How painless to transition to a Mac and run VMWare Fusion to access my Windows-Dependent Applications

I have just invested in an iMac, and I can tell you how easy it was for me to convert to it. Yes, there are a few things to get used to, but I can tell you that those transitions were painless. For those who are hard-core gamers, nothing beats a Windows XP box for the best games out there. So, the solution is simple: do a dual-boot system with the iMac.

The steps were painless:

1. Upon opening my iMac with OS X 10.5.6, I set up the partition with Boot Camp.
2. Installed XP on the Boot Camp Partition (to start the Boot Camp Partition, use the "Option" Key, very important)
3. Put the OS X DVD in to the SuperDrive, and the drivers automatically installed the drivers onto XP.
4. Booted in OS X, and purchased and installed VMWare Fusion (Parallels is an alternative)
5. Opened the Boot Camp Partition with VMWare Fusion.

Pretty simple. Now I have several ways of using the Boot Camp Partition:

1. For hard-core Windows games: Boot right into the Boot Camp Partition.
2. For other Windows-dependent applications: Use VMWare Fusion in Unity Mode to run my Windows Applications seamlessly on the Mac. (Parallels has a similar function called Coherence)

If I only knew this sooner, I would have transitioned earlier. My only dependent app is Adobe, so in my next upgrade, I am switching over, and I can say good-bye to Windows forever.

Why Silverlight will never conquer the Web World as Flash has.

It's funny how there are so many people out there that have a hate on Flash, and how Silverlight is touted to be the Flash-Killer. Yes, it's true that I am Pro-Flash. But I don't see how Silverlight can penetrate the market with the rich multimedia experience that Flash provides.

For those of you who do not know what SilverLight is, in a nutshell. It's Client-Side .NET Scripting. I cannot dispute that .NET is a widely accepted programming language, but there are huge problems with SilverLight.

Here is the reasons why Silverlight will never be widely adopted.

1. You have to accept the download. Why do I need to download something that should already be a part of the browser? No one knows what it is, so why do I need it. This is with most dynamic content, including Flash, but everytime I see this, I ignore it.
   
2. It is made by Microsoft. Think about this for a second. SilverLight directly is in conflict with it's own market. Do you think for a second that SilverLight would ever run on Linux better than it would run on Windows? Microsoft had the odacity to alienate their customers with the release of Vista, and I would never trust them with any future technologies. All they try to do is copy others. There is no originality with this company.
   
3. The Linux Version of SilverLight is called MoonLight: An open source development. If MoonLight is being developed by another developer, it is going to present the same problems as if you tried to develop javascript website. You have to consider the behavior of each of the browsers. They will never behave the same. If Microsoft chooses not to provide the source for other operating systems, then it's not going to behave the same. Furthermore, MoonLight is having problems with being able to use some .NET Trademarked technologies, that will be lacking in its release. This is huge problem, if you decide to release anything using SilverLight, and try to run it on another OS due to copyright of .NET Objects. Does a developer want to contend with having to tinker with the behavior of the presentation layer?
   
4. Conflict of Interest: If it did run better on Linux, wouldn't people be switching to Linux. This conflicts with Microsoft's aim at capturing OS market share. Because Microsoft makes an OS, other OS will have SilverLight behave differently than it would in Microsoft.

Flash on the other hand, would dare not alienate their web users (although support in the past has been lacking on low-market share OS's) and Adobe has no interest in creating their own OS, rather they have the daunting task to be able to serve Flash in as many Web Browsers as possible and to be consistent with its behavior. Because they control the Plug-in in each OS and Browser, they are able to provide the best behavior for their product. Furthermore, because of this fact, it is a dream to program in Flash, because it is truely "Write Once". Now with Adobe AIR being able to run on multiple platforms, this proves to be powerful, because now the OS is ubiquitous. You don't ever have to be held hostage to one operating system.