CYBERSPACE – With Apple’s unveiling of new, Intel processor-based Macs at last week’s Macworld Conference and Expo in San Francisco, speculation has taken hold that we’ll soon see Macs running Windows, even if Apple doesn’t support the possibility directly.Apple originally announced their plan to release Intel-based Macs last June, saying at the time that they would begin selling the Intel-powered Macs by summer of 2006. At the Expo last week, Apple CEO Steve Jobs unveiled two new Intel-equipped Macs; an iMac desktop and the MacBook notebook. The iMac is available now, and the MacBook will hit stores in February, according to Apple.

At the expo, Jobs said that the entire Mac line, including iBook notebooks and the Mac mini, will be available with Intel chips by the end of the year.

Although it’s technically possible to run Windows on the new Intel-based Macs, company officials make it clear you shouldn’t hold your breath waiting for Apple to introduce Macs designed to run the rival OS.

On the subject of running Windows on the new Macs, Apple manager Wiley Hodges said, “We haven’t done anything to explicitly prevent it, but we haven’t done anything to encourage it either.”

Analysts have also said it would be possible for users to not only run the OS X and Windows concurrently, but it’s conceivable they could run a third OS – Linux – simultaneously, as well.

“If we take this to its conclusion, you could have three OSes running on these machines at once,” Bruce Perens, vice president of SourceLabs, an open-source software and services company, told IDG News Service in an interview this week. “Only a geek would want to do it, but it would be fun.”

On the Microsoft side of the ledger, the software giant plans to release Windows Vista, the first major revision of the Windows OS in several years, this fall. Some critics have already begun to assail the new OS, even without having the benefit of actually seeing it – or, for that matter, using it – just yet.

Among the concerns in advance of Vista’s release is a search function which allows users to tag files with metadata; some analysts are concerned that this could lead to accidental disclosure of embarrassing or sensitive information on the part of companies whose employees use the OS.

In a report issued last month, analysts from Gartner claimed that Microsoft wasn’t paying sufficient attention to managing the descriptive data that users will be able to add to the files.

“This opens up the possibility of the inadvertent disclosure of this metadata to other users inside and outside of your organization,” Gartner analysts Michael Silver and Neil MacDonald wrote in their report published in December.

Since it’s up to the individual user what keywords they use, the Gartner analysts point out, the task of avoiding inappropriate keywords is entirely out of the company’s control. As an example, Silver and MacDonald offered a scenario in which a user might use “good customers” and “bad customers” as keywords to separate customers in a contract file. If such a contract were to be sent to the customer with the keyword attached, it could upset the customers, embarrass the company, or even lead to loss of business.

Microsoft says it will provide a simple metadata removal tool with Vista, but according to the Garter analysts, that’s just not good enough. “If I rely on the user to remove metadata, a lot of that metadata is inevitably going to get through,” Silver said in a recent interview. “It really needs to be automated.”

Michael Burk, a product manager for Windows Vista, said that Microsoft is concerned about user privacy and security, and said the company “has listened to our customers and is implementing the usage of metadata throughout the system to give users breakthrough ways of managing and searching for their files while protecting user privacy.”