[David M]

Great idea. I have scientists who bring Macs onboard and other scientists who bring PC laptops onboard. Contrary to what I read, they quite often cannot share data or swap software. There is always that dreaded, "I will have to send you that data after I get back to the office."

I can see this problem going away real fast now with dual OS machines. Plus, being able to run XP on a Mac means that scientists will be able to use their Mac and run software which is used to run the various sampling instruments (which is almost always written for PC's most commonly by Seabird and RDI) on their Mac's

I had that problem today in fact...one of the scientists brought his Mac onboard to run his CODAR (shows current velocity and direction using the doppler shift from a low frequency radar antenna) software and he could not load and run the software which shows the internet signal strength and which shoreside station we were receiving from. We were running around like idiots trying to get a stronger signal so we could fine tune the codar station from the water via the internet and not have to send someone ashore...which was a big waste of valuable boat time.

Some of this ocean instrument software is so old that it is written in DOS and requires a serial port to communicate with the instrument! I would say about half the scientists that come onboard use Macs. It will be a real relief for them when they can run all scientific software on their computers.