The Linux Mint 15 distribution I have just installed is even better than the 14 release. Hopefully it will not have that annoying bug from the 14 release that would slow your computer to a crawl when you were copying large files from one location to another. The new login screen has many new HTML5 themes that allow animation. To get the SSH deamon working, type sudo apt-get install ssh and then you may log into your machine remotely. This is how I did it. I just typed: ssh [email protected] and I was presented with the login prompt. Very easy indeed. You may then use sudo in the SSH session to update your machine with apt and install software. The Virtualbox software works perfectly in Linux Mint 15. Giving the Virtualbox network interface an IP address that passes through to the host allows you to network the host to the virtualised operating system, this is very useful as you could then network another virtualbox instance to the first and create a virtualised client/server system. Assuming that you had enough computing power to do this of course. But that is a good reason to have a multi-core CPU; you can easily handle virtualization without any hassle.
The Windows 7 installation I have installed is using the Virtualbox guest additions. This allows the use of high resolutions and copying and pasting betwixt Windows and the host operating system. As well as Direct3D support and other benefits. This shows the power of modern computers. We could not have dreamed of having this much power when we were using old 486 SX 33 machines to run Windows 3.11 and DOS 6.22. But that is progress for you. I wonder what the future of CPU technology will hold. What CPU will we be using in 2020? And how powerful will they be? Considering that Moores Law is still in effect; we should be seeing some interesting technology in the next ten years. A computer with 32 Gigabytes of RAM and SLI ATI graphics cards would have been considered a supercomputer in the olden days; but they are taken for granted now. The National Security Agency are building quantum level computers to enable them to break complex codes and perform cryptography that would be out of the reach of standard computers. This blog post has some information on this: http://qbnets.wordpress.com/2010/06/19/utra-secret-nsa-databases/. This shows that the future of computing is qubits or quantum bits. Standard encryption would pose no problem to a quantum computer; this is why you would need a quantum computer of your own to encrypt a file with quantum encryption to keep it safe from prying eyes.
The question is will the government allow citizens to possess powerful quantum computers or not? That is a very interesting question; but we will have to wait and see what the future holds. Linux Mint would be very fast on a quantum computer, I wonder how long it will be until this happens?