Slashdot Mirror
Hot Multi-OS Switching — Why Isn't It Everywhere?
First time accepted submitter recrudescence writes "Slashdot readers might remember the Touchbook announcement from Always Innovating stirring up a lot of excitement in the Slashdot community back in 2009 (almost a year before the iPad was announced and essentially killed this off, and way before the Asus Transformer, which is essentially the same idea). The company's new product seems to support Hot multi-OS switching, supposedly with a minimal performance penalty. What seems strange to me is, why haven't other developers jumped in on this already? Macs, for instance, made a huge campaign of their products' new ability to finally support Microsoft Windows, yet (disregarding emulation options) they're still limited to booting to a single working system at any time."
Some of us don't have the luxury of using only what we want. I get paid for helping my clients with their problems (normally Windows), not playing on my own system. sometimes I have to fire up Windows 7, or XP, or Server 2008 R2, or Fedora 14, while I enjoy working with Ubuntu or testing an "enthusiast" OS. Some on-line services STILL only work with Windows.
An OS is just a platform for apps. By itself, it doesn't do a whole lot. The apps are what's important. If I HAVE to run MS Office, then I have to run Windows. If I have to work on Oracle in Linux, then I need Red Hat.
I'm planning on putting either a bare-metal hypervisor, or thin Linux server, on my next laptop just so I can "Hot Multi-OS switch" according to my needs of the moment.
When you want something built, come see me. If you want correct grammar and spelling, get a F*ing liberal arts student.
Hell why not have two and pick the right tool for the job? I got myself one of the new EEE Brazos netbooks (highly recommend BTW, great performance and holds 8Gb of RAM) and one of the things that sold me on it is ExpressGate. With ExpressGate if all I want to do is surf, or chat, or listen to the tunes off my HDD I just push the EG button instead of the on button and in under 6 seconds I have a ChromeOS style net OS that adds about two hours on the battery, depending on what I'm doing.
On the other hand, if I want to fire up Audacity to do some editing? Or Word to work on a doc, or even fire up one of the games I picked up off of GOG? Hit the on button instead and I have Win 7 HP X64 waiting to do whatever I want. And the Brazos chip is a hell of a lot more like a CULV than an Atom, it is really snappy.
So why not have both? Hell you can fire up EG from within Win 7 if you want some "Yo dawg" OS in a OS style action. But it isn't like there aren't plenty of choices out there so in this case you can have your cake and eat it too.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.