Month: February 2007

Parallels announced yesterday that Parallels Desktop is out of beta and now provides compatibility with Leopard and Vista.

But Crazy Apple Rumors Site has learned that the company has plans to expanded its product line-up beyond merely allowing Mac OS X and other platforms to run other operating systems in separate environments.

Parallels Desktop for Reality, expected to go into beta shortly, goes one step further, allowing separate bubble universes to form on any computer running Windows 2000, XP, Vista, Mac OS X, and releases of Linux that do not contain the word “foobar” in source-code comments.

Desktop for Reality uses the hypervisor feature of modern processors to tear small rents in the fabric of time and space, and then encapsulate those in a graphical user interface. Because processors can calculate at rates that allow relativistic effects to appear in each window’s frame (or window) of reference, time can be slowed or sped up within each bubble universe.

For instance, a Photoshop rendering operation that might take 100 years in regular time can be launched in a virtual window in which time is sped up to a factor of 100,000 relative to our own. While this would require a display that could handle 1024 by 1920 parsecs to display, Desktop for Reality can scale to fit. Also, sources warns that Photoshop images will be red-shifted or blue-shifted, depending on time dilation and the observer position in our universe, and require additional color correction.

Sources believe that its Incoherence mode will be used the most, however. In Incoherence, fundamental events in the computer history timeline can be modified before a bubble reality is launched. The beta comes preloaded with “Woz decides to keep building calculators for HP,” “Jeff Bezos was killed in that helicopter crash and replaced with a robot named Amazon Prime,” and “IBM buys MS-DOS outright from Ballmer, Gates, instead of licensing it.”

Preliminary release notes for the beta of Desktop for Reality say that side effects may include vertigo, nausea, and hallucinations due to the computer’s localized control over the creation of bubble universes and time flow, but only because they need to tweak the USB 2.0 drivers a bit further. They also warn that you should make sure and leave Ironic Outcome unchecked in the Edit menu, as it might result in you being trapped within a universe of your own making in which Mac OS X never existed.

Sources close to Apple revealed today that the Daylight Savings Time Update package for Tiger and Panther contain a special enhancement required for use of the upcoming Apple TV media adapter: February 2007, will have 63 days in it.

Due to Apple’s promise to deliver the Apple TV “in February, and their failure to have product ready by the traditional end of the month, which contains 28 days in years other than leap years, CEO Steve Jobs opted to manipulate the calendar for his purposes.

“Technically, by agreeing to our software licensing terms, Mac users also agree to be governed by the Stephorian calendar which, admittedly, is a term I just made up,” said Apple senior vice president for worldwide marketing, Phil Schiller, who asked to not be identified in association with this article.

“Under the conditions of that license, Apple can make arbitrary changes to the length of a second or a day, or change the length of months and years,” Schiller said.

“Actually, if you read it closely, we can pretty much do anything we want. I can’t believe you people just click through those things.

“A lot of our customers have been asking us for 30-hour days and 10-day weeks for a while. Yes, we know they were kidding, but it’s too late for jokes now, folks.”

Along with the 63-day February, the year following 2009 will be known as 200X, and Bill Gates’s birth date, along with the birth dates of all his children – but not Melinda, for some reason – will be removed from future Apple calendars.

Because the ubiquitous iPod also uses the same set of calendars, the changes are expected to gain immediate popularity. Linux users will be required to develop their own patches to conform to the Apple calendar. As Apple is unlikely to license the Stephorian calendar for Windows, users of that platform will soon be called “February 63rd Fools” and be forced to move to a small rural community in Indiana.

The Apple TV is schedule to ship by Feb. 63rd, unless further developments make the cancellation of summer necessary.