ENDIF

Continued from 'DOS Next?'….

Even if OS 10.5 ends up implementing nothing more than a cleaned-up version of today's Boot Camp (presumably also with some degree of official Windows tech support), I think Apple still has significant opportunity to improve on today's OS X interoperability with Microsoft-developed operating systems. For example, at the moment OS X can both read and write FAT32 partitions, but it treats NTFS-formatted media as read-only (Windows, by the way, can read OS X's HFS and HFS+ partitions via MediaFour's MacDrive). I mentioned earlier that FAT32 is one available option for a Boot Camp-created Windows partition, but it comes with some disadvantages: a 32 GByte maximum partition size, a 4 GByte maximum per-file size (particularly problematic with high-def and long-running video content) and minimal user access rights control, all of which NFTS fixes (along with making other improvements). I hope that Apple will fully support NTFS in OS 10.5, if not before.

And now I'm going to go way out on a limb. Apple periodically offers refurbished iPod minis for sale on its website, and I recently bought a bunch of them, both as gifts for friends and family, and for my wife (pink) and myself (blue). My CD collection is ripped to my NAS as 96 kbps WMA files, however; WMA is a format no iPod variant currently supports. I used EasyWMA to batch-transcode all 10,000+ WMA files to AAC (iTunes also offers built-in WMA-to-AAC transcoding), which worked quite well (although I wish the developer had integrated the multi-threaded version of ffmpeg, which would have sped the process considerably on my dual-G5 Power Mac). However, in converting WMA to AAC, I've lossy-compressed already-lossy-compressed files, which incrementally degrades their quality. I also now have redundant WMA and AAC files taking up space on my NAS.

Every iPod contains a PortalPlayer- or SigmaTel-designed CPU inside, all of which are capable of decoding WMA. It'd sure be nice if Apple would release a firmware upgrade that would unlock WMA playback capability on any/all iPods, and if iTunes would natively manage WMA files residing on Windows partitions. But, given that AAC (FairPlay DRM-inclusive or not) is key to the hardware 'lock' Apple puts on iTunes users, I'm not going to my breath on this particular aspiration coming true any time soon. Right now I can't even get WMA support on my iPod mini via iPodLinux or Rockbox, because the currently-available version of ffmpeg uses floating point routines that no iPod's CPU supports, and no one's yet developed a fixed point-only version of ffmpeg.

Enough wish-listing. Many folks thought industry pundit John Dvorak was crazy when, in mid-February, he suggested that Apple should dump OS X and embrace Windows. John didn't get the 'dump' part right, but he sure nailed 'embrace'. I don't particularly agree with his more recent prognostication that Apple's going to open-source OS X in order to compete with Linux but, hey, who knows? Virtualization is here, and the opportunities it affords aren't restricted to OS X. How do you think Apple's going to harness virtualization going forward, and how do you plan to do so in your designs?

Followup: On second thought, maybe that Apple-vs-Microsoft competition is a bit more heated (with commentary by Slashdot) than I had earlier implied And if you're interested in learning more about Boot Camp, give this ebook from O'Reilly a look.