From The Labs: Parallels “28% Better” At Containing Stench of Evil than Fusion
The CANS labs have reached a shocking conclusion that may affect the outcome of the virtualization wars on the Mac.
According to our research, Parallels is 28% more effective than VMWare Fusion at keeping the stench of Windows evil out of your Mac OS.
“It’s well known that Windows exudes a certain amount of evil whenever it’s running,” said our lead testing ninja, “and you have to expect a certain amount of seepage. I mean, your Mac is sharing screen space, memory, audio channels, and everything else, so the Windows evil is soaking into your dock, your desktop picture, everything.”
Overall, we found that, after 100 hours of use, Fusion poured 250 units of evil into our test iMac, while only 180 units had spilled over from Parallels. VirtualBox was tested, but we really didn’t care about the outcome.
“We think it has something to do with the way each system handles its desktop integration,” our ninjas report. ”Parallels tries to contain elements in a simple ‘cohesion’, whereas Fusion seeks for real ‘unity’.”
Fortunately, there are ways that you can mitigate the effect of Windows evil when using virtualization technology. The first, of course, is to always run Windows in “single window” mode, so that the virtualizer will wrap a protective Cocoa frame around Windows. This also mitigates the evil spread by using a single mouse pointer between two operating systems.
“Never share cursors,” said Leo Laporte. ”A contaminated cursor can carry corrupted drivers, dirty files, anything. Be sure your cursor is free of Windows before use, every time.”
Other strong pollutants include Windows Media Player, Microsoft Office, and, of course, Internet Explorer.
“Basically, running Microsoft products that have perfectly acceptable Mac counterparts degrades the moral shield inherent in OSX and allows a greater flow of evil.”
“Internet Explorer is evil,” said Douglas Adams, who came back from the dead to contribute to this article.
When asked about the effects of running Linux in virtual machines, our lab ninjas simply stared. “Linux. In a virtual machine. On a Mac. Why? Why would we do that?”
Apple declined to comment, but was seen buying some E-Z Cleen™ Evil Remover after seeing the test results.
First!
I didn’t believe your story until I took another look at the chart. It’s damn clear when you see it in black and white. And green. Green is the wrong color for evil, by the way, unless maybe it’s puce or olive green.
Hey, could the lab add stats for Virtual PC also? That’s how I run XP on my G5 under Tiger.
Ooooh, bad news on Virtual PC. Since it is itself a Microsoft product, it sprays evil like some kind of frightened evil squid. the Lab Ninjas have given it an evil unit rating of 650. Sorry, man.
Also, the color on the bar chart is “Soul Paralyzing Green” (It’s not in the normal apple “crayon” color picker) and we felt it would work well.