Making the single box and multiple box disappear

I don't keep up with all the latest trends, breakthroughs and buzz in every corner of the industry.  Wish I could!    I've been a fan of Virtual PCs for quite awhile.  While they have their pain points they allow one to have a complete environment separate from the physical PC it runs on.  Virtual Server does the same for Servers (and you can run Virtual Server on a PC for those really complex environments from your client.)  Microsoft and VMware are the two leaders that I am aware of.

One of the things I've wanted was the ability to run virtualized applications on my physical machine.  To me, this comes in 2 flavors.  First, running just the window for an app from a remote connection instead of the whole desktop of that distant machine.  Second, launch an app in it's own virtualized instance so it's hardware needs are contained in that instance.  This would allow me to, for instance, run Ubuntu as my main OS, have a WinXP window open, a SQL window (from the server itself!) open, have any number of native Ubuntu windows open and so on.

Some of the items I've been reading on this include:

• Microsoft to bring Application Virtualization on servers
• VMware releases Workstation 6.5 private beta with Unity feature
• Working outside the box with Unity

Once this technology catches up to the mainstream, even if it is more on the bleeding edge of things, I can see many uses for it.  For instance, I could be at work and have an email app running, from home, on my work desktop.  This is, in it's own way, the other side of GRID computing technologies.  Instead of allowing the app to run across several machines, like Seti Search does, this will allow many separate apps from separate hardware instances to be displayed on one piece of glass.

Sounds like some exciting times are just around the corner!