“I grew up at ground zero during an age of terror. Just 10 miles upwind of my elementary school in Omaha, Nebraska sat Strategic Air Command headquarters, its proud motto posted outside the security gates: ‘Peace Is Our Profession.’ A group of radical nuns had once spray-painted ‘War Is Just a Hobby’ on the sign before being dragged away in cuffs.”

John Nagl, writing in Democracy: A Journal of Ideas.

… in 1965, a march by civil rights demonstrators was broken up in Selma, Alabama, by state troopers and a sheriff’s posse.

I’m a Mac and Linux user, but usually carry a MacBook Air when I’m in my various workplaces. When I go to meetings, most people turn up with laptops. There then follows an hilarious charade. The folks with Macs open up their laptops and are typing or browsing in about 30 seconds. The Wintel users open up their machines and then sit there for several minutes looking glum while Windows winds itself up, stretches, yawns, does some impenetrable calisthenics and performs a leisurely search to see if, by any chance, there happens to be a wireless network around.

Not surprisingly, then, this Technology Review post caught my eye.

Thousands of hours are wasted every year waiting for computers to boot up. A Windows machine can take a couple of minutes to get going and to shut down again. In extreme cases, the entire process can take as long as 30 minutes, according to people who’ve filed lawsuits claiming that their employers should pay for this boot-up and shut-down time.

Software called Presto could provide an alternative to waiting. Demonstrated this week at Demo, a tech conference held in Palm Desert, CA, it joins a handful of products that have emerged recently in an effort to get people working on their computers faster. These products, offered by companies including Intel, HP, and DeviceVM, generally allow a person to boot up in less than 30 seconds, and in some cases less than 10.

When a computer running Presto is first switched on, the user is given the option to load the Windows operating system or Presto. If she chooses Presto, then the system launches within a few seconds, providing a task bar and icons for several applications, including a Web browser, an instant-messaging application, and the Internet phone system Skype. If the user wants to switch to Windows, she needs to log out of Presto and start up the machine as usual.

Interesting, ne c’est pas? So where does it come from? And how does it work? Well, it’s produced by a software company called Xandros, which is located in New York, and it’s based on a slimmed-down version of Linux. (The Xandros distro is what powered the original ASUS EeePC, and it’s neat, minimalist and efficient.)

Presto will be out in beta on March 16 and as a product on April 13 for $19.95. Cheaper than buying a Mac. Could it be a cheap way for my Wintellized colleagues to curb their impatience?

UPDATE: Martin Barry emailed to point out that this stuff is built into some ASUS motherboards now. It’s called ExpressGate and powered by Splashtop from the DeviceVM company mentioned in the NYT piece:

I love Paul Graham’s essays. Just been reading one in which he’s pondering what the impact of the recession will be on venture capital. He thinks that it will probably dry up somewhat during the present downturn, like it usually does in bad times. But this time, he says, the result may be different. This time the number of new startups may not decrease. And that, he thinks, could be dangerous for VCs.

When VC funding dried up after the Internet Bubble, startups dried up too. There were not a lot of new startups being founded in 2003. But startups aren’t tied to VC the way they were 10 years ago. It’s now possible for VCs and startups to diverge. And if they do, they may not reconverge once the economy gets better.

The reason startups no longer depend so much on VCs is one that everyone in the startup business knows by now: it has gotten much cheaper to start a startup. There are four main reasons: Moore’s law has made hardware cheap; open source has made software free; the web has made marketing and distribution free; and more powerful programming languages mean development teams can be smaller. These changes have pushed the cost of starting a startup down into the noise. In a lot of startups — probaby most startups funded by Y Combinator [Graham’s incubator] — the biggest expense is simply the founders’ living expenses. We’ve had startups that were profitable on revenues of $3000 a month.

$3000 is insignificant as revenues go. Why should anyone care about a startup making $3000 a month? Because, although insignificant as revenue, this amount of money can change a startup’s funding situation completely.

Someone running a startup is always calculating in the back of their mind how much ‘runway’ they have—how long they have till the money in the bank runs out and they either have to be profitable, raise more money, or go out of business. Once you cross the threshold of profitability, however low, your runway becomes infinite. It’s a qualitative change, like the stars turning into lines and disappearing when the Enterprise accelerates to warp speed. Once you’re profitable you don’t need investors’ money. And because Internet startups have become so cheap to run, the threshold of profitability can be trivially low. Which means many Internet startups don’t need VC-scale investments anymore. For many startups, VC funding has, in the language of VCs, gone from a must-have to a nice-to-have.

That rings a lot of bells for me at the moment.

We’re in uncharted waters — see for example this NYT report.

“It’s pretty despondent everywhere,” said Dwyfor Evans, a strategist at State Street Global Markets in Hong Kong. “O.K., there are signs that some of the leading indicators have stabilized to some extent, but it’s at a very, very low level, and we’re not seeing corporate investment picking up, or consumers starting to spend again — in other words, the traditional mechanisms by which economies come out of a recession are absent at this time.”

Hopes that the American economy, which led the world into recession, might lead it back out this year have been fading.

Last weekend, Warren E. Buffett, the chairman of Berkshire Hathaway, wrote in his company’s annual report that “the economy will be in shambles, throughout 2009, and, for that matter, probably well beyond.”

As if to emphasize the problems, the Institute for Supply Management reported that companies in Britain, France, Germany, Italy, and the United States said business was getting much worse, especially in terms of jobs.

Paul Dales, an economist with Capital Economics, pointed to the survey in forecasting that the February employment report will show a decline of 785,000 jobs when it is released on Friday. If so, it would be the largest one-month decline in employment in nearly 60 years.

Last week, the United States revised its estimate of fourth quarter gross domestic product to show a decline at an annual rate of 6.2 percent, the worst in more than a quarter century. On Monday in reporting that construction activity fell sharply in January, the government also revised the December figure lower.