On NPR’s news quiz show Wait Wait—Don’t Tell Me! last night, the host mentioned that Hu Jintao’s first stop in America was to visit Bill Gates, because “he wanted to see how an opaque totalitarian empire really works.” (quoting from memory)

Anyway, I recently posted about Boot Camp, the beta software from Apple which allows users with Intel-based Macs to dual-boot between Windows and Mac OS X. Many people think that is going to be pretty cool, especially since it is to be included in the next version of the OS, due around January.

However, according to Robert Cringely, technology columnist for PBS, it's going to be even better than that when the new OS comes out. In his column last week, he predicted the ability to run Windows Vista on top of OS X, so users have full access to both systems at the same time, ability to copy and paste between OSes, and so forth. After all, Apple has lots of experience with emulation on OS X. One major advantage of this for Windows users, he points out, is that you couldn't even begin to hack Vista’s security until you'd hacked your way through OS X’s security.

Cringely predicts that Apple will go after the business market by offering Macs with Vista bundled alongside OS X. Of course, idiot Mac-haters like John Dvorak immediately claimed that Apple plans to dump OS X altogether and just become another Windows OEM.

But in his latest column, Cringely goes even farther. Besides predicting a new kernel for the Unix underpinnings of OS X, to speed performance, he sees a bright future for Windows XP users on the Mac. He claims that Apple could implement the Microsoft API in the new OS, meaning that you could run XP applications on your Mac without even running Windows at all. No chancy upgrading to Vista—you know they never get it right the first year—no upgrading applications to Vista versions, greater security, and so forth and so on. And a really nice box to run all these programs.

It will be interesting, very very interesting, to see how this all shakes out….

While we’re on the subject of Windows Vista, a Windows columnist reviewing the latest builds says the new OS "has been an utter disaster. And it's not even out yet." When it finally comes out, he says in many ways it's not much more than warmed-over OS X Tiger (the current Mac OS which has been out over a year). The reviewer goes into detail about the litany of promises made and broken over the long, long history of what once was Longhorn, what was sure to be the final nail in the coffin of Mac OS and that pesky Unix thing, what’s it called? Linus or something? Ha!