Yeah, I'm in Australia too and I know a lot of people who have no idea what Linux, but I'm also noticing more non-geeks who do. I was recently asked by someone I know who used to use MACs and recently bought a PC to help him get Linux working because Vista sucks. This guy has always been a "I turn it on and it works" kind of guy and I have no idea where he heard of Linux. He's also the third non geek in the past two months to talk to me about putting Linux on their computer.
Come to think of it, all the people I know who have talked about Linux to me, as in they brought the subject up, in the past year are non-geeks. The geeks I know are either already using it or they are Windows users who still have the weird notion that Linux only has a CLI no matter how often they are told otherwise. So I'm definitely noticing it growing amongst non techs more than techs, but I'm also noticing that Dell still doesn't offer Linux notebooks
Back to this IBM push, I think it's a good idea, especially if they include Lotus Notes. It wouldn't be right if corporate desktops dropped Windows without replacing it with some other mind numbing torture. The whole corporate world is set up to torture people slowly while buying their complicity with the illusion that they are achieving something and a fantastic Linux desktop without something like Notes would eliminate the torture aspect. You can't have your cake and eat it too.
Microsoft is a single entity in one sense, but it is also a community, or a political organisation, if you will, comprised of lots of people with differing agendas and varying levels of "evilness". Adhering to a militant stance as a stated policy and assuming defiance as a fixed position is not just very lazy, it is short sighted, counter-productive and stupid.
Sure, it makes everything easy now. You don't have to think about what your "enemy" is doing, just reject everything as bad because it comes from Redmond - just like how anything that Muslims do is terrorism and anything the Jews did in central Europe in the 1930s was evil and subhuman. It actually doesn't help anyone though.
Microsoft can make public gestures of reconciliation and receive public rejection. This gives the wider community the impression that Microsoft is fair minded and willing to cooperate with others while the FOSS community are is some bigoted group of crackpot zealots. So Microsoft wins the battle for hearts and minds while the FOSS community, through a conscious choice of ignorance, loses. Pressure on Microsoft to share protocols and adhere to genuine open standards is diminished while the world of FOSS remains an obscure backwater.
Yeah, I've come across this approach personally many times, and it's never been successful for the militants in the long term. It tends to be one of those behaviour patterns that intelligent teenagers grow out of. Sometimes it's just the militants who lose, mostly it's everyone.
Of course if everyone was determined to adhere to a militant approach, I suggest marching in the streets wearing brown shirts as a good start to impress the general population and win supporters. Worked for Adolf.
If my car was recalled due to a fault by the manufacturer, I would expect them to collect the car, provide an equivalent vehicle while the fault is remedied and then deliver the car. My time is valuable and anyone wanting my custom should respect that.
One might offer to use vouchers to download songs and send an invoice for time and materials with penalty clauses for late payment. Most companies don't like it when people don't accept their offers to resolve claims because it means they are exposed to risk. If you have a legitimate claim, you really can apply some leverage. Accepting their first and cheapest offer isn't all that smart.
Do they pay you for the effort of having to repurchase the same songs? I wasn't silly enough to buy this DRM ladened shite, but if I was, I would insist that they not only offer me vouchers to buy the same songs, but that they also compensate me for my time in repurchasing the same songs. Or did they warn people that they would have to do maintenance on their music collections?
I run Vista Ultimate host & Ubuntu guest in seamless mode on my laptop and everything is still fast as hell!
I highly recommend swapping that around. I run a Vista guest on Ubuntu and it is really quick - for some reason the Vista boot time seems quicker in the VM (?) - and that gives me 3D acceleration for Ubuntu. It works out a bit better for me because the 3D desktop in Vista is pretty, but the 3D desktop on Ubuntu is highly functional and much more configurable. I'll take the form + function over just form any day.
It's also kinda cool running Vista in a root window and blowing peoples mind by doing regular windows stuff, then hitting some magic key combination to rotate a cube to a completely different system. Of course I have completely re-themed the Ubuntu system and installed emerald - rotating from vista to a turd invokes the wrong sort of "wow".
, it likely makes sense to lose a bit of power for the conversion from DC to high-voltage AC and not lose the power in the line.
I'm not an EE either, but I have practical experience of living in a house with 12VDC and 240VAC wiring with power generated from small scale hydro. We had a TV that ran on 12VDC or 240VAC which, before we had the inverter to provide 240VAC, used to switch itself off if it was plugged in to the furthest points from the batteries/regulator etc. The voltage drop on the line was enough to cause that, and we had invested in some fairly hefty cables to run the 12V system. Also, the power cupboard, with the batteries, etc, was almost as far from the place in the lounge where we wanted the TV.
I don't remember the efficiency of the inverter, but the fact that we had plenty of water in the creek and therefore plenty of power meant that the conversion was definitely worth it for us.
So, the outside of the heat sink would be copper or aluminum or something, and the inside would be some low-temperature metal like tin.
From what I can figure out of low temperature liquid metals, inside would probably be some gallium-tin alloy if it was to be non toxic. If so, the heat sink would need to be copper. Gallium eats through aluminium.
The easiest way to do a click-drag operation these days is for you and a buddy to each to flick the ignition switch (click) and burn (drag). Who ever is first to 10,000 ft wins! It ain't sensible, but it's a lot of fun!
What do you mean you don't have a rocket pack? It's the 21st century for crying out loud!
Web technologies/pages that only work with IE and Windows.
Time was when that was a very valid point. These days I find the number of sites that work really well in Firefox has increased to the point that IE only seems to be the exception, at least in pages I visit. I don't know if this is because OSX has been gaining market share and web sites are being developed to work on the lowest common denominator, so many web developers (as distinct from Frontpage/VS/Sharepoint devs) use Firefox as an integral part of the development platform or a bit of both.
I know in one six week job I had a few years ago, I got a corporate SOE changed from IE+OSX to Safari+OSX because IE 5.5 on the Mac couldn't do what the site required and MS had announced that they would no longer be releasing IE for Mac. That sent a few ripples out that changed some pre-conceived web development notions in that large organisation.
So if it is the increased OSX adoption I, as a Linux user, am thankful to MS for abandoning IE on OSX, Apple for committing to a standards based browser and the computer buying public for increasing Apples market share.
Exactly. give them what Jerry Pournelle calls "weapons of cultural mass destruction" and let those weapons do their job. Within a few years, either the Cuban government will lighten up, or the people will throw them out when they realize how much better their lives could be.
I have read a few of your comments in this thread and you, sir, are an idiot
But the interface is utterly asstastic compared to Windows or even OS X (and I hate OS X). It's borderline unusable for somebody who's not a guru and has grown up on Windows. I'm pretty knowledgeable about both Linux and Windows, and the weirdnesses of GNOME and KDE still leave me scratching my head.
Every thing you have to say on this issue is from the point of view of a developer with an MSDN subscription and you use Windows flavour of the day as a benchmark for how a UI should look and feel. That means that any other OS is going to look weird. KDE3 defaults to be the most like windows, so you hate it less than other systems, but I bet OSX leaves you scratching your head too.
A lot of IT professionals I know see my notebook and say "wow, that looks great" because the layout is good, the presentation is good. Sure sometimes the defaults suck, but theming is a matter of downloading a theme an dragging it into the appearance settings and a lot of windows users I know are jealous that theming is easier to manage and more stable out of the box than on windows.
Of course that means, with a lot of stuffing around, you can make gnome look and feel very much like windows. So given your criteria, you are completely correct. It does take a lot of work to get a Linux desktop working.
I kind of wanted to avoid the fanboi flamewar thing, but doing a comparison between any operating systems is going to see that happen on./
Both my father and mother now use Ubuntu. My father has been developing software since the late 60s, but in the last 20 years has worked predominantly with Microsoft stuff and my mother is the archetypal mum who has no clue about technology. She and my dad separated in the 70s by the way, so she hasn't really learned anything by osmosis. They both find Ubuntu simpler to use for day to day stuff "out of the box" than windows. Simple as that.
Applications are in a menu at the top grouped by functionality. System settings are in a menu called "System" and then divided into user specific and system wide stuff. Places on the file system are under "Places". The file system is not some bizzaar thing where the Desktop contains My Computer which contains weird things called "C:", "D:", etc, one of which contains the Desktop. That right there is something that I was always having to help my mum with on XP. She just didn't get it. She doesn't have the history of DOS, so she doesn't know or care about drive letters or the insane legacy that Microsoft is hanging on to.
My dad still uses windows in his A/V post production business because he is running professional software that has been windows only for a while. He uses Ubuntu for his general purpose office PC. Both prefer the Gnome UI to any of the windows desktops. His first install was Feisty Fawn, I think, and he comment on how the installation to a fraction of the time of a windows installation and everything just worked.
My wife, another non-tech, rates usability of the desktops she knows in this order, "Ubuntu", "Mac" then "Windows". I know a couple of PHB types who installed Ubuntu at home and said "wow, everything worked and i didn't need to feed in 5+ driver disks!"
Three to five years ago I might have agreed with you. Now, it is a very different story.
As for wine, I have it installed at home so I can run the games that came on a Shrek DVD I bought for my son - took me more time to fix the case insensitive mess that was the html navigation than to get the games working - a symptom of bad practice on the html developers part - but thankfully I had a powerful shell. Otherwise, I don't use it, so I can't comment there.
Yeah, one more reason I missed is that someone is a developer that is married to Windows development tools. But that's a given, why would anyone who develops in a Windows only tool for Windows use any other system for development? Makes now sense.
Are there really any (non game) apps by anyone other than Microsoft that won't work on Linux or don't have any equivalent method in Linux? The only software I have personally bought from MS in the last 7 years has been Vista included with my notebook and games for the xbox. If they released Visio for Linux, I might buy that.
Installing drivers on Linux is easy too. In most cases with the majority hardware and most good distros, you do nothing.
i converted to it from vista and i never get the spinning circle anymore. its just snappier.
So you spent probably more than the cost of the hardware for an average PC on an operating system to replace vista? Why do that? Linux is free and performs great on new hardware and old hardware alike. Considering modern Linux distros have UIs which are easier to use and more productive than windows (give windows users a few days adjustment, of course), the only reasons left for running Windows are legacy apps that only run on Windows, difficulty with drivers and games.
one thing to note, its kind of a bitch to get drivers working. vista drivers work fine but you'll have to open those driver installers with an archive utility, pull out the.inf driver files and manually install through device manager. although if you're installing windows server you probably can do that stuff no sweat. i highly recommend windows 2008
So from what you're saying, one of the arguments for running windows is out the window. Driver installation sucks, and sounds about the same as installing most tricky things on Linux these days. (my recent experience with a newer DVICO TV tuner and broadcom wireless come to mind). That leaves legacy apps and games, but then a lot of legacy apps don't work on newer versions of windows, so it's a safer bet to keep the old OS in a VM image or running on an old box.
That really just leaves games.
Therefore windows is now just a toy.
Windows Server 2008 is an extremely expensive toy.
Give it the Scrapheap Challenge treatment, combine it with an old CRT TV, a microwave oven and a generator to build a high-powered fossil fuel death ray!!!
You've got a guy on Blogspot going up against the large number of researchers at Intel who actually designed the chips, as well as researchers who can design and assemble supercomputers and are doing so with the belief that these chips are suitable. I wonder who wins.
History is absolutely full of people who don't follow the mainstream theory or have financial backing and end up creating the next mainstream theory which receives all of the financial backing.
History is also full of people such yourself, AC, who poor scorn on non-conformist ways of looking at things and end up looking like fools.
Maybe he has a point, maybe he hasn't, but whether or not he is in the mainstream has little or no bearing on the validity of his thought.
Good point. My understanding about the theoretical pre-history of continents only went as far back as Gondwana, which dates back roughly 500 million years and is a very different map to the one in TFA, so I had a look at this to refresh my memory and try to resolve conflicts. If TFA is true, then the continents really do shift pretty quickly and change direction a fair bit too, considering Australia started in the northern hemisphere according to TFA, went South to join Gondwana and is now heading North again.
But back to your point about how they knew what it was called, I have a related question. How do they know that Eastern Laurentia had crinkle cut coastlines like Canada? Weren't they formed by glacial activity? How does that happen at the equator?
Also, it wasn't clear to me from TFA whether the magnetic field lines conflict with this theory or support it. If they do conflict, how do we know that the distribution of isotopes isn't due to some other phenomenon?
I'm running Vista right now on the notebook I'm posting from, and it's quite quick. It has a 1.9GHz X2 AMD64 thing with 2 gibiwotsits of rambling. It does hang after I put the notebook to sleep, but the boot up time is really quick and the system is quite responsive. When I say the boot up time is quick, I mean from the time I tell VirtualBox to launch the VM under Linux, not from cold boot. Cold boot into Vista native on this thing took forever. I don't know what Innotek/Sun did, but it really does seem to load quicker in the VM than native.
Seriously, I recommend having a look at running Vista in VirtualBox on Linux if you only have a few windows apps you need to use. Then again, this sounds like a work machine and there may be issues.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, I'm in Australia too and I know a lot of people who have no idea what Linux, but I'm also noticing more non-geeks who do. I was recently asked by someone I know who used to use MACs and recently bought a PC to help him get Linux working because Vista sucks. This guy has always been a "I turn it on and it works" kind of guy and I have no idea where he heard of Linux. He's also the third non geek in the past two months to talk to me about putting Linux on their computer.
Come to think of it, all the people I know who have talked about Linux to me, as in they brought the subject up, in the past year are non-geeks. The geeks I know are either already using it or they are Windows users who still have the weird notion that Linux only has a CLI no matter how often they are told otherwise. So I'm definitely noticing it growing amongst non techs more than techs, but I'm also noticing that Dell still doesn't offer Linux notebooks
Back to this IBM push, I think it's a good idea, especially if they include Lotus Notes. It wouldn't be right if corporate desktops dropped Windows without replacing it with some other mind numbing torture. The whole corporate world is set up to torture people slowly while buying their complicity with the illusion that they are achieving something and a fantastic Linux desktop without something like Notes would eliminate the torture aspect. You can't have your cake and eat it too.
Microsoft is a single entity in one sense, but it is also a community, or a political organisation, if you will, comprised of lots of people with differing agendas and varying levels of "evilness". Adhering to a militant stance as a stated policy and assuming defiance as a fixed position is not just very lazy, it is short sighted, counter-productive and stupid.
Sure, it makes everything easy now. You don't have to think about what your "enemy" is doing, just reject everything as bad because it comes from Redmond - just like how anything that Muslims do is terrorism and anything the Jews did in central Europe in the 1930s was evil and subhuman. It actually doesn't help anyone though.
Microsoft can make public gestures of reconciliation and receive public rejection. This gives the wider community the impression that Microsoft is fair minded and willing to cooperate with others while the FOSS community are is some bigoted group of crackpot zealots. So Microsoft wins the battle for hearts and minds while the FOSS community, through a conscious choice of ignorance, loses. Pressure on Microsoft to share protocols and adhere to genuine open standards is diminished while the world of FOSS remains an obscure backwater.
Yeah, I've come across this approach personally many times, and it's never been successful for the militants in the long term. It tends to be one of those behaviour patterns that intelligent teenagers grow out of. Sometimes it's just the militants who lose, mostly it's everyone.
Of course if everyone was determined to adhere to a militant approach, I suggest marching in the streets wearing brown shirts as a good start to impress the general population and win supporters. Worked for Adolf.
If my car was recalled due to a fault by the manufacturer, I would expect them to collect the car, provide an equivalent vehicle while the fault is remedied and then deliver the car. My time is valuable and anyone wanting my custom should respect that.
One might offer to use vouchers to download songs and send an invoice for time and materials with penalty clauses for late payment. Most companies don't like it when people don't accept their offers to resolve claims because it means they are exposed to risk. If you have a legitimate claim, you really can apply some leverage. Accepting their first and cheapest offer isn't all that smart.
They're C*nts, F*ck 'em!
Do they pay you for the effort of having to repurchase the same songs? I wasn't silly enough to buy this DRM ladened shite, but if I was, I would insist that they not only offer me vouchers to buy the same songs, but that they also compensate me for my time in repurchasing the same songs. Or did they warn people that they would have to do maintenance on their music collections?
I highly recommend swapping that around. I run a Vista guest on Ubuntu and it is really quick - for some reason the Vista boot time seems quicker in the VM (?) - and that gives me 3D acceleration for Ubuntu. It works out a bit better for me because the 3D desktop in Vista is pretty, but the 3D desktop on Ubuntu is highly functional and much more configurable. I'll take the form + function over just form any day.
It's also kinda cool running Vista in a root window and blowing peoples mind by doing regular windows stuff, then hitting some magic key combination to rotate a cube to a completely different system. Of course I have completely re-themed the Ubuntu system and installed emerald - rotating from vista to a turd invokes the wrong sort of "wow".
I'm not an EE either, but I have practical experience of living in a house with 12VDC and 240VAC wiring with power generated from small scale hydro. We had a TV that ran on 12VDC or 240VAC which, before we had the inverter to provide 240VAC, used to switch itself off if it was plugged in to the furthest points from the batteries/regulator etc. The voltage drop on the line was enough to cause that, and we had invested in some fairly hefty cables to run the 12V system. Also, the power cupboard, with the batteries, etc, was almost as far from the place in the lounge where we wanted the TV.
I don't remember the efficiency of the inverter, but the fact that we had plenty of water in the creek and therefore plenty of power meant that the conversion was definitely worth it for us.
Hey, the title does say it's one of the coolest places in the universe.
From what I can figure out of low temperature liquid metals, inside would probably be some gallium-tin alloy if it was to be non toxic. If so, the heat sink would need to be copper. Gallium eats through aluminium.
Actually it's part of their green shipping strategy.
They can fill a truck with ~1000 boxes and burn half the fuel that anyone else would shipping 1000 boxes.
The easiest way to do a click-drag operation these days is for you and a buddy to each to flick the ignition switch (click) and burn (drag). Who ever is first to 10,000 ft wins! It ain't sensible, but it's a lot of fun!
What do you mean you don't have a rocket pack? It's the 21st century for crying out loud!
Thanks! You just saved me a whole lot of stuffing around!
I've been trying to get OSX running on a 1973 Wang 2200 and I can't figure out how to install it.
I feel like an idiot. Think I'll go get one.
Time was when that was a very valid point. These days I find the number of sites that work really well in Firefox has increased to the point that IE only seems to be the exception, at least in pages I visit. I don't know if this is because OSX has been gaining market share and web sites are being developed to work on the lowest common denominator, so many web developers (as distinct from Frontpage/VS/Sharepoint devs) use Firefox as an integral part of the development platform or a bit of both.
I know in one six week job I had a few years ago, I got a corporate SOE changed from IE+OSX to Safari+OSX because IE 5.5 on the Mac couldn't do what the site required and MS had announced that they would no longer be releasing IE for Mac. That sent a few ripples out that changed some pre-conceived web development notions in that large organisation.
So if it is the increased OSX adoption I, as a Linux user, am thankful to MS for abandoning IE on OSX, Apple for committing to a standards based browser and the computer buying public for increasing Apples market share.
They have changed the installation significantly with Vista. It has pretty graphics.
It also has repair tools which I have used once and did nothing to save my data and user configuration. But it does have pretty graphics.
If that's true, how come Bush got a second term?
I have read a few of your comments in this thread and you, sir, are an idiot
Every thing you have to say on this issue is from the point of view of a developer with an MSDN subscription and you use Windows flavour of the day as a benchmark for how a UI should look and feel. That means that any other OS is going to look weird. KDE3 defaults to be the most like windows, so you hate it less than other systems, but I bet OSX leaves you scratching your head too.
A lot of IT professionals I know see my notebook and say "wow, that looks great" because the layout is good, the presentation is good. Sure sometimes the defaults suck, but theming is a matter of downloading a theme an dragging it into the appearance settings and a lot of windows users I know are jealous that theming is easier to manage and more stable out of the box than on windows.
Of course that means, with a lot of stuffing around, you can make gnome look and feel very much like windows. So given your criteria, you are completely correct. It does take a lot of work to get a Linux desktop working.
I kind of wanted to avoid the fanboi flamewar thing, but doing a comparison between any operating systems is going to see that happen on ./
Both my father and mother now use Ubuntu. My father has been developing software since the late 60s, but in the last 20 years has worked predominantly with Microsoft stuff and my mother is the archetypal mum who has no clue about technology. She and my dad separated in the 70s by the way, so she hasn't really learned anything by osmosis. They both find Ubuntu simpler to use for day to day stuff "out of the box" than windows. Simple as that.
Applications are in a menu at the top grouped by functionality. System settings are in a menu called "System" and then divided into user specific and system wide stuff. Places on the file system are under "Places". The file system is not some bizzaar thing where the Desktop contains My Computer which contains weird things called "C:", "D:", etc, one of which contains the Desktop. That right there is something that I was always having to help my mum with on XP. She just didn't get it. She doesn't have the history of DOS, so she doesn't know or care about drive letters or the insane legacy that Microsoft is hanging on to.
My dad still uses windows in his A/V post production business because he is running professional software that has been windows only for a while. He uses Ubuntu for his general purpose office PC. Both prefer the Gnome UI to any of the windows desktops. His first install was Feisty Fawn, I think, and he comment on how the installation to a fraction of the time of a windows installation and everything just worked.
My wife, another non-tech, rates usability of the desktops she knows in this order, "Ubuntu", "Mac" then "Windows". I know a couple of PHB types who installed Ubuntu at home and said "wow, everything worked and i didn't need to feed in 5+ driver disks!"
Three to five years ago I might have agreed with you. Now, it is a very different story.
As for wine, I have it installed at home so I can run the games that came on a Shrek DVD I bought for my son - took me more time to fix the case insensitive mess that was the html navigation than to get the games working - a symptom of bad practice on the html developers part - but thankfully I had a powerful shell. Otherwise, I don't use it, so I can't comment there.
Yeah, one more reason I missed is that someone is a developer that is married to Windows development tools. But that's a given, why would anyone who develops in a Windows only tool for Windows use any other system for development? Makes now sense.
Are there really any (non game) apps by anyone other than Microsoft that won't work on Linux or don't have any equivalent method in Linux? The only software I have personally bought from MS in the last 7 years has been Vista included with my notebook and games for the xbox. If they released Visio for Linux, I might buy that.
Installing drivers on Linux is easy too. In most cases with the majority hardware and most good distros, you do nothing.
So you spent probably more than the cost of the hardware for an average PC on an operating system to replace vista? Why do that? Linux is free and performs great on new hardware and old hardware alike. Considering modern Linux distros have UIs which are easier to use and more productive than windows (give windows users a few days adjustment, of course), the only reasons left for running Windows are legacy apps that only run on Windows, difficulty with drivers and games.
So from what you're saying, one of the arguments for running windows is out the window. Driver installation sucks, and sounds about the same as installing most tricky things on Linux these days. (my recent experience with a newer DVICO TV tuner and broadcom wireless come to mind). That leaves legacy apps and games, but then a lot of legacy apps don't work on newer versions of windows, so it's a safer bet to keep the old OS in a VM image or running on an old box.
That really just leaves games.
Therefore windows is now just a toy.
Windows Server 2008 is an extremely expensive toy.
What is the point of this article?
Give it the Scrapheap Challenge treatment, combine it with an old CRT TV, a microwave oven and a generator to build a high-powered fossil fuel death ray!!!
What doesn't make sense to me is the editorial standards on /.
The title should be "Estimating the 71m32pwn of an Unpatched Windows PC.
Really, the standard is slipping.
History is absolutely full of people who don't follow the mainstream theory or have financial backing and end up creating the next mainstream theory which receives all of the financial backing.
History is also full of people such yourself, AC, who poor scorn on non-conformist ways of looking at things and end up looking like fools.
Maybe he has a point, maybe he hasn't, but whether or not he is in the mainstream has little or no bearing on the validity of his thought.
...that the name for their creation deity as written is automatically read by English speakers as make make. (even though it's pronounced makimaki)
Good point. My understanding about the theoretical pre-history of continents only went as far back as Gondwana, which dates back roughly 500 million years and is a very different map to the one in TFA, so I had a look at this to refresh my memory and try to resolve conflicts. If TFA is true, then the continents really do shift pretty quickly and change direction a fair bit too, considering Australia started in the northern hemisphere according to TFA, went South to join Gondwana and is now heading North again.
But back to your point about how they knew what it was called, I have a related question. How do they know that Eastern Laurentia had crinkle cut coastlines like Canada? Weren't they formed by glacial activity? How does that happen at the equator?
Also, it wasn't clear to me from TFA whether the magnetic field lines conflict with this theory or support it. If they do conflict, how do we know that the distribution of isotopes isn't due to some other phenomenon?
Who is Jay Leno?
I'm running Vista right now on the notebook I'm posting from, and it's quite quick. It has a 1.9GHz X2 AMD64 thing with 2 gibiwotsits of rambling. It does hang after I put the notebook to sleep, but the boot up time is really quick and the system is quite responsive. When I say the boot up time is quick, I mean from the time I tell VirtualBox to launch the VM under Linux, not from cold boot. Cold boot into Vista native on this thing took forever. I don't know what Innotek/Sun did, but it really does seem to load quicker in the VM than native.
Seriously, I recommend having a look at running Vista in VirtualBox on Linux if you only have a few windows apps you need to use. Then again, this sounds like a work machine and there may be issues.