last time I checked (yesterday actually) IE had a 86% market share. I'm running a Windows 2000 server. If your browsers don't implement the div tag with css style codes properly, ain't my fault =).
But in any case, I will attempt to correct the problem. Since it's just cosmetic, it's not very high on my priority list =(.
I have been shutting down more lately due to power costs and wanting to do my part to conserve energy. In any case, I am more interested in the laptop end of things. Virtually no one leaves a laptop up and running all the time.
Did you actually stop to figure out the costs of running your computer 24/7? My friend gave me the same argument, and I calculated that the computer itself, to run 24/7, amounted to about $3USD/mo.:)
As for the laptop, no, but you have 2 easy options : suspend and hibernate. Almost all laptops support both, and have for many years now, and I always just put my laptop on suspend mode, and in the unlikely event that it will be off for more than a day, or away from a power outlet for more than a day, I'll just hibernate it.
This may be a crazy question, but how hard would it be to write an MP3 player into the bios? Or even just something that do simple bios stuff, then load the MP3 player code off the start of the hard disk or CD, then just have a simple MP3 player interface (for example, with a numeric keypad to change songs)?
NVRam is not "dirt fscking" or any other kind of cheap. Also, RAM for embedded devices is not always cheap like it is for consumer devices.
The comment I was replying to was that the person had a half gig in their home machine, and since 128MB PC133 is $18.95 at the corner store now, fully populating your motherboard isn't expensive AT ALL. I can't believe how fast and quickly memory prices have fallen!! Can anyone else remember when it was like $30/MB back with SIMMs? Then with the DIMM price hike? Damn... So yes, SDRAM is dirt cheap right now =) Kinda pisses me off. About a year ago I paid $400 for 256MB RDRAM off ebay for my P4. Now it's like $81 for the same amount.
I have a notebook I use all the time with only 16MB. It's nothing like "totally" stripped down.
Trimmed, as you'd do for any notebook install, but not as much as you seem to think. The same notebook runs windows95 just fine too.
And what do you run on it? No, seriously. I want to know what you can run on a 16MB laptop, deemed "usable". If you're referring to maybe wordpad or 1 small old application, ok sure. But I remember with 32MB on a laptop trying to run Word with Win95 and it choked bigtime. Took forever to load, was ok to use provided that I didn't try to use any other application at the same time.
I think the point of this entire thread was that they were talking about doing this to your normal home machine to speed up booting time. I'm just not certain that it wouldn't be a lot easier, and no slower, to just put that block at the beginning of the hard drive and load it from a very simple bios. This way you're unlimited as to what you can do, you don't have to flash to test anything, and since you have to read stuff off disk anyways sooner-or-later during the bootprocess, do it all at once at the beginning and grab your bootstrap/ramimage at the same time.
Then the Great Programmer leaned back in his executive chair, and gazed upon the newborn Universe.
And frowned. He knew those sentient humans would be a problem. Even after He had sweated over a hot terminal for thirteen days, those humans were ungrateful. They called their place of existence the "Universe", not the "Great Programmer/Universe".
yeah, Windows XP monitors file access on bootup and rearranges files loaded on bootup in the same order that they're loaded on the hard drive, so after a few boots your system actually boots quite a bit faster, it's impressive. One of those "Duh, why didn't we think of that before??" =)
Compared to your boot process there, what's the difference between that and just a
* Spin disk at power on
* load simple BIOS that loads and uncompresses first xMB off the HD into ram
* execute from extracted.
I don't think that'd be much slower (if any slower at all, since you have to do the disk read anyways), but this way you don't have to worry about the whole BIOS thing.
Here's another silly question. Can't you postpone most of the BIOS checks to happen after the kernel has started loading? I.e. once you've decompressed the root kernel image from the HD into memory and the base kernel is loaded, do some of the less-important BIOS checks concurrently then (i.e. upper range memory check, floppy seek, etc, etc).
with memory being DIRT FSCKING CHEAP... half gig isn't that out-of-this-world anymore, eh?? =)
Umm, yes, a totally stripped down and trimmed version of linux could run in 16MB, but a fully fledged and usable version? I doubt if it could fit in 16MB. Do a memory dump sometime to see how much memory your system is using right after bootup, I'd be interested to see actually.
You can't just do that load-a-memory-image trick because all of the devices in the system need to be in the exact same state that the drivers think that they are in. Thus if you were to just load a memory image, all of the drivers in the system must support hot-reset, including kernel drivers. Windows 2000 finally supports that (hibernate mode), so you could hypothetically boot up, immediately hibernate, and then just always use that hibernate restore. that would speed things up considerably. My system uses about 70MB total on boot (but I'm sure that if they were smart and didn't load stuff that "might be used soon" it could be 40MB. Compressed that's easily 30MB which is just a second or 2 to load off the disk. That's gotta be faster than doing a full boot all the time.
Anyways, it's not just as easy as it sounds. I don't think linux has it yet, does it? Is it in the works? Do linux users even want it?
I don't know why they don't implement that as a standard feature, but I'm sure they have their reasons.
aah ok, the problem isn't negative numbers, the problem is that you browser doesn't render DIVs correctly... I use a div for the graph with a height setting corrosponding to how high the graph should be (concept!:>).. I had this problem on mozilla to, it has a minimum height apparently, and if you specify less than that height it displays the box much bigger than necessary. Try to load it with IE or netscape (dunno about the latter, but I know that it works in IE). Thanks for the feedback thou =)
Umm, I just ran it and it reported fine, no negative numbers.
Maybe it can't hold more than one person accessing it at once =). It wasn't exactly written to be robust and hold load. I dunno, I figured that it wouldn't be around for more than a few days so I didn't exactly code perfect...
What if you installed a sort of "sleep" mode, or "suspend" mode? What type of hardware setup are you using anyways? I just mounted a laptop in my front (removable) with a GPS unit in the pcmcia slot and kept it always-on basically, sleep mode and plugged in inside. The GPS is really cool, too bad I don't have any decent mapping software to with it (I live in Canada).
you think that you can fit everything that you need for a linux or windows bootup in 8MB of flash? You think that you can fit BOTH of them?
The linux kernel is small, yes, but that's because all of the needed modules and drivers aren't in it! They're loaded on the hard drive.
Not to mention that flash is very slow... and expensive...
You'd be better off to store a memory image of a booted kernel at the beginning of your hard drive, along with all necessary information to initialize all of the hardware. Just have a small bootstrap/lilo type of thing that quickly loads up enough to access the hard drive and file system, then load the rest into memory directly, then initialize the hardware.
But I reboot so infrequently that it doesn't really matter how long it takes. Hell, I have my system set to do a full memory check on bootup. It takes an extra 45 seconds, so what?
And stop bashing windows... My W2K Server has been up for 145 days now and counting. Check it out along with CodeRedII attack info realtime (yeah, shameless plug) =>
Umm, anything like a brake and you do NOT WANT a power cycle. If that happens, you're toast. You go out of your way in any CRITICAL embedded system to ensure that you NEVER NEED TO CYCLE the power. So a 2 or 3 second boottime is negligable.
In any serious embedded device you want to make sure that you never never never need to reboot the device. So I think that the only cases when boot-time would be critical is things that need to be active within instants after a poweron. Things like power backup systems or... I dunno. maybe bad example, but I can't think of much where the difference between a.8 and 3 second POST time is going to be a big deal at all.
{user sees Sarge}
{user says "jump"}
User eats Sarge's rocket
{User is reincarnated}
User eats Sarge's rocket
{User is reincarnated}
{User jumps}
---
But in all seriousness, I've seen very little improvement between the P200 version and the current version that can run on processors 4x faster. Shouldn't there be a MASSIVE improvement by now? What's holding it up?
yeah, the only thing that I have ever found useful about voice recognition is when I'm typing a letter or something with a LOT of text, and even then it is almost faster to type it out by hand because you wind up with saying "scratch" every second word. Mind you, last time I've tried it was in the P200 days. But I was really excpecting it to be practically part of the OS by now, with this much computing power, why isn't it? Why isn't there any good voice recognition software out?
Basically all it is is a smart card on your credit card, that contains all of the info that is on the mag stripe of the card. The only difference is that you can insert the card into a reader (end first, and only about 2" to get the chip in), it will prompt you for a pin code, and you can enter it, then the terminal has the info to make the purchase. It's not much different than normal magstripe readers, except that it has the potential in the future to be a lot neater (like replace cash entirely). It can also be used for loyalty programs (stores points on the card, for example). As for the "much more secure", that's bullshit. The information that is on the card is kept hidden and unaccessable, that's correct. It cannot be modified, that's correct. You cannot copy the card, that's correct. But on your PC any information must be passed into the browser, and over the internet, and thus it's just as vulnerable as typing it in yourself.
In the future, you will be able to do things like have a remote site talk directly to the chip on the card, using built in encryption that will be entirely secure, as well as do neat things like authorize payments from your bank, cash transfers, withdrawing money from your bank over the internet onto your card (don't need to go to an ABM anymore!) Unfortunately people aren't yet comfortable with this technology as a whole, and thus the technology trials proved that although the technology works and is available, nobody wanted to use them. Perhaps in another 3 or 4 years.
OTOH, Europe has had smart chips in their credit cards for years now, to the point at which vendors get confused when you pass them a normal mag-stripe-only credit card (I'm not joking, I've had my card refused several times because they couldn't figure out how to use it). Similarly all bank cards here have a smart card in them. It's a lot more secure for banking because you can't copy the card just by knowing the number on the card and the pin number. In North America it has happened several times where people can capture the pin code and card number, make a new card, go up to some banking machine and withdrawl money, and guess what, the legitimate card owner gets fsck'ed over because there's no protection against that. Common to happen is a video camera placed above the keypad somewhere (For example, there was a case in a supermarket where some guy placed a camera with a zoom lens in the rafters of the roof just above a checkout, had it focused on the pinpad, the camera captured the card number visually, and watched you punch in the number. He got away with it for a few months until they traced down where this was happening and finally caught him. Popular also is to put a fake ABM in a parking lot somewhere, and have it prompt you for your card and pin number, then just print out "Sorry, network failure" message, at which point you go away grumbling but they now have your card/pin... I don't use interact anymore because it is HORRIBLY insecure. Credit cards however still are insecure, but the credit card company takes the loss instead of you =)...
Oh, really? So if I have a *movie trailer*, or home videos or anything else that can be packaged in video form on computers, it's automatically pirating? From what you say, that means that all digital video is pirating?
Slashdot Mirror
if we don't have a problem now, why fix it?
(ahem)
"640 kB should be enough for everybody"
"I see a worldwide market for 5, maybe 6 computers"
and one that I can only assume:
"yeah, use 2 digits for the year. Bah, the year 2000 is 20 years away, nobody will be using this stuff then anyways"
And besides, if you wait until the problem is upon us, it'll be too late to fix it.
last time I checked (yesterday actually) IE had a 86% market share. I'm running a Windows 2000 server. If your browsers don't implement the div tag with css style codes properly, ain't my fault =).
But in any case, I will attempt to correct the problem. Since it's just cosmetic, it's not very high on my priority list =(.
Thanks for the heads-up.
I have been shutting down more lately due to power costs and wanting to do my part to conserve energy. In any case, I am more interested in the laptop end of things. Virtually no one leaves a laptop up and running all the time.
:)
Did you actually stop to figure out the costs of running your computer 24/7? My friend gave me the same argument, and I calculated that the computer itself, to run 24/7, amounted to about $3USD/mo.
As for the laptop, no, but you have 2 easy options : suspend and hibernate. Almost all laptops support both, and have for many years now, and I always just put my laptop on suspend mode, and in the unlikely event that it will be off for more than a day, or away from a power outlet for more than a day, I'll just hibernate it.
Actually it was more of a "Here, let me twist that knife for you Rich..."
You know, they call that account the Anonymous Coward for a good reason.
This may be a crazy question, but how hard would it be to write an MP3 player into the bios? Or even just something that do simple bios stuff, then load the MP3 player code off the start of the hard disk or CD, then just have a simple MP3 player interface (for example, with a numeric keypad to change songs)?
NVRam is not "dirt fscking" or any other kind of cheap. Also, RAM for embedded devices is not always cheap like it is for consumer devices.
The comment I was replying to was that the person had a half gig in their home machine, and since 128MB PC133 is $18.95 at the corner store now, fully populating your motherboard isn't expensive AT ALL. I can't believe how fast and quickly memory prices have fallen!! Can anyone else remember when it was like $30/MB back with SIMMs? Then with the DIMM price hike? Damn... So yes, SDRAM is dirt cheap right now =) Kinda pisses me off. About a year ago I paid $400 for 256MB RDRAM off ebay for my P4. Now it's like $81 for the same amount.
I have a notebook I use all the time with only 16MB. It's nothing like "totally" stripped down.
Trimmed, as you'd do for any notebook install, but not as much as you seem to think. The same notebook runs windows95 just fine too.
And what do you run on it? No, seriously. I want to know what you can run on a 16MB laptop, deemed "usable". If you're referring to maybe wordpad or 1 small old application, ok sure. But I remember with 32MB on a laptop trying to run Word with Win95 and it choked bigtime. Took forever to load, was ok to use provided that I didn't try to use any other application at the same time.
I think the point of this entire thread was that they were talking about doing this to your normal home machine to speed up booting time. I'm just not certain that it wouldn't be a lot easier, and no slower, to just put that block at the beginning of the hard drive and load it from a very simple bios. This way you're unlimited as to what you can do, you don't have to flash to test anything, and since you have to read stuff off disk anyways sooner-or-later during the bootprocess, do it all at once at the beginning and grab your bootstrap/ramimage at the same time.
Then the Great Programmer leaned back in his executive chair, and gazed upon the newborn Universe.
And frowned. He knew those sentient humans would be a problem. Even after He had sweated over a hot terminal for thirteen days, those humans were ungrateful. They called their place of existence the "Universe", not the "Great Programmer/Universe".
Richard M Stallman, eat your heart out...!
yeah, Windows XP monitors file access on bootup and rearranges files loaded on bootup in the same order that they're loaded on the hard drive, so after a few boots your system actually boots quite a bit faster, it's impressive. One of those "Duh, why didn't we think of that before??" =)
Compared to your boot process there, what's the difference between that and just a
* Spin disk at power on
* load simple BIOS that loads and uncompresses first xMB off the HD into ram
* execute from extracted.
I don't think that'd be much slower (if any slower at all, since you have to do the disk read anyways), but this way you don't have to worry about the whole BIOS thing.
Here's another silly question. Can't you postpone most of the BIOS checks to happen after the kernel has started loading? I.e. once you've decompressed the root kernel image from the HD into memory and the base kernel is loaded, do some of the less-important BIOS checks concurrently then (i.e. upper range memory check, floppy seek, etc, etc).
OK, fair enough, but seriously then, what are some specific real-world applications of such a device?
OK, I stand corrected!! =)
But seriously then, what's the speed difference between that and just loading the image off the disk?
with memory being DIRT FSCKING CHEAP... half gig isn't that out-of-this-world anymore, eh?? =)
Umm, yes, a totally stripped down and trimmed version of linux could run in 16MB, but a fully fledged and usable version? I doubt if it could fit in 16MB. Do a memory dump sometime to see how much memory your system is using right after bootup, I'd be interested to see actually.
You can't just do that load-a-memory-image trick because all of the devices in the system need to be in the exact same state that the drivers think that they are in. Thus if you were to just load a memory image, all of the drivers in the system must support hot-reset, including kernel drivers. Windows 2000 finally supports that (hibernate mode), so you could hypothetically boot up, immediately hibernate, and then just always use that hibernate restore. that would speed things up considerably. My system uses about 70MB total on boot (but I'm sure that if they were smart and didn't load stuff that "might be used soon" it could be 40MB. Compressed that's easily 30MB which is just a second or 2 to load off the disk. That's gotta be faster than doing a full boot all the time.
Anyways, it's not just as easy as it sounds. I don't think linux has it yet, does it? Is it in the works? Do linux users even want it?
I don't know why they don't implement that as a standard feature, but I'm sure they have their reasons.
aah ok, the problem isn't negative numbers, the problem is that you browser doesn't render DIVs correctly... I use a div for the graph with a height setting corrosponding to how high the graph should be (concept! :>) .. I had this problem on mozilla to, it has a minimum height apparently, and if you specify less than that height it displays the box much bigger than necessary. Try to load it with IE or netscape (dunno about the latter, but I know that it works in IE). Thanks for the feedback thou =)
funny =)
Umm, I just ran it and it reported fine, no negative numbers.
Maybe it can't hold more than one person accessing it at once =). It wasn't exactly written to be robust and hold load. I dunno, I figured that it wouldn't be around for more than a few days so I didn't exactly code perfect...
What if you installed a sort of "sleep" mode, or "suspend" mode? What type of hardware setup are you using anyways? I just mounted a laptop in my front (removable) with a GPS unit in the pcmcia slot and kept it always-on basically, sleep mode and plugged in inside. The GPS is really cool, too bad I don't have any decent mapping software to with it (I live in Canada).
99.99999% uptime per year?
;)
3.15s/year downtime.
This is possible with a reboot? of any machine? Even if the post takes 0.8 seconds?
I think the only way to have that type of uptime is to not go down at all.
Or of course, you could say that you have a 99.99999% uptime (average, over 1000 years)
you think that you can fit everything that you need for a linux or windows bootup in 8MB of flash? You think that you can fit BOTH of them?
The linux kernel is small, yes, but that's because all of the needed modules and drivers aren't in it! They're loaded on the hard drive.
Not to mention that flash is very slow... and expensive...
You'd be better off to store a memory image of a booted kernel at the beginning of your hard drive, along with all necessary information to initialize all of the hardware. Just have a small bootstrap/lilo type of thing that quickly loads up enough to access the hard drive and file system, then load the rest into memory directly, then initialize the hardware.
But I reboot so infrequently that it doesn't really matter how long it takes. Hell, I have my system set to do a full memory check on bootup. It takes an extra 45 seconds, so what?
And stop bashing windows... My W2K Server has been up for 145 days now and counting. Check it out along with CodeRedII attack info realtime (yeah, shameless plug) =>
how long does your car mp3 player take to boot up that is due to POST time??
Umm, anything like a brake and you do NOT WANT a power cycle. If that happens, you're toast. You go out of your way in any CRITICAL embedded system to ensure that you NEVER NEED TO CYCLE the power. So a 2 or 3 second boottime is negligable.
... I dunno. maybe bad example, but I can't think of much where the difference between a .8 and 3 second POST time is going to be a big deal at all.
In any serious embedded device you want to make sure that you never never never need to reboot the device. So I think that the only cases when boot-time would be critical is things that need to be active within instants after a poweron. Things like power backup systems or
What's the point of running a server on a device that spends 99% of it's time not on a network?!
{user sees Sarge}
{user says "jump"}
User eats Sarge's rocket
{User is reincarnated}
User eats Sarge's rocket
{User is reincarnated}
{User jumps}
---
But in all seriousness, I've seen very little improvement between the P200 version and the current version that can run on processors 4x faster. Shouldn't there be a MASSIVE improvement by now? What's holding it up?
yeah, the only thing that I have ever found useful about voice recognition is when I'm typing a letter or something with a LOT of text, and even then it is almost faster to type it out by hand because you wind up with saying "scratch" every second word. Mind you, last time I've tried it was in the P200 days. But I was really excpecting it to be practically part of the OS by now, with this much computing power, why isn't it? Why isn't there any good voice recognition software out?
Hey, I work with that industry =)
Basically all it is is a smart card on your credit card, that contains all of the info that is on the mag stripe of the card. The only difference is that you can insert the card into a reader (end first, and only about 2" to get the chip in), it will prompt you for a pin code, and you can enter it, then the terminal has the info to make the purchase. It's not much different than normal magstripe readers, except that it has the potential in the future to be a lot neater (like replace cash entirely). It can also be used for loyalty programs (stores points on the card, for example). As for the "much more secure", that's bullshit. The information that is on the card is kept hidden and unaccessable, that's correct. It cannot be modified, that's correct. You cannot copy the card, that's correct. But on your PC any information must be passed into the browser, and over the internet, and thus it's just as vulnerable as typing it in yourself.
In the future, you will be able to do things like have a remote site talk directly to the chip on the card, using built in encryption that will be entirely secure, as well as do neat things like authorize payments from your bank, cash transfers, withdrawing money from your bank over the internet onto your card (don't need to go to an ABM anymore!) Unfortunately people aren't yet comfortable with this technology as a whole, and thus the technology trials proved that although the technology works and is available, nobody wanted to use them. Perhaps in another 3 or 4 years.
OTOH, Europe has had smart chips in their credit cards for years now, to the point at which vendors get confused when you pass them a normal mag-stripe-only credit card (I'm not joking, I've had my card refused several times because they couldn't figure out how to use it). Similarly all bank cards here have a smart card in them. It's a lot more secure for banking because you can't copy the card just by knowing the number on the card and the pin number. In North America it has happened several times where people can capture the pin code and card number, make a new card, go up to some banking machine and withdrawl money, and guess what, the legitimate card owner gets fsck'ed over because there's no protection against that. Common to happen is a video camera placed above the keypad somewhere (For example, there was a case in a supermarket where some guy placed a camera with a zoom lens in the rafters of the roof just above a checkout, had it focused on the pinpad, the camera captured the card number visually, and watched you punch in the number. He got away with it for a few months until they traced down where this was happening and finally caught him. Popular also is to put a fake ABM in a parking lot somewhere, and have it prompt you for your card and pin number, then just print out "Sorry, network failure" message, at which point you go away grumbling but they now have your card/pin... I don't use interact anymore because it is HORRIBLY insecure. Credit cards however still are insecure, but the credit card company takes the loss instead of you =)...
Oh, really? So if I have a *movie trailer*, or home videos or anything else that can be packaged in video form on computers, it's automatically pirating? From what you say, that means that all digital video is pirating?
Woah. Thanks for clearing that one up for me...
right, but do they force the cigarette in your mouth and light it for you?
Anyone who smokes knows the risks of smoking, this is no secret. If you still choose to do so, then that is your choice, out of your own free will.