XP on MacTel is official: narf gets paid – Engadget:

XP on MacTel is official: narf gets paid
Posted Mar 16th 2006 3:30AM by Evan Blass

It’s over, done with, and the check is in the mail- literally. Colin Nederkoorn has just verified the solution that the now-famous narf and fellow programmer blanka came up with for dual-booting Windows XP and OS X on an Intel-powered Mac, and announced that all future donations to the project will be go towards the open-source work that will evolve from the contest. MacRumors is reporting that the winning methodology will be posted online shortly, and will supposedly work on the 17- and 20-inch iMacs, MacBook Pro, and new Mac Mini.

Fantastic!

This is a big step in one direction, for certain.  There’ve been times where this would’ve been really, really helpful, because sometimes, Virtual PC just doesn’t cut it.  VPC performs passably well, but dual booting will mean much better performance.  The big problem w/ it is that you have to stop everything you’re doing in one OS, save all your data, cancel any downloads, end any IM conversations, and then rebooot.

The other direction I’d like to have seen this contest take would be to pay for a WINE solution.  With WINE, the user can just launch Windows apps right from withinn OS X.
My brother Pete made an interesting point about a year ago, and that is that Windows, as an operating system, has lost all of it’s value.  What Microsoft DOES have, however, is the API that everyone wants to write to.  At this point, users no longer have to run the Windows operating system to run Windows apps, but w/ so much software written for the Windows API, it’ll always be around.  Giving me the choice to run Windows apps on OS X will provide further OS freedom w/o the inherent risks of running Microsoft’s operating systems.

Sweet ass sweet.