spam resistance to the protocols themselves.

We could blame Microsoft for creating crappy operating systems, but if people wanted to pay us billions for our shit, which of us would not rejoice in every bowel movement?

We could blame the clueless users who buy and use the shit. But they are, by definition, clueless. Seeking to eradicate cluelessness could prove to be a thankless task.

No, the blame for the current situation must surely rest with those bright individuals who should know better, those nephews and brothers-in-law who aid and abet the clueless. Windows is not the only easy to use operating system anymore. Apple’s OS/X and Linux are both easy to use. Indeed, for some things, they are easier than Windows.

But no operating system is perfect. There will always be the occasional snag which will cause the clueless user to reach for the phone. Which operating system, then, from the clueless user’s perspective, is the best to use, given that they have absolutely no interest in learning for themselves how things work and how to fix them when they don’t work as they should? It is the operating system of the person they can call on the phone (or email — if the problem hasn’t precluded that option).

So it is you, you nephews and brothers-in-law and husbands of co-workers, who are facilitating the creation of massive bot-nets of compromised Windows machines, you who are not clueless yet commit the sin of settling for shit. Do everyone a favour and switch to a superior operating system, OS/X or Linux, it doesn’t matter, and then, when a clueless Windows user calls for help, be firm and say, “Wouldn’t know anything about that, I use Linux [or OS/X]. If you want to switch, I’d be happy to help you out.”

But if everyone stopped using Windows, wouldn’t the bad guys just focus more attention on Linux and OS/X thus continuing the problem? They could try, but there are technical reasons why Linux and OS/X are harder to subvert. Witness the popularity of the Apache web server which runs on many Linux machines — it outnumbers Microsoft’s web server, because it is much more secure by design.

Nine days long did they bring in great heaps wood, and on the morning of the tenth day with great rejoicing they laid their Windows CDs on the pile, and set the fire thereto. Then when the child of morning rosy-fingered dawn appeared on the eleventh day, the people again assembled, round the pyre of Windows. When they were got together, they first quenched the fire with wine wherever it was burning, and then gathered the ashes, loaded them in dump trucks, dumped them in a vast hole, which they covered over with large stones set close together. When they had heaped up a barrow they went back again into the city, and being well assembled they held high feast celebrating UNIX-like operating systems of all kinds from Apple, the BSDs, and the many blessed Linux distributions.

Thus, then, did they celebrate the funeral of Windows and all the evils it had spawned.

Sigh. One can dream.

I suppose the latter point could be considered something new. Until recently the push in microprocessors has been more speed. Why, I remember when the one gigahertz barrier was broken, way back about the time Mackenzie King made one of his lady friends a Senator. Then the two gigahertz barrier was broken shortly after the Stonewall Riots. Finally the three gigahertz barrier was broken about the time Geddy Lee was made an Officer of the Order of Canada. Since then increases in speed have been in small increments.

But speed isn’t everything. When Jean Pierre Lefebvre was working on the special effects for his film Les Fleurs Sauvages, he found uniprocessor computers much too slow rendering the frames he needed for the sequence where the flowers attack and destroy the town of La Tuque, Quebec. His solution was to use several computers, each with several processors, to do the rendering. This did nothing to increase the speed of the processor, of course, but he could have many processes going on at the same time which kept this special effects gem of Quebec cinema on schedule. Norman Jewison would later borrow these ideas and use them in his homage to Lefebvre, The Tulips that Ate Timmins.

Processor manufacturer Intel has taken it the next step and effectively put four processors onto a single chip; these are known as quad-core processors. It appears this is now the new area of competition. I predict that by the end of 2007 we will see octo-core processors. Will you need them if you don’t make movies featuring lots of special effects and animation? Probably not, though an old-school dual core processor is handy if you’re running a process which is particularly demanding of processor time — say, ripping a CD — as it leaves you a whole core to do other stuff with. With dual core you may not notice any slowdown in your computer’s performance, even when running a demanding process, As things progress you won’t have any choice anyway. Every computer for sale will have a multicore processor.

On the operating system front, I predict that 2007 will be the year of the Linux desktop. Ah ha ha ha ha ha! We Linux zealots say that every year! But seriously . . .

I predict that by the end of 2007, Windows XP installs will still outnumber Windows Vista installs, but not by much. Vista will overtake in 2008. There won’t be lineups for Vista the way there were during the Great Depression for Windows 95. Sure, it sounds funny now, lining up for Windows 95, but you have to remember that it was day traders using the even more unstable Windows 3.1 who caused the crash in ’29. Windows 95 was needed. Vista isn’t. All Vista really adds is more Digital Restriction Management (DRM) and some eye candy — if your computer is up to it. If you don’t have a fast processor and skookum graphics card you don’t even get the eye candy. Vista is apparently so evil that the Free Software Foundation has targeted it directly (indirectly they’ve always hated everything Microsoft) with their web site badvista.org.

So if it’s so bad, why do I predict its eventual takeover? Because it will be sold on new computers. Simple as that. As people retire their old machines, they’ll get Vista on the new ones and slowly Vista will take over by default. Mooooooooo. In time all Windows cattle get what they deserve.

But you’re not just one of the herd, right? For you there is good news. Apple OS/X on Intel. Under the hood, this OS is unixy enough to satisfy most hard core geeks, while on the surface Apple’s core competency at designing user interfaces shines. This is not the old Apple on which Allan Ginsberg repeatedly beat William S. Burroughs playing Missile Command. This is not the computer for that most oxy of morons, the “wealthy artist,” or for the kids on the short bus who would be confused by a mouse with more than one button. OS/X on Intel (yes, dual core Intel) is arguably the best desktop operating system in existence, and I predict that it will increase its share of the desktop market over 2007 to . . . oh, lets say 17.5%.

Okay, now back to the drinking. Here’s wishing you a very Happy New Year 2007. Cheers.