"Samsung Electronics and Microsoft will next month show off the ready-to-market version of a hybrid hard drive which can greatly reduce boot-up time of laptops and desktop PCs. The HHD is the convergence of a flash memory chip and a conventional platter-type magnetic disk drive. To save the time and energy spent spinning a metal disk drive it is designed to use static flash memory when starting a PC."
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Member since:2006-03-18
I perfectly agree with you about suspend to disk. The Shutdown option in all OSs should by default suspend to disk. I also think new BIOSes should be introduced which are tightly coupled with suspend-to-disk options, so that the time the BIOS takes in the boot process is only minimal hardware initialization, and it doesn't have to setup anything that a realmode/DOS-like OS would need.
Member since:2006-01-16
My girlfriend has a laptop (Nexoc Osiris S602) with a very fast BIOS POST. The BIOS takes about 1-2 seconds until the boot manager shows up. So it is really doable, even today, even with all hardware initialized.
I ask myself if EFI initializes much of the hardware, too. Perhaps it's just the way to go.
Member since:2005-07-18
I don't understand why I should buy hardware which assists in nothing else than booting.
Me neither. But I don't even use suspend-to-disk, since I don't use a laptop. All my PCs just keep running all the time, that way I can access them from each other.
The obvious but unstated weakness to this is the extra hassle of UPGRADING. My suspicion is that they will use DRM or something like it to prevent use of the flash by Linux. I wonder if that's the real motive.
Member since:2006-01-10
Member since:2005-07-06
Member since:2005-07-06
Member since:2005-07-06
I don't particularly like to post off topic, but I've seen something like this a couple of times recently:
"1 Gig of RAM fits into 512 Megs if zipped."
Compression of that type is not deterministic wrt data size. If that RAM was holding mpeg4 video in it, it would barely compress at best, if it was empty, well, then it would compress to a few bytes.
Low level engineers cannot count on things like compression always hitting a target. It either has to definitely always work or... well, that's the option. You have to be a software person to get away with putting up a failure dialog on the screen.
"The Verge has learned that HTC's Chief Product Officer, Kouji Kodera, left the company last week. Kodera was responsible for HTC's overall product strategy, which makes the departure especially notable on the heels of the global launch of the make-or-break One. It's not just Kodera. In the past three-odd months, HTC has lost a number of employees in rapid succession." I really hope HTC pulls it together.
"It is with huge pleasure that the Debian GNU/Hurd team announces the release of Debian GNU/Hurd 2013. This is a snapshot of Debian 'sid' at the time of the Debian 'wheezy' release (May 2013), so it is mostly based on the same sources. It is not an official Debian release, but it is an official Debian GNU/Hurd port release." Important note: 75% of Debian packages are supported bu Debian GNU/Hurd. Impressive.
"The first killer app was VisiCalc. This early spreadsheet turned the Apple II from a hobbyist toy to a business computer. VisiCalc came with room for improvement, though. In addition, a new architecture and operating system, the Intel-based IBM PC and MS-DOS, also needed a spreadsheet to be taken seriously. That spreadsheet, released in early 1983, would be Lotus 1-2-3, and it would change the world. It became the PC's killer app, and the world would never be the same. On May 14, IBM quietly announced the end of the road for 1-2-3, along with Lotus Organizer and the Lotus SmartSuite office suite. Lotus 1-2-3's day is done." Impressive 30 year run.
"There's a disconnect between how Apple CEO Tim Cook sees his company's tax strategies and how some members of the US Senate view it. That became clearer than ever today after Cook and two other Apple executives testified before Congress, explaining why they're holding most of their international income in Irish subsidiaries like Apple Operations International, which declare no tax residency anywhere in the world. AOI hasn't filed a tax return anywhere in the world for the last five years, yet it earned $30 billion in income from 2009 to 2012, according to a Senate report released yesterday." Just because something is legal, doesn't mean it's just. Apple, Google, Microsoft, and many more - these companies might not be breaking any laws, but it's obvious to anyone that what they are doing is scummy.
The new WebKit Opera for Android has been released. "Opera 14 for Android is built on top of Chromium 26, with a total overhaul of the UI in native code, making it fit well with the latest Android design guidelines. Go get the build from Google Play or point your browser to m.opera.com, and give it a spin!"
The Verge pointed me to a blog post by Leap Motion - which reveals how their Kinect-like motion control works with Windows 8. "From the second you plug in your Leap Motion Controller, you'll be able to browse the web and interact with your computer just by moving your hands and fingers in the air. With Leap Motion technology and Windows, you can do everything that's possible with multi-touch inputs - without actually touching anything. This also means that existing applications in Windows 7 and 8 will respond to your natural hand and finger movements. Soon, we'll show you how Leap Motion will work with Mac OS X." Quite cool.PocketNow interviews Marc Dillon, and there's an interesting note about why Jolla is keeping the display properties under wraps: "We're leaving some of those details out because we do understand that there are a lot of really big players in the market and they tend to take certain components in the market and dominate them. We created the ability to actually be able to run Sailfish on multiple hardware displays and be able to swap components, so this is part of the demand and supply planning phase. We are committed to this industrial design which is a 4.5-inch display, an 8 megapixel camera on the back and a front-facing camera at the front, and the exact specs of the display we'll provide when we're close to delivery." Something you rarely hear anything about.
"This is my NeXTstation Turbo Color booting the Mac System 7.1 Operating System using a hardware add-on called 'Daydream'. The Daydream has a Mac ROM and a few custom ICs in it and hooked up to the NeXTs DSP port. Turns your NeXT into a full fledged 68k powered Mac." So cool.
"The NetBSD Project is pleased to announce NetBSD 6.1, the first feature update of the NetBSD 6 release branch. It represents a selected subset of fixes deemed important for security or stability reasons, as well as new features and enhancements. Please note that all fixes in the prior security/bugfix updates (NetBSD 6.0.1 and 6.0.2) are also in 6.1."
"At the end of a week in which Electronic Arts confirmed it wasn't developing a thing for the Wii U, one of the software engineers in EA Sports' Canada studio, in a series of since-deleted tweets, disparaged the console as 'crap' and suggested Nintendo should give up on hardware altogether. 'The Wii U is crap. Less powerful than an Xbox 360. Poor online/store. Weird tablet', tweeted Bob Summerwill, listed as a senior software engineer at EA Canada, in a reply to a tweet posting a link about EA's no-Wii U news. 'Nintendo are walking dead at this point'." The Wii U is turning into the 21st century's Virtual Boy.
Member since:
2006-01-16
Hi,
booting a system is like installing a system. It doesn't really make sense to do it very often.
With today's hardware (esp. disks) it takes less time to save all the memory content to disk (on-the-fly-compressed), as to shutdown a decent "bloated" operating system.
Easy to tell it also takes much less time to read back the data on startup of the machine than to boot it.
And you can continue working where you stopped. No additional power consumption while the power is off. It is power consuming to copy back all the memory data, but it is also while you startup applications, etc.. Better productivity anyway!
What is needed? An operating system capable of this; hardware drivers capable of this.
What is not needed? An additional flash drive
I don't understand why people still talk about booting, esp. on laptop devices, other than OSes like Windows like to operate worse and worse after running too long.
Even on desktop machines it is more convenient to use suspend-to-disk, as hard drives are faster. Half of the startup time (with suspend to disk) on my 3 years old desktop machine is wasted by the BIOS...
I don't understand why I should buy hardware which assists in nothing else than booting. This flash memory is built into the drive, so I can't use it to take data with me. Anyway I can't efficiently use it in runtime as the "boot" data (operating system) will have to reside there, otherwise it needs to be copied back from disk, wich will make it silly (battery usage, time loss on shutdown instead of boot). The data used while operating will not be read from flash but from memory, as it is much faster...
A better idea would be to include flash memory into a notebook for a suspend-to-flash like feature. 1 Gig of RAM fits into 512 Megs if zipped. It could still be called silly.
Regards,
Ford Prefect
Edited 2006-05-08 13:56