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
TFA is infected with "Vibrant Media IntelliTxt" advertising hotlinks. Mouse carefully or browse with NoScript or something.
Welcome to the Panopticon. Used to be a prison, now it's your home.
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.
You're probably thinking of this article.
:)
Apparently, Device VM hadn't officially announced their technology yet, but now they have. More than enough reason for a dupe
I think you just have to submit a press release as a story.
If you haven't made a developer cry, you've wasted a day.
Splashtop sounds good, but TFA portrays it as requiring the user to pick between OSes at boot. That sucks if the user wants a fast boot and eventual access to all their "real" applications. Instead, I see more need for a light weight interim OS (a preOS??) that boots and lets the user do a few things while the main OS continues to boot in the background. Something like Splashtop could boot first, launch a couple of key "first-thing" apps (e.g. web with some morning news or email) and then transfer the session data to the main OS once it's up and running. After a minute (or whatever) Splashtop would crossfade to the main OS and decommission itself.
Of course, the real solution is stable instant-on low power modes (and OSes) that make the morning boot wholly obsolete.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
In Japan, they call it Bukkaketop.
OMG. Does anyone know how to recover a stolen account? I had a really low uid too.
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!
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.
Since I turned off automatic Windows updates I rarely worry about shutting down and rebooting.
I hope it has really good power management, because otherwise that's an extreme waste of energy.
It's funny how many slashdotters are posting to say that Windows sucks and boots slow, and of course the solution is to run Linux. I run Linux, but one of the things I'm least happy about is the horrible support for power management. None of the sleep, hibernate, etc., options work on my machine at all. I don't know the solution to the problem, either, because it sounds like the problem is basically that manufacturers refuse to openly document the registers that need to be saved when their devices go to sleep. If I had working power management, then I wouldn't need to shut down my computer so often, and I wouldn't care much what my boot times were. This is all much bigger issue on laptops, of course.
I believe one of the reasons Linux doesn't boot faster than it does is that there's a kernel feature that, for security, randomizes the addresses at which various code is loaded into memory each time you boot. This is supposed to protect against buffer overflows that jump to a fixed address in memory. The problem is that it means you can't speed up booting by simply caching an image of the initialized state of a lot of your memory in a freshly booted system.
I don't know about other people's Linux boxes, but on mine the time taken to start Gnome is comparable to the time it takes to boot into gdm. That's one of the reasons I run fluxbox rather then Gnome.
Find free books.
I run Linux, but one of the things I'm least happy about is the horrible support for power management. None of the sleep, hibernate, etc., options work on my machine at all.
I once had a problem with this, and decided to investigate.
So I went through the forums and found that the problem was that the manufacturer of the laptop supplies a dsdt table that does not follow the published standards for dsdt tables.
So I found a corrected table for my laptop and suspend/resume now works. But I was interested as to why a manufacturer would supply a DSDT that didnt follow the specs. And heres what I found:
So Microsoft create a complicated specification, probably taking care to leave out important implementation details. Then they ship a compiler for the specification that only checks parts of the specification used by their own software. And thats why Linux has issues with suspend/resume on some hardware.
Does any of this sound familiar?
**TODO** Steal someone elses sig.