Dell Hails 2008 As The Year Of The Corporate Linux Desktop

Just found this on digg:
http://forums.xisto.com/no_longer_exists/

The advent of desktop virtualisation will provide the missing link for Linux to shine on the corporate desktop, Dell chief technology officer Kevin Kettler predicted in a keynote speech at the Linuxworld conference in San Francisco.
"A lot of people are predicting that next year could be the year where we really see an explosive growth of Linux on the desktop in business applications, " Kettler told delegates.

At the bottom of the article there is a link to a video of him presenting his vision about the future of virtualization.

He's describing a business environment where all safe computing (business and productivity applications) will happen on the desktop, and for all activities which are considered unsafe (browsing the web) employees will simply create a disposable installation of an OS on some server, connect to it (presumably using something like the VNC viewer, although VNC isn't specifically mentioned in this speech) do the required browsing, and if they happen to pick up any malware in the process, it will only affect this particular instance of a virtual OS.

He also shows an example of a SLED (SuSe Linux Enterprise Desktop) laptop simultaneously running a virtual copy of Windows XP along with a virtual copy of Vista. What I don't get is how you can run Vista in a virtual box since Vista is supposed to be built on the principles of trusted computing, which means severe checks on hardware components.

I'm running Vista on VMWare using Kubuntu-7.04 as my host platform without any problems.

Check this other one out.

"Virtualize Windows on Linux? Microsoft Says No Way!"
Link:
http://www.pcgamer.com/hardware/

Apparently the stakes are high.
Microsoft has a history of making their competitors' products intentionally slower - in this case the roles are reversed: the competitor is the host, and Microsoft is the guest.