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http://www.osnews.com/story.php/18982/Does...g-Capabilities/

On the Wine mailing list, there is some interesting information on Leopard's apparent ability to load basic Windows binaries. "When tracking down a crash in the kernel32 loader test, Dmitry found a bug in the Mac OS loader when Wine tried to load his dummy PE file. Upon further research I found that the Mac loader seems to have its own undocumented PE loader built in. I did some further testing with a Windows binary and got some really interesting results." The first thought was that this was a remnant from Mac OS X' EFI support, but upon further investigation, this really seems like new, Leopard-specific behaviour: "This is new to Leopard. On Tiger, dlopen rejects PE files as expected. The Wine testing that Steven was originally trying to do would probably not crash on Tiger." Apparently, Apple is trying its best to hide this behaviour.

 

Will this becomes something like X11 layer in OS X? :P

That would make a lot of people switch.

I doubt it. Since you can just do this with Parallels or VMware, the biggest reason for people not switching is that they just like the Windows environment better.

the biggest reason for people not switching is that they just like the Windows environment better.

 

No it isn't! How many zillion times must we argue this?

 

People stay with whatever OS came with their computer. Give a child a computer loaded with Linux and several nice games, and he will love it (personal experience).

As to Macs, people don't buy them because of one of the following reasons:

1)They have never heard of them (here in Italy 99% of the population).

2)If they have heard of Macs, outside of the US they are up to 50% more expensive, sometimes more, and people see computers as a tool like any other (thus, why should they spend more?)

That would make a lot of people switch.
That would make a lot of {censored} software developers go back to windows-only versions of their apps, which is more likely than lots of people switching to OS X. Look at IBM OS2's binary compatibility with Windows, eventually everyone just used windows instead.
2)If they have heard of Macs, outside of the US they are up to 50% more expensive, sometimes more, and people see computers as a tool like any other (thus, why should they spend more?)
Same reasons you spend more on a good car or chair: if it's something you use all day long for years, the extra money spent up front will pay off over time.
Same reasons you spend more on a good car or chair: if it's something you use all day long for years, the extra money spent up front will pay off over time.

 

People don't see a computer on the same level as a car. They see it on the same level as a fridge or a washing machine, and very few are willing to spend a lot more on such appliances. Anyway, you try to convince them. When I have said "Why don't you buy a a Mac", they have laughed at me, here in Europe.

The inclusion of something like wine/crossover at the system level in leo has been rumoured for over a year, so the discovery of indications that this might be happening is exciting news. (unlike the stale platform squabble it appears to have unleashed.)

 

 

It strikes me that apart from Apple's usual tendency towards secrecy, such functionality would have to be thought over very carefully to avoid it becoming a potential infection vector for virii

 

Another afterthought is that this might just be for bootcamp support..

 

Stay on topic, please.

The inclusion of something like wine/crossover at the system level in leo has been rumoured for over a year, so the discovery of indications that this might be happening is exciting news. (unlike the stale platform squabble it appears to have unleashed.)

Well.. exactly more than 2 years, well not in leopard but...

 

Red Box project? (Possibly a project by Apple to run Win software), Who knows?

It strikes me that apart from Apple's usual tendency towards secrecy, such functionality would have to be thought over very carefully to avoid it becoming a potential infection vector for virii

I don't know much about wine's innards, but wouldn't any malware/virus from a wine-run app only infect the app bundle itself (i.e. where all the DLLs/system files are kept)? I don't think it would provide much in the way of direct access to OS X, and even then there's still the unix security model that the virus probably wouldn't get past.

I don't know much about wine's innards, but wouldn't any malware/virus from a wine-run app only infect the app bundle itself (i.e. where all the DLLs/system files are kept)? I don't think it would provide much in the way of direct access to OS X, and even then there's still the unix security model that the virus probably wouldn't get past.

 

hmm, probably we shouldn't be so confident of that. Once it allows win32 pro to run on OS X, it may also allow the program to access disk or any other resources...

hmm, probably we shouldn't be so confident of that. Once it allows win32 pro to run on OS X, it may also allow the program to access disk or any other resources...

Right but I doubt it would be able to do anything disruptive like zeroing out your harddrive without prompting for an admin password first. Of course, that does nothing to protect your user directory which can get hosed without a password prompt.

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