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Bypass Windows With Fast-Boot Technology
thatnerdguy writes "Phoenix Technologies, a developer of BIOS software, is working on a new technology called Hyperspace that will allow you to instantly load certain applications like email, web browser and media player, without loading windows. It could even lead to tailoring of computers to even more specific demographics, like a student laptop preloaded with word processor, email and an IM all available at the press of a button." Why is this story setting off alarms in my brain?
When you said console I took it to mean command line interface rather than a 'games console'. Mold your language for the slashdot demographic if you're going to post on slashdot man!
which is totally what she said
Asus already offers this.
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=885&num=1
It does use Linux BTW and the Motherboard is very Linux Friendly.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
um, linux, windows and osx aren't the only operating systems out there. i thought you dumbasses should know.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Basically what I'm saying is that I want a proper OS, not something that runs one app at a time. I doubt I'm alone in that. Now, give me a decent OS that runs lots of things loaded into an area of Flash memory so it starts up quickly and I'm yours.
It's things listed in your post that popular OS vendors have forgotten about... We need to be pandered to. There's a reason that Vista sales are in the toilet, Linux hasn't been able to break into the market in a decade and why Apple is a cool, but small niche vendor. They need to create an OS based on what their customers want, not based on a list of features Jobs or Gates thinks is cool. Aero was written to be as slick as a Mac, and Macs have taken repeated steps to become more like PCs (close case to open case, adopting Intel architecture, etc.) Linux isn't exempt from the imitate success bandwagon. By trying to replace windows instead of doing what it does best, run apps, no distribution has been able to be both slim and fully functional. It's going to take someone thinking outside the box (pun intended) to get an OS that meets the needs of an increasingly tech-savvy and tech-reliant society to abandon windows. If that means revolutionizing the hardware and dumping the entrenched OS companies at the same time, I say bring it on.
ASCII tastes bad dude.
Binary it is then.
Wild turkeys can fly. Domestic turkeys are too fat.
http://www.kidzone.ws/animals/turkey.htm
(search for "unable to fly")
As someone who's had flocks of wild turkeys fly over his head, I can attest to their ability to fly first hand. I've also seen them fly away after being shot. That's why you always aim for the head; their feathers are too tough for shotgun pellets.
"My Macbook is the first machine that simply just works.. close the lid when you're done, stash the machine."
Just make sure you don't do this with your iPhone if you're outside the US.
Yep yep - there's actually a video of it running though which shows that you can have multiple apps running (though the only 2 there are firefox and Skype atm!). I'm not sure if you can write to it (presumably you can make your own ROM images though), but if there was a version of it with the adblocking extension of FF then it could be awesome for quick browsing.. and with all the stuff you can do in a browser these days, it's actually very versatile. It will be sad if they keep building on this until it gets bloated again tho, heh.
which is totally what she said
You mean like LinuxBIOS? Boots to a Linux console in 3 seconds.
A simple yet functional OS and applications on a chip! Why didn't someone think of doing this before!?
OH WAIT, THEY DID AND MICROSOFT PUSHED THEM OUT OF THEIR MARKET AND SENT THEM OUT OF BUSINESS
If we can put a man on the moon, why can't we shoot people for Apollo-related non-sequiturs?
I'll have to say bull shit on that.
If you setup the system correctly you'll get the same behavior from a windows (xp/vista) machine.
On all the laptop I had my hands on. That behavior was already set.
My current laptop and my workstation are setup to "Suspend To RAM".
And I can get my workstation up faster them my monitor.
Actually most of the 30-90 second boot process is interrogating the hardware from top to bottom to re-discover all the different pieces of hardware you might have in the system, on a one-by-one basis, then loading the individual sets of drivers for each. Just because you had an nVidia video card, Intel chipset, Creative Labs PCI sound card, six USB ports, and a 100Mb/s Ethernet NIC by SMC in your system when you shut it down last time, that doesn't mean those are the components in your system this time you do a cold boot - so the OS goes through the entire discovery process from top to bottom again, loading the drivers for the hardware it finds after going through the process of discovering each piece of hardware in your system.
... no, that one is used, how about picking a different one...'. If there was a way to code Windows to skip the PnP (Plug and Play) and just tell it what all you had for hardware and where in memory / IRQ / DMAland to put each piece (or just tell it that the hardware it had when it shut down was the same hardware it had the next boot) - I'm guessing that the OS would boot a LOT faster. Like order of magnitude faster.
That's why my laptop can recovery from 'stand-by' or 'hibernate' modes in almost no-time, but a cold boot still takes a veritable lifetime - approaching two minutes before the system is fully loaded and operational, and why solid state drives only shave 6-8 seconds from boot times while offering nano-second seek times.
Back in the old days you hard-coded the memory addresses, IRQs, DMA addresses, etc of the hardware in the boot files, which is why older (much slower) systems booted so fast. No parsing every IRQ and memory address in the system looking for new hardware, asking each piece of hardware 'what are you, what kind of drivers do you use, which IRQ do you want
Glonoinha the MebiByte Slayer
Actually, the underlying technology is much more clever in the Apple space - for laptops at least.
For Windows, you have the choice of hibernating (store memory to hard drive, then cut power) or sleeping (CPU stops, power is fed to RAM to keep apps in memory). Wake from sleep takes a few seconds, wake from hibernate takes about 30 for me (depends on how much memory you have).
In Mac OS X, there is no need to choose - it does the best of both worlds. When you close the lid, it immediately stores memory to the hard drive (like hibernate would). Then, with data safely stored away, it switches into sleep mode (supplying power to RAM to keep apps in memory). If you open the lid in within a day or two, it wakes up instantly, as if you put it to sleep. But if you leave it sleeping forever and the battery runs out, then when you eventually plug it in and reopen, it wakes from hibernation.
So the PC is offering sleep-vs-hibernate that only tech-saavy people know how to use. But the Mac is offering a fundamentally better option that you can't get in the PC world, and it's available to all users.
I've never been an Apple fanboy, but since I bought a Mac a few months ago features like this continue to impress me.