Joined: Sun Oct 17, 2004 3:11 am Posts: 6822 Location: College Station, TX, USA Gender: Male
This probably works better than trying to run Windows on a Mac.
WARNING: BORING COMPUTER SCIENCE STUFF
For those who are unfamiliar with the concept here, there's two ways to run multiple operating systems on a single machine. One way is to install them to separate partitions of hard drive space, whether these partitions are on the same physical drive or not is immaterial.
The other way is to run a virtual machine. The key to making this work is that the virtual machine translates the commands from the virtual OS into the equivalent commands of the native OS, which in turn relays them to the processor, and vice versa. The obvious drawback here is that the increased overhead per command means that your OS runs slower. Also, the reliability of command translation depends on the quality of the virtual machine.
Fun Fact: Java actually runs on a virtual machine, which everyone here likely has installed and might not even know it. The upshot of this is that any compiled Java program can run on any machine, provided that host machine has the Java Virtual Machine installed. For other programming languages, you have to use a compiler specific to the operating system. The downside of this, like any virtual machine, is that Java is slow.
Joined: Sat Oct 16, 2004 10:51 pm Posts: 14534 Location: Mesa,AZ
ManiacalClown wrote:
This probably works better than trying to run Windows on a Mac.
WARNING: BORING COMPUTER SCIENCE STUFF
For those who are unfamiliar with the concept here, there's two ways to run multiple operating systems on a single machine. One way is to install them to separate partitions of hard drive space, whether these partitions are on the same physical drive or not is immaterial.
The other way is to run a virtual machine. The key to making this work is that the virtual machine translates the commands from the virtual OS into the equivalent commands of the native OS, which in turn relays them to the processor, and vice versa. The obvious drawback here is that the increased overhead per command means that your OS runs slower. Also, the reliability of command translation depends on the quality of the virtual machine.
Fun Fact: Java actually runs on a virtual machine, which everyone here likely has installed and might not even know it. The upshot of this is that any compiled Java program can run on any machine, provided that host machine has the Java Virtual Machine installed. For other programming languages, you have to use a compiler specific to the operating system. The downside of this, like any virtual machine, is that Java is slow.
We have actually made huge strides in virtualization. It's impossible to get rid of all of the overhead of course, but my Fedora VM actually runs fairly swiftly, and it's more than usable. Part of that, I'd guess, is that there is hardware-assisted virtualization, which I think takes the operating system out of part of the equation. Now it's not too uncommon for people to run three different SQL server VMs, for instance, on one machine in order to save hardware costs, which I think, personally, is a stupid idea. VMs really come in handy when you need a test environment, or you need isolation from the host OS.
I do wish I had VMWare, though, that's supposed to be leaps and bounds better than Microsoft Virtual PC. Unfortunately it costs $180 per desktop.
Another Virtual Machine that everybody has probably used in some form or another is .NET. All of your ASP.NET (.aspx) are run on a VM, and any .NET application is run on a VM.
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awesome....
