For the purposes of work, I just installed Ubuntu 7.10 Linux on a Parallels virtual machine on my MacBook Pro.

For some strange reason this morning, the Ubuntu virtual disk was just going on and on, spinning away and responsiveness was near zero.

Running “top” showed that a daemon called trackerd was eating a bunch of CPU cycles.

A quick search on Google revealed that trackerd indexes your hard disk for quicker searches.

Does that sound familiar?

Anyone who has encountered Windows Vista would have seen that same problem: the total lack of responsiveness in the user interface while the hard disk chugs away.

One would think that the Linux folks are generally more “progressive” than the people at Redmond.

But nooooo! As they say:”Fools seldom differ”.

OS X Leopard also has the same problem.

I think the issue is that no one in a product development organization goes through the end-to-end experience of an average user. Usually, someone has a machine all set up and all he does is to plunk in new binaries and run them.

On the other hand, the average user has a brand new computer and has to go through all that initial set up (and indexing à la trackerd/Vista).

So development organizations have to sit at the place of the end user and really examine every step the user goes through. Only then will their products be really user friendly.

I am still waiting…

UC Berkeley is the birthplace of BSD Unix, a variation of which formed the original foundation of Apple’s OS X operating system for the Macintosh (and now the iPhone).

So it was very strange to be talking to the girl at the service counter in the Haas School of Business computer center and be told that I could not connect to any of the printers from a Macintosh: the computer center only supported Windows. This was notwithstanding the fact that the Mac is one of the most popular student computers out there.

Fortunately, I was all ready for this answer. So I whipped out my MacBook (that was pre-MacBook Pro upgrade) and asked the girl:”So which Windows? XP or Vista?”  And my mouse cursor was hovering excitedly between the Windows Vista or XP icons on my desktop.

“I have both Vista and XP,” I insisted, to the bafflement of the girl who probably had never heard of virtualization.

When she was finally convinced that I could magically transform a pedestrian MacBook to a Windows PC, she gave me a flyer with full instructions on how to connect (via Windows) to one of the printers in the computer center.

That was certainly a liberating experience: thanks to virtualization, I was no longer limited by my choice of operating system.