Boot Camp, Again

Well, that will teach me to get some outpatient surgery the day Apple does something interesting, namely, releasing Boot Camp. I was going to write about it, but I see that Gruber over at Daring Fireball has pretty much said what I wanted to say. Thanks, John.

In short, Boot Camp will provide a checkbox for people ("Runs Windows") that may be worried about making a switch, but most of those people will happily end up using Mac OS X. Me, I'm pleased that when I buy an Intel-based Mac (maybe a laptop towards the end of this year, and possibly a new desktop next year), I'll be able to run any software I want on it, with only a reboot (and maybe not that, if Apple includes virtualization in Leopard). Will I get rid of the Dell minitower? Probably not. It's really useful for me to be able to use Dragon NaturallySpeaking for voice recognition to write on the Dell while taking screenshots on the Mac. And next year, I'll need a separate box to run Vista for the cross-platform books that I'll probably be writing.

Oh, and the surgery went fine. It was a lithotripsy to get rid of some kidney stones, which are now passing harmlessly out.

Michael S. Cox is a Spammer

Okay, everyone gets spam, and everyone hates spammers. But right now I'm really tee'd off at this guy: Michael S. Cox is a spammer. Follow that link to find out why.

Boot Camp

Apple announces Boot Camp:

More and more people are buying and loving Macs. To make this choice simply irresistible, Apple will include technology in the next major release of Mac OS X, Leopard, that lets you install and run the Windows XP operating system on your Mac. Called Boot Camp (for now), you can download a public beta today.

Later note: there's a FAQ here.

I'm in Tempe, but you can hear me here

Via Ajaxian, the podcast for the "Ajax: What You Need To Know" panel from SxSW is now up. I'm always amused the way that programmers call me a writer and writers call me a programmer.

I'm at a conference in Tempe, Arizona for the next few days, so if you want to hear from me, listening to the podcast is your best bet. What I'm doing here I'm not supposed to talk about, but let me just say that the person who told Guy Kawasaki to read Influence—Science and Practice is here, too. It's going to be a good conference.