No More Rebooting?

blankmange writes: "This headline caught my eye: 'The End of Computer Rebooting.' Seems that there has been some new developments in memory technology: The new thin-film technology that could give rebooting the boot is based on resistor logic rather than the traditional transistor logic used in most PCs and other memory-enabled devices. It also is considerably faster than current memory systems and holds the promise of reducing the time required to transfer and download multimedia content and other massive files. This is great news, but what am I going to do with the extra hour or so a day?"

Comments

the downtime

[perdida]

Like your computer, you need downtime (sleep, walking the dog, eating, etc).

If you are an avid computer user, you may only get your downtime when your computer is rebooting. This is especially true in workplaces where people are "chained" to their computers trying to finish a project, etc.

Those ergonomics posters on the wall do very little to get an average 'puter user to take care of themselves.. reboots served some of this purpose.

(Maybe that is why windows crashes so much - it's Bill Gates' gift to the employee!)

In any case, perhaps all offices should institute a staggered mandatory 15 minute inactivity period every couple of hours for each active computer.

How different is this than MRAM?

[brokeninside]

IBM and Infineon expect to deliver MRAM in 2004.

The press release doesn't really go into detail, so I don't know how similar (or disparate) the respective IBM and Samsung solutions are. They do both have the same net effect for users: non-volatile main memory.

This is cool stuff, but what hasn't been said is that as long as operating systems and applications leak memory, there will be a need for reboots.

Ciao.

Re:But.....

[gazbo]

I also read the /. writeup as being some miracle cure for OS crashes or the like. In fact, it's just non-volatile memory.

So, when you turn off/on your PC, you don't need to reboot, it can just put you right back where you were instantly. Unfortunately, in the context of a crash/instability, this would put you right back in an inoperable/unstable environment.

Bad writeup.

Re:rebooting will not die, yet.

[Rogerborg]

• We could easily dump the memory contents onto the hard drive straigh away and we are not doing it (except in laptops, but even there it doesn't always work)

Uh, have you seen WinXP's hibernate feature? On my 256Mb Athlon desktop, it writes the RAM to disk and shuts down in under five seconds, and comes back up (from wakeup keypress, through POST, then writes disk to ram) and is fully usable in twelve seconds. I've hibernated it with dozens of running processes and services, and not yet seen any problems on restore. I even took it down and brought it back up during a game of Deus Ex, and just kept right on playing where I'd left off.

Given a reasonably reliable OS, you should only be wiping the RAM when the system changes significantly, e.g. switching kernels or hardware. XP's hibernate feature demonstrates that merely turning the power off shouldn't require you to shut anything down. Unfortunately, I've yet to see anything that works as well on my linux boxen, including my laptop. Suggestions gratefully received!