> Once they've got that CS degree -- the one that they were so sure would give them a free ride to a six-figure salary -- they're not too likely to wad it up, throw it in the trash, and go be a schoolteacher. Right?
If they aren't good at programming, and it's bad enough that this is obvious from a job interview, then they need to revisit their qualifications. Sure, they likely won't wad up the CS degree and do something unrelated, but reminding them that not all CS people need to get jobs as programmers might be a good push in the right direction. After all, there are schoolteachers that teach about computers, for example. Making that prospective employee beat his head against a wall that's not going to fall down when a nudge around the corner might lead to daylight is a waste of everyone's time.
> I have to say it in english, because you yankees are too stupid to learn another language.
Since when does any true Quebecois give a toss about whether or not the target of his disdain can understand him? I've run into plenty of you who can speak English perfectly well and simply refuse.
You're arguing against the idea of edge cases by arguing that your kids might lose out on the returns from your posthumous memoirs? How is that not also an edge case? Again, it would require that a book deal be in the offing (a vanishingly small proposition) and that any secrets you have are bad enough to sour the deal. You'll have to pardon me for not thinking this is a compelling addition to your original argument.
> The administrator account is for... ADMINISTRATION.. not normal running of applications and games, once your product is installed, it's got NO REASON to leach for admin rights.
I know, I know, this is Slashdot, but you didn't RTFA, did you? The developer in question is complaining that casual, downloadable games are going to be taking it on the chin with Vista. The problem is that a game can be built with security in mind, it can be made never to need admin access rights even to install, and Vista will still pitch a fit and a bunch of warnings about installing it. For the average end user who uses downloadables, they're not going to understand that Vista is going berserk just because it's told to go berserk any time a non-admin tries to install anything, they going to think that Vista is going berserk because there's a legitimate problem. In XP, this problem could be avoided (albeit by the bad methodology of giving the end user the admin account) but in Vista it's not possible to turn off the warnings even if there's no reason to have them.
Notwithstanding that your post is about an amazingly unlikely edge case, this sentence alone is enough to turn me off. Sense the irony here?
Seriously, though, the likelihood that your affairs are so valuable that it's important to get your knowledge base publicized but so embarassing that those discoveries are going to prevent it is so small that considering it in a deadman switch plan is not worth the effort. I'm with the OP in this. If your porn collection (or whatever) gets found after you're dead, it's unlikely to be so damaging that you need to plan for its destruction in the event of your incapacitation.
> This totally misses the point. That second car in the garage doesn't just fall apart.
His point is that, to some extent, that second car does indeed "fall apart" (cars left sitting for long periods do tend to deteriorate unless effort is expended to prevent it), and on top of that the part you failed to address is that the standing cost of a second vehicle is not zero. You actually have to buy or finance the second vehicle to start, you can't insure a vehicle "only when you drive it", and you need to keep it somewhere which is a bite for some folks in terms of garage or driveway space. At the extreme, in an urban center you'd need to pay a rather exhorbitant parking cost to have two vehicles (and that's not just in a major city, there are plenty of people who use on-the-street parking for whom mass transit isn't an option for commuting).
Sad, but at the same time it's not so sad. The problem stems from the fact that it causes physical harm and isn't discriminate. For example, what if a police officer commandeered the car for official use? Sure, it's mighty rare, but at the same time you'd injure someone who wasn't breaking the law. What if you forgot to notify someone you loaned the car to, or your car was being towed for illegal parking and the tow truck operator sat down to take off the parking brake? The legal issue with booby traps in cars that cause harm are that they're dangerous to people who cannot reasonably be considered criminals. Honestly, even I have walked up to a car that I thought was mine and only realized I'd made a mistake when the ignition key wouldn't work. This knife would have injured me for an honest mistake, and the law does not consider that reasonable to protect a car from theft. A car alarm that makes noise doesn't do any permanent harm, but a knife in the butt could conceivably be fatal (femoral arteries are nearby).
> How now having a torque measure makes the jet engine any less useful is a mystery. Some applications need torque, others thrust.
This goes to the heart of it, so I need only address this. Ships propel themselves by twisting a screw in the water. Jet engines are badly suited to this task compared to Diesel engines, and moving a ship by pushing it above water is very inefficient compared to twisting a screw. Since we're discussing applications involving moving a container ship on the ocean, the argument stands. Sure, there are many applications where a jet engine would be better, but they would be offtopic, since we're discussing an engine specifically designed to move a ship.
> Sorry, but planes need a lot of power: for speed you need power.
My second point does derive from the first, remember. While saying that planes need only speed is a semantic point (you're right that power is necessary to move a plane forward) I will say in my weak defense that a plane doesn't necessarily need to be moving forward to fly. Having watched a Piper two-seater "flying" like a kite in a gale force wind at an airport near my house, I can say that it's so. With tongue in cheek.
> But if god is directly involved they wouldn't need the grail to achieve immortality.
Oh, come on, this is too easy. It's simple to show that God grants immortality by route of the grail, and thereby imposes the limitation. If you want to live forever, you must do it in that cave in perpetual worship, because immortality means drinking regularly from the grail and the grail can't leave the cave. Seems simple enough in a religion that emphasizes that immortality is for the afterlife, not this life. Again, the great seal is just an indicator, not anything to do with the power of the grail.
This movie was positively cratered with plot holes, but this isn't one of them. If you want to jump on anything about the grail's resting place, try the concept that there are enough crescent-shaped valleys south of cities in the Middle East that a thousand years of searching (including the knowledge of the map with no names) couldn't turn up the right one until Dr. Jones figured out the name of the city.
> Which leaves a very big plot hole on who made the great seal and what is it?
I think you're missing out on the whole "Power of God" thing here. Just to pull something from my nethers, I'd say that the folks who set up the place (the knights who found it) got a vision from God to set up a place for the grail and make a seal on the ground to mark the boundary. The seal itself isn't the boundary, just like a road cone isn't the pothole that it marks. The seal just shows mortals where the line is. As to moving into the place and living forever, it's an artifact from God, so it stands to reason that if you try to find a loophole but you're not devoutly religious, God would just pull the plug on you anyway.
> If a cylinder block always beats a jet engine in fuel efficiency, those 'jet' airliners would have a different name.
The other response addressed a lot of this, but I'll toss in that there are two things that change considerations for jet engines versus Diesels, and both point toward jet engines for aircraft. Firstly, planes don't need torque, they only need thrust. Jet engines are great for generating thrust, not so good at torque. Second (which derives from the first) planes need speed, not really power. Both is handy, but if it was economical to build rail guns to get planes off the ground they'd do it. Speed is king, since it's the forward motion (and only the forward motion) that keeps it aloft.
Both of these benefits are lost on a huge oceangoing vessel. These vessels need a huge amount of torque to drive the screws, and speed is irrelevant after a certain (low) amount. Therefore, jet engines would be very inefficient for these applications.
> A boot ROM with Windows and Office on it would be sufficent for many people.
You know, I've been thinking this for quite a few years. The problems are there to be dealt with (patches would be tough, and satellite functionality would need to be incorporated like add-ons for printers and detachables), but I've always thought that there's got to be a market out there for this sort of thing that isn't just palmtop users.
I had thought this (cookie-cutter machine with modded Windows) was going to be the approach that Wal-Mart took when it started offering cheap PCs, but it didn't work out that way.
No need to think, or start. It's been done quite a bit. Virtually every palmtop and PDA computer built today does exactly this, because the non-changeability of the hardware makes it possible. There are palmtops today that can stand in for a bargain-basement laptop.
Now, building a PC with Windows that does this is virtually impossible, just because the OS is closed-source and is programmed to do stuff even if it's not necessary. For example, there's no way to tell Windows not to check for plug-and-play hardware on boot, even if you know there will never be a hardware change. Using Linux, however, it's more possible, because the kernel can be seriously hacked to remove anything that's even remotely extraneous, and if you know exactly what needs to happen and what doesn't, you can save time left and right. I built a custom monolithic kernel for a simple Intel-based PC once that booted Red Hat 9 from the end of POST to the login prompt in twelve seconds, because I cut it to the bone. It couldn't cope with even the slightest hardware change, but that wasn't a concern since it was just for kernel building practice. The simple answer is that it's doable, but it takes an investment of time, money or both to make it so.
I do still adore my '64, though. LOAD "*",8,1 FTW.
By the same token, you could build a boot ROM that you could plug into a slot on a PC that would launch an application (be it game or programming IDE) without any other OS, and boot your PC off it. Remember, though, that if you wanted to switch to a different app, you'd have to power down the C64 and pull the cartridge. Most people want their PC to be more flexible than that.
> My point is that if Palm can do it on such limited hardware with a RISC chip emulating a 68000, why the heck can't Windows and/or Linux do the same on much more powerful machines.
You answered your own question. It's the "limited hardware" that matters. If every PC was exactly (and I mean exactly the same), Windows or Linux could be built to boot like lightning. Also, your palmtop doesn't boot off of a hard drive even if it has a microdrive installed, and again, the OS can load REALLY fast if it's coming off of ROM or flash. Lastly, your palmtop doesn't shut off when you switch it off. To test its cold start capacity like a PC, shut it off and pull the batteries, then put them back and turn it on. Sure, the desktop shows fast (see above for loading from ROM) but anything you had open is gone, like a PC.
Nice thought, but what could you do from the prompt that appeared when you switched it on? You can't compare that to booting a machine to the point of a functional desktop. Also, those machines didn't have hard drives nor any changeable hardware. Again, not a fair comparison.
> Are you telling me it takes 60 billion calculations to display a start menu?
If you think that the boot sequence is all about calculations, then you're not really qualified to comment on boot times.
> I don't care for technical explainations of hardware or operating systems.
Wow, did this fail to surprise me. Of course you don't care for technical explanations, since they don't fit your simplistic worldview. Never mind that a hard drive takes almost five seconds from power-on just to spin up to operating speed, much less initialize its own hardware and move the heads to gather the data off the platters to start the machine. Never mind that network discovery takes more than five seconds just to start transmitting, much less get a meaningful response and negotiate the settings that will allow it to play well with the rest of the machines on the LAN. Never mind that most of the boot sequence up to loading the OS ignores the processor entirely, so calcs per second is meaningless to the process. Never mind that the amount of data to produce a meaningful "desktop" can't be loaded from any medium but RAM in five seconds. And so on. Sticking your fingers in your ears doesn't actually fix any of these problems.
> Engineers who say a computer cannot start in five seconds are lazy or lying!
I've never met an engineer who would claim a computer can't boot in five seconds. That's not what you want. You want a garden-variety PC running Windows and costing less than US$2,000 that will boot in less than five seconds, and that's never going to happen. There are plenty of computers that boot in less than five seconds. The computer in your car starts in less than one second. The problem is, if you want a computer capable of very complex tasks (like a desktop-based consumer operating system and a lot of storage space) that's lightning-fast, you'll need to get out your wallet. A PC running Windows off of a Flash ROM with all solid state storage (say, fifty or sixty gigabytes of RAM) that's never going to change hardware can be built. It'll cost an appalling amount of money, but it'll boot Windows in seconds, and will actually work pretty darn quick. If you want a computer that performs like a Ferarri, you can't expect to pay Ford prices for it. Until you're ready to pay the price for that, you really should reconsider bitching about a problem that you could solve if only you'd be willing to put your money where your mouth is.
> Today I have an HP Jornada 820 built in 1999. It runs Windows CE, and it turns on faster than anything. You hit the on/off button and you are either on or off just like that. --Best of all, it holds open all of your documents and programs exactly as you left them. I feel confident not saving stuff because it's so rock-steady reliable. The little critter is run on Flash memory; no hard drives.
Here's the lesson for the day for using palmtop devices: they eat very little power. The reason it shuts down and starts again so fast is that it doesn't reboot, and it saves all of the RAM with battery power, so it can instantly resume when you wake it up. To show you what I mean, open a few apps or a document, then turn it off. Next, take out the batteries (including the button battery). Count to twenty, put the batteries back in, turn it on, and tell me what's happened to your apps and documents. I know what will happen, since I've done it myself. Functionally, you can replicate the performance of your Jornada by switching off the monitor of your PC, then pretend you've actually shut it off.
Of course, the other side of this is there is no hardware upgrade of any kind available for your Jornada, either. If you think it's as flexible as your PC, try upgrading the video processor. Or the internal RAM. Or add sound to it. Put in a DVD player. I think you get the point, eh? As someone else stated, that's why the TRS-80 started instantly. As they didn't state, getting a ready prompt on the TRS-80 meant you could do precisely nothing with it. Any program you wanted to use required that you load it off a tape, or have a cartridge preinserted. If your PC was a guaranteed hardware state, couldn't be changed, and started only to the point where you had to tell it to load anything useful (even the GUI), it'd start pretty fast.
Anyway, the short story here is that your PC is much more complex than the devices you compared it to, it's much more flexible in terms of hardware, and you expect it to do a whole lot more right off the boot sequence than those other devices. The price to be paid is that it takes longer to start than those other devices.
> I don't know, but I suspect that if engineers had their act together and were not constrained by the ridiculous way of doing things which are currently in place, we'd have much better machines available.
There's a company that did this, to a greater extent than most. Apple computers are quite famous for hardware that just works, for laptops that can sleep for a week and still come back in seconds, and for reliability against data loss. The price is, well, the price. Because Apple builds (or must approve) all of the hardware, they cost more than a PC does, and there's not as much stuff written for them since they have a smaller market share. One of the big things that PC makers and Microsoft have in their favor is a huge variety of hardware and software. The big problem is exactly the same thing, in that this huge variety of stuff has to interoperate, and solving those interoperability issues (at least for hardware) takes time at boot.
> Of course, the problem with that proposal is the stooopid computers don't have hard power switches -- the "power" switch is just a signal to the same stooopid software that's causing you this grief in the first place.
Just a quick note - most power switches on newer PCs can be used for hard power-offs. It's most likely a BIOS setting that tells it to reboot on power flash, but if you want to test this, get your computer to a safe spot, then press and hold the power switch. Don't relent if the OS says something about receiving a signal to shut down gracefully, keep holding it. After five to eight seconds, the system should drop dead like you pulled the plug. It's technically not instant, but less than ten seconds is close enough for most.
> Well no "three men" EVER produced a baby. AFAIK it has *always* been ONE male and ONE female that make a baby.
Wasn't Jesus supposed to be born of a virgin (wink)? Sure, biologically, babies are made by one man and one woman. But see, we're not discussing biology, we're discussing childrearing.
> Since that is so, then why is it so unreasonable for this baby-making process to also extend to that baby's later development and life?
It's not unreasonable, and in fact a lot of folks raise their own children. Again, that's not what we're discussing. What we're discussing is whether a biological mother and father pair is necessarily and in all cases better than any other possibility for raising children.
> Of course there can be input from other members of a community, but the primary responsibility for child raising is on the same two people who produced that child in the first place. This has been mainstream in the human race for millennia.
Again, I don't disagree that people are responsible for the kids they bring into the world. But once again, that's not what we're discussing. What we're discussing is the cases where a mother and father pair are not raising the child for whatever reason (including personal preference) and whether that means the child is worse off than if the mother/father pair was doing the raising. As long as the responsibility for the child's care is chosen and settled, I don't agree that mother/father is always better than alternatives, even those alternatives where one (or both) of the child's biological parents are not doing the raising.
> Anything else is against the Creator's intent and is an unnatural modern aberration.
Arguments that require agreement on both sides about philosophical issues tend to stray from logic. If you're arguing from faith, it's very disingenuous of you to pretend that you're doing anything else. You should have said that you're basing your arguments on Biblical pretexts from the start so I could have saved my time trying to debate you on your religious beliefs.
> We are seeing the results of this breakdown of what God intended in the decay of our educational system now and will see it in the rest of society later. God is not mocked. Whatever a man sows, he shall also reap. That is an ancient ironclad law that modern man and his ways cannot circumvent. The reaping has begun!
See above. You sound like a Billy Graham wannabe, and you're not nearly as skilled at it as he is.
Slashdot Mirror
> This is to further drive the point home about how stupid you are by not learning another language.
I know another language. It's just not French.
Virg
> Once they've got that CS degree -- the one that they were so sure would give them a free ride to a six-figure salary -- they're not too likely to wad it up, throw it in the trash, and go be a schoolteacher. Right?
If they aren't good at programming, and it's bad enough that this is obvious from a job interview, then they need to revisit their qualifications. Sure, they likely won't wad up the CS degree and do something unrelated, but reminding them that not all CS people need to get jobs as programmers might be a good push in the right direction. After all, there are schoolteachers that teach about computers, for example. Making that prospective employee beat his head against a wall that's not going to fall down when a nudge around the corner might lead to daylight is a waste of everyone's time.
Virg
> I have to say it in english, because you yankees are too stupid to learn another language.
Since when does any true Quebecois give a toss about whether or not the target of his disdain can understand him? I've run into plenty of you who can speak English perfectly well and simply refuse.
Virg
You're arguing against the idea of edge cases by arguing that your kids might lose out on the returns from your posthumous memoirs? How is that not also an edge case? Again, it would require that a book deal be in the offing (a vanishingly small proposition) and that any secrets you have are bad enough to sour the deal. You'll have to pardon me for not thinking this is a compelling addition to your original argument.
Virg
> The administrator account is for ... ADMINISTRATION .. not normal running of applications and games, once your product is installed, it's got NO REASON to leach for admin rights.
I know, I know, this is Slashdot, but you didn't RTFA, did you? The developer in question is complaining that casual, downloadable games are going to be taking it on the chin with Vista. The problem is that a game can be built with security in mind, it can be made never to need admin access rights even to install, and Vista will still pitch a fit and a bunch of warnings about installing it. For the average end user who uses downloadables, they're not going to understand that Vista is going berserk just because it's told to go berserk any time a non-admin tries to install anything, they going to think that Vista is going berserk because there's a legitimate problem. In XP, this problem could be avoided (albeit by the bad methodology of giving the end user the admin account) but in Vista it's not possible to turn off the warnings even if there's no reason to have them.
Virg
> Logicly thinking, it is more deeper then that.
Notwithstanding that your post is about an amazingly unlikely edge case, this sentence alone is enough to turn me off. Sense the irony here?
Seriously, though, the likelihood that your affairs are so valuable that it's important to get your knowledge base publicized but so embarassing that those discoveries are going to prevent it is so small that considering it in a deadman switch plan is not worth the effort. I'm with the OP in this. If your porn collection (or whatever) gets found after you're dead, it's unlikely to be so damaging that you need to plan for its destruction in the event of your incapacitation.
Virg
> This totally misses the point. That second car in the garage doesn't just fall apart.
His point is that, to some extent, that second car does indeed "fall apart" (cars left sitting for long periods do tend to deteriorate unless effort is expended to prevent it), and on top of that the part you failed to address is that the standing cost of a second vehicle is not zero. You actually have to buy or finance the second vehicle to start, you can't insure a vehicle "only when you drive it", and you need to keep it somewhere which is a bite for some folks in terms of garage or driveway space. At the extreme, in an urban center you'd need to pay a rather exhorbitant parking cost to have two vehicles (and that's not just in a major city, there are plenty of people who use on-the-street parking for whom mass transit isn't an option for commuting).
Virg
> There was talk of running the CAT 5 across the street alongside the power lines, however it never happened.
Yikes! You'd have learned a hard lesson in induction there, and perhaps also in recovery after a fire.
Virg
Sad, but at the same time it's not so sad. The problem stems from the fact that it causes physical harm and isn't discriminate. For example, what if a police officer commandeered the car for official use? Sure, it's mighty rare, but at the same time you'd injure someone who wasn't breaking the law. What if you forgot to notify someone you loaned the car to, or your car was being towed for illegal parking and the tow truck operator sat down to take off the parking brake? The legal issue with booby traps in cars that cause harm are that they're dangerous to people who cannot reasonably be considered criminals. Honestly, even I have walked up to a car that I thought was mine and only realized I'd made a mistake when the ignition key wouldn't work. This knife would have injured me for an honest mistake, and the law does not consider that reasonable to protect a car from theft. A car alarm that makes noise doesn't do any permanent harm, but a knife in the butt could conceivably be fatal (femoral arteries are nearby).
Virg
> How now having a torque measure makes the jet engine any less useful is a mystery. Some applications need torque, others thrust.
This goes to the heart of it, so I need only address this. Ships propel themselves by twisting a screw in the water. Jet engines are badly suited to this task compared to Diesel engines, and moving a ship by pushing it above water is very inefficient compared to twisting a screw. Since we're discussing applications involving moving a container ship on the ocean, the argument stands. Sure, there are many applications where a jet engine would be better, but they would be offtopic, since we're discussing an engine specifically designed to move a ship.
> Sorry, but planes need a lot of power: for speed you need power.
My second point does derive from the first, remember. While saying that planes need only speed is a semantic point (you're right that power is necessary to move a plane forward) I will say in my weak defense that a plane doesn't necessarily need to be moving forward to fly. Having watched a Piper two-seater "flying" like a kite in a gale force wind at an airport near my house, I can say that it's so. With tongue in cheek.
Virg
> But if god is directly involved they wouldn't need the grail to achieve immortality.
Oh, come on, this is too easy. It's simple to show that God grants immortality by route of the grail, and thereby imposes the limitation. If you want to live forever, you must do it in that cave in perpetual worship, because immortality means drinking regularly from the grail and the grail can't leave the cave. Seems simple enough in a religion that emphasizes that immortality is for the afterlife, not this life. Again, the great seal is just an indicator, not anything to do with the power of the grail.
This movie was positively cratered with plot holes, but this isn't one of them. If you want to jump on anything about the grail's resting place, try the concept that there are enough crescent-shaped valleys south of cities in the Middle East that a thousand years of searching (including the knowledge of the map with no names) couldn't turn up the right one until Dr. Jones figured out the name of the city.
Virg
> River Phoenix signing up as Indy's son? He did a good job in the last movie. Is he even available?
Well, there are those who think Harrison Ford will look like the undead, so what diff?
Virg
P.S. In case you're serious, River Phoenix is a little too dead to take the role.
> Which leaves a very big plot hole on who made the great seal and what is it?
I think you're missing out on the whole "Power of God" thing here. Just to pull something from my nethers, I'd say that the folks who set up the place (the knights who found it) got a vision from God to set up a place for the grail and make a seal on the ground to mark the boundary. The seal itself isn't the boundary, just like a road cone isn't the pothole that it marks. The seal just shows mortals where the line is. As to moving into the place and living forever, it's an artifact from God, so it stands to reason that if you try to find a loophole but you're not devoutly religious, God would just pull the plug on you anyway.
Virg
> If a cylinder block always beats a jet engine in fuel efficiency, those 'jet' airliners would have a different name.
The other response addressed a lot of this, but I'll toss in that there are two things that change considerations for jet engines versus Diesels, and both point toward jet engines for aircraft. Firstly, planes don't need torque, they only need thrust. Jet engines are great for generating thrust, not so good at torque. Second (which derives from the first) planes need speed, not really power. Both is handy, but if it was economical to build rail guns to get planes off the ground they'd do it. Speed is king, since it's the forward motion (and only the forward motion) that keeps it aloft.
Both of these benefits are lost on a huge oceangoing vessel. These vessels need a huge amount of torque to drive the screws, and speed is irrelevant after a certain (low) amount. Therefore, jet engines would be very inefficient for these applications.
Virg
Well, no.
Truck: 12,000 HP per engine times 3 = 36,000 HP.
Wartsila engine: 7780 HP per cylinder times 14 (for the largest) = 108,920 HP.
Why do you think that your truck even comes close to the output of this monster?
Virg
> Okay, for my first order I'd like a copy of all the books from the Library at Alexandria please.
Well, that'd be about three books total. Most of the writings in that library were on scrolls.
Virg
> A boot ROM with Windows and Office on it would be sufficent for many people.
You know, I've been thinking this for quite a few years. The problems are there to be dealt with (patches would be tough, and satellite functionality would need to be incorporated like add-ons for printers and detachables), but I've always thought that there's got to be a market out there for this sort of thing that isn't just palmtop users.
I had thought this (cookie-cutter machine with modded Windows) was going to be the approach that Wal-Mart took when it started offering cheap PCs, but it didn't work out that way.
Virg
> i still think its a good place to start though
No need to think, or start. It's been done quite a bit. Virtually every palmtop and PDA computer built today does exactly this, because the non-changeability of the hardware makes it possible. There are palmtops today that can stand in for a bargain-basement laptop.
Now, building a PC with Windows that does this is virtually impossible, just because the OS is closed-source and is programmed to do stuff even if it's not necessary. For example, there's no way to tell Windows not to check for plug-and-play hardware on boot, even if you know there will never be a hardware change. Using Linux, however, it's more possible, because the kernel can be seriously hacked to remove anything that's even remotely extraneous, and if you know exactly what needs to happen and what doesn't, you can save time left and right. I built a custom monolithic kernel for a simple Intel-based PC once that booted Red Hat 9 from the end of POST to the login prompt in twelve seconds, because I cut it to the bone. It couldn't cope with even the slightest hardware change, but that wasn't a concern since it was just for kernel building practice. The simple answer is that it's doable, but it takes an investment of time, money or both to make it so.
I do still adore my '64, though. LOAD "*",8,1 FTW.
Virg
By the same token, you could build a boot ROM that you could plug into a slot on a PC that would launch an application (be it game or programming IDE) without any other OS, and boot your PC off it. Remember, though, that if you wanted to switch to a different app, you'd have to power down the C64 and pull the cartridge. Most people want their PC to be more flexible than that.
Virg
> My point is that if Palm can do it on such limited hardware with a RISC chip emulating a 68000, why the heck can't Windows and/or Linux do the same on much more powerful machines.
You answered your own question. It's the "limited hardware" that matters. If every PC was exactly (and I mean exactly the same), Windows or Linux could be built to boot like lightning. Also, your palmtop doesn't boot off of a hard drive even if it has a microdrive installed, and again, the OS can load REALLY fast if it's coming off of ROM or flash. Lastly, your palmtop doesn't shut off when you switch it off. To test its cold start capacity like a PC, shut it off and pull the batteries, then put them back and turn it on. Sure, the desktop shows fast (see above for loading from ROM) but anything you had open is gone, like a PC.
Virg
Nice thought, but what could you do from the prompt that appeared when you switched it on? You can't compare that to booting a machine to the point of a functional desktop. Also, those machines didn't have hard drives nor any changeable hardware. Again, not a fair comparison.
Virg
> Are you telling me it takes 60 billion calculations to display a start menu?
If you think that the boot sequence is all about calculations, then you're not really qualified to comment on boot times.
> I don't care for technical explainations of hardware or operating systems.
Wow, did this fail to surprise me. Of course you don't care for technical explanations, since they don't fit your simplistic worldview. Never mind that a hard drive takes almost five seconds from power-on just to spin up to operating speed, much less initialize its own hardware and move the heads to gather the data off the platters to start the machine. Never mind that network discovery takes more than five seconds just to start transmitting, much less get a meaningful response and negotiate the settings that will allow it to play well with the rest of the machines on the LAN. Never mind that most of the boot sequence up to loading the OS ignores the processor entirely, so calcs per second is meaningless to the process. Never mind that the amount of data to produce a meaningful "desktop" can't be loaded from any medium but RAM in five seconds. And so on. Sticking your fingers in your ears doesn't actually fix any of these problems.
> Engineers who say a computer cannot start in five seconds are lazy or lying!
I've never met an engineer who would claim a computer can't boot in five seconds. That's not what you want. You want a garden-variety PC running Windows and costing less than US$2,000 that will boot in less than five seconds, and that's never going to happen. There are plenty of computers that boot in less than five seconds. The computer in your car starts in less than one second. The problem is, if you want a computer capable of very complex tasks (like a desktop-based consumer operating system and a lot of storage space) that's lightning-fast, you'll need to get out your wallet. A PC running Windows off of a Flash ROM with all solid state storage (say, fifty or sixty gigabytes of RAM) that's never going to change hardware can be built. It'll cost an appalling amount of money, but it'll boot Windows in seconds, and will actually work pretty darn quick. If you want a computer that performs like a Ferarri, you can't expect to pay Ford prices for it. Until you're ready to pay the price for that, you really should reconsider bitching about a problem that you could solve if only you'd be willing to put your money where your mouth is.
Virg
> Today I have an HP Jornada 820 built in 1999. It runs Windows CE, and it turns on faster than anything. You hit the on/off button and you are either on or off just like that. --Best of all, it holds open all of your documents and programs exactly as you left them. I feel confident not saving stuff because it's so rock-steady reliable. The little critter is run on Flash memory; no hard drives.
Here's the lesson for the day for using palmtop devices: they eat very little power. The reason it shuts down and starts again so fast is that it doesn't reboot, and it saves all of the RAM with battery power, so it can instantly resume when you wake it up. To show you what I mean, open a few apps or a document, then turn it off. Next, take out the batteries (including the button battery). Count to twenty, put the batteries back in, turn it on, and tell me what's happened to your apps and documents. I know what will happen, since I've done it myself. Functionally, you can replicate the performance of your Jornada by switching off the monitor of your PC, then pretend you've actually shut it off.
Of course, the other side of this is there is no hardware upgrade of any kind available for your Jornada, either. If you think it's as flexible as your PC, try upgrading the video processor. Or the internal RAM. Or add sound to it. Put in a DVD player. I think you get the point, eh? As someone else stated, that's why the TRS-80 started instantly. As they didn't state, getting a ready prompt on the TRS-80 meant you could do precisely nothing with it. Any program you wanted to use required that you load it off a tape, or have a cartridge preinserted. If your PC was a guaranteed hardware state, couldn't be changed, and started only to the point where you had to tell it to load anything useful (even the GUI), it'd start pretty fast.
Anyway, the short story here is that your PC is much more complex than the devices you compared it to, it's much more flexible in terms of hardware, and you expect it to do a whole lot more right off the boot sequence than those other devices. The price to be paid is that it takes longer to start than those other devices.
> I don't know, but I suspect that if engineers had their act together and were not constrained by the ridiculous way of doing things which are currently in place, we'd have much better machines available.
There's a company that did this, to a greater extent than most. Apple computers are quite famous for hardware that just works, for laptops that can sleep for a week and still come back in seconds, and for reliability against data loss. The price is, well, the price. Because Apple builds (or must approve) all of the hardware, they cost more than a PC does, and there's not as much stuff written for them since they have a smaller market share. One of the big things that PC makers and Microsoft have in their favor is a huge variety of hardware and software. The big problem is exactly the same thing, in that this huge variety of stuff has to interoperate, and solving those interoperability issues (at least for hardware) takes time at boot.
Virg
> Of course, the problem with that proposal is the stooopid computers don't have hard power switches -- the "power" switch is just a signal to the same stooopid software that's causing you this grief in the first place.
Just a quick note - most power switches on newer PCs can be used for hard power-offs. It's most likely a BIOS setting that tells it to reboot on power flash, but if you want to test this, get your computer to a safe spot, then press and hold the power switch. Don't relent if the OS says something about receiving a signal to shut down gracefully, keep holding it. After five to eight seconds, the system should drop dead like you pulled the plug. It's technically not instant, but less than ten seconds is close enough for most.
Virg
> Well no "three men" EVER produced a baby. AFAIK it has *always* been ONE male and ONE female that make a baby.
Wasn't Jesus supposed to be born of a virgin (wink)? Sure, biologically, babies are made by one man and one woman. But see, we're not discussing biology, we're discussing childrearing.
> Since that is so, then why is it so unreasonable for this baby-making process to also extend to that baby's later development and life?
It's not unreasonable, and in fact a lot of folks raise their own children. Again, that's not what we're discussing. What we're discussing is whether a biological mother and father pair is necessarily and in all cases better than any other possibility for raising children.
> Of course there can be input from other members of a community, but the primary responsibility for child raising is on the same two people who produced that child in the first place. This has been mainstream in the human race for millennia.
Again, I don't disagree that people are responsible for the kids they bring into the world. But once again, that's not what we're discussing. What we're discussing is the cases where a mother and father pair are not raising the child for whatever reason (including personal preference) and whether that means the child is worse off than if the mother/father pair was doing the raising. As long as the responsibility for the child's care is chosen and settled, I don't agree that mother/father is always better than alternatives, even those alternatives where one (or both) of the child's biological parents are not doing the raising.
> Anything else is against the Creator's intent and is an unnatural modern aberration.
Arguments that require agreement on both sides about philosophical issues tend to stray from logic. If you're arguing from faith, it's very disingenuous of you to pretend that you're doing anything else. You should have said that you're basing your arguments on Biblical pretexts from the start so I could have saved my time trying to debate you on your religious beliefs.
> We are seeing the results of this breakdown of what God intended in the decay of our educational system now and will see it in the rest of society later. God is not mocked. Whatever a man sows, he shall also reap. That is an ancient ironclad law that modern man and his ways cannot circumvent. The reaping has begun!
See above. You sound like a Billy Graham wannabe, and you're not nearly as skilled at it as he is.
Virg