Slashdot Mirror
Startup Offers Instant-Boot Windows Alternative
Lucas123 writes "A Silicon Valley startup named Device VM has a product that circumvents the boot-up process, according to a story in MIT's Technology Review. Device VM recently released a tiny piece of software that gives users the option to boot either Windows or a faster, less-complex operating system called Splashtop. The company is partnering with PC OEMs and consumer electronics companies to integrate its core technology into desktops, notebooks, ultra-mobile PCs, and other devices."
How to get slashdot coverage if I have a startup?
Taking all bets here, folks! How long before Microsoft tries to do something to try to get PC companies to not have this in their systems? Anyone? Anyone? Bueller?
Living With a Nerd
Umm... ok, so I booted instantly into this thing... now what?
Don't get me wrong, the long boot times of XP annoy me (except when it's freshly installed), but I don't see how this helps, unless it provides for an instant boot INTO XP, I don't see how you'd get regular people interested or how it will help them.
Watch the Teaser Trailer for "The Lightning Thief" Her
Since I turned off automatic Windows updates I rarely worry about shutting down and rebooting. Of course the 3 or 4 times a year I do have to patch Windows it sucks plutonic balls to have to restart over and over to finalize the patches.
Calling this "Instant-Boot" is a bit of a stretch. What they are describing is just a dual-boot bootloader that gives the option of booting into Windows or into Linux (Splashtop is a trimmed-down Linux distribution). The 20 second boot time for Splashtop is decently fast, but hardly "instant", especially when you compare it to how fast some computers can recover from sleep or hibernate modes.
It seems moderately interesting, in the sense that some users might suddenly realize that all their computing needs are met by a lightweight (and Free) operating system. They might rarely boot into Windows. On the other hand, for many people this "fast boot" will just make using the computer more frustrating, since they will boot into Splashtop to get something done quickly, but then suddenly realize that they need another application (that they only have on their Windows partition), and then have to endure another, longer, boot (and re-open whatever webpage they were just looking at, etc.).
In short, the interesting thing here is the idea of pushing a dual-boot computer to the masses, and not an "instant on" computer.
This thing is quite the buzz. It was all-the-rage at CES in a few companies' product, memorably ASUS, which I believe calls it "Express Gate." I think that OEMs could clone this functionality quickly and package it up. It's just a very hardware-specific kernel running with just enough modules and libraries to run the applications. A quick build of the x86 version of Cross-LFS would yield a decent, small OS for a base. But, those Linux users who already tune their kernel generally don't have to wait the two minutes for Vista to start and think it's quick when the computer boots in 20 seconds. We tuners wait 30-40 seconds and we've got a full system. Splashtop users wait 20 seconds and have a reduced system.
Colin Dean Go a year without DRM
It's kind of silly, people moan about their bootup time, meanwhile they have 800,000 apps that all launch at boot and run in the system tray. I've never understood why it's so important to have instantaneous access to Quicktime movies, Word docs, or PDF files that it's worth having something running and sucking up resources all the time. Even OpenOffice is guilty, although their app is easier to get rid of than most. Turn off all that shit except for stuff you genuinely need, make sure you have adequate RAM for the OS you're running, and Windows boots plenty fast.
Excellent! Now I have something to boot to and surf microsoft's tech support site with when my Vista install inevitably goes bad!
I can't find anything useful about this product. XP boots quickly on my PC, though it can't match OSX or Debian in my experience. Still, I don't have to go away and put on some tea whilst waiting for it to get to the "Login" screen, and can't imagine why anyone would be so desperate to browse the internet or connect to Skype that they'd find "Splashtop" an interesting prospect.
Maybe you haven't stepped outside the university much, but most users have those apps boot at start-up because they don't know how to disable them (or worry they'll break something if they did).
Couple that with the persistence of certain vendors installing unnecessary applications into their taskbars (and as services) and of course there's a lot of cruft that could be cleaned up.
Quack, quack.
1>Submit a story And that's about it. If it has enough geek appeal, it will get posted. Hell, you could even try submitting it again a couple days later ;)
Well anytime Windows is acting unstable. Instead of being screwed and dead in the water. You can fire your computer back up this way. Amazingly enough. You could even use it to google out error messages to get Windows going again. Possibly even download a missing or damaged DLL? Or discover since all you do is facebook, hotmail, youtube and myspace. You don't really need Windows.
vi +