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Comment by timmorgan | Hacker News Reader

"The Spoon kernel is a lightweight implementation of core operating system APIs, including the filesystem, registry, process, and threading subsystems, completely implemented within the user-mode space, allowing Spoon apps to be executed without any device driver installation or administrative privileges."

Two thoughts:

1. Wow, I cannot imagine how much work it would be to fake all the necessary Windows APIs for this to work.

2. IT managers everywhere should be afraid. Very afraid.

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It look Wine almost 15 years to get to the 1.0 release.

Although to be fair to Wine they have had to build the entire stack - as far as I can see this only runs on Windows. Presumably emulating the Windows APIs on Windows is a lot easier than emulating them on a completely different underlying platform.

Still - it's pretty cool.

It's easier, and a pass-through model is not entirely new.

DEC's fx!32 emulator was running Windows x86 code on Windows Alpha way back in 1996. And yes, fx!32 passed calls through to native Windows code, too.

I remember having a PC emulator on a OSF/1 Alpha about 94 or so (SoftWindows?) - was perfectly usable.

Why should IT Managers fear this? From looking at their site it is very similar in concept to Citrix, which is already widely used. The browser plug-in is still needed so that provides some measure of control.

If people are able to install the browser plug-in then they could probably install the applications directly.

One of my clients is government-funded and can get into trouble if they have licensing issues with their software. Their employees, meanwhile, have a tendency to not fully review the EULAs for software they download. For that and other reasons, we're about to revoke admin privileges on their workstations.

This would pretty much circumvent that.

So, yeah. I can see how IT managers might not be looking forward to this. (But, that's their job.)

Can they install the plugin without admin rights?

allowing Spoon apps to be executed without any device driver installation or administrative privileges

Isn't this what Google was looking to do with their Chrome Frame for IE? Sounds like an acquisition may be in order.

Yep. Spoon wont last in the wild for long, if it actually delivers.

It's been around since 2007 (or earlier). They just renamed/bundled it.

See my longer comment further down this page for details.

"Virtual OS in the browser" sounds like the best business and consumer product. the stuff practically sells itself. If they haven't done much since 2007, I am left to wonder how well do they actually work.

No, Chrome Frame for IE is a way to swap out the rendering engine used by IE. It replaces the IE layout engine with Chrome's WebKit-based layout engine.

I think you're thinking of NaCL (http://code.google.com/p/nativeclient/)

In contrast, Google Frame is designed to make the deployment hassle for new browsers simpler (user still clicks on "The Internet").

I hadn't even considered the possibility that they implemented that part themselves. I just assumed they were using something like Crossover as part of their product. Now that is impressive.

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