Wouldn't it be possible to make a PSU that adjusts its power rating to what is required? It seems daft to have to get a PSU that only runs anywhere close to maximum capacity for a few seconds when spinning up drives at boot up, and then spends the rest of its time wasting electricity.
Why not have a 1kW PSU that can supply 1kW max, but draws 150W (or whatever you computer needs) the rest of the time?
Processors seem to be able to do this. Why not PSUs?
Won't this potentially start an arms race? Sure, it's only 2MHz now, but then the other mobo manufacturers may decide to add a 5MHz boost to put their boards back in front. Then ASUS will have to add a 10MHz boost, and so on.
I think the issue here isn't whether 2MHz is significant per se, but that it forces everyone to start to drift further and further away from the rated speed. Eventually this process is going to result in distortions that *do* matter.
You seem to be missing the fundamental point that most of the information in question came from Google itself.
If the boss of Smith and Wesson routinely got shot at by nutcases toting guns he sold them, then he might be a bit more careful about who his company sold guns to. As it is, they're probably rarely affected, so it's "not their problem" - the more they sell, the better.
In this case, Google is routinely hoovering up all the details of our lives, and all we can do is trust them because they're supposed to be the good guys, and the only assurance of that we have is their word. Sort of. Just exactly what does "do no evil" mean in the context of privacy issues anyhow?
Google has provided us with all sorts of wonderful facilities but they are long overdue in providing serious answers to privacy concerns. As a publicly traded company, it's about time they started acting like grown ups.
So far all attempts to get them to provide definitive answers to such questions have come to nothing, so eventually someone (CNet in this case) forced the issue by making it matter to them personally.
It had to come to this eventually. If you're doing something that affects millions of people, and any concerns they raise are just deflected with "na na na na na - I can't hear you", then sooner or later, somebody somewhere is going to have no option but to force you to just ANSWER THE FUCKING QUESTION.
Your own argument is actually in favour of the opposite position of the one you think it is - Google is ploughing ahead regardless, "just because they can".
I'd think that he'd be the favourite round these parts on the grounds that he has been a regular Linux columnist for the UK's Computer Shopper magazine, and is obviously au fait with the whole open source scene, judging by his website.
What the hell is it with this unelected bunch of goons? First they do their level best to introduce patents across the EU, despite the will of the (elected) parliament, now they're sticking their noses into another area they know bugger all about.
It really is high time that the EU Commission was given the boot.
And they wonder why people across the EU are jumping at the chance to say NO to the EU constitution, which cements the Commission into place...
How on earth did we get this bunch of cretins foisted upon us, and why aren't we the people of the EC allowed to say "actually, no, we don't want them, we never have"?
My memory may be going, but I seem to dimly recall that after this whole SCO fiasco erupted, a number of open-source projects put terms in their licenses that explicity forbid SCO from including them into any future SCO offerings.
Anyone else recall this? If so, wouldn't it be fun if it turns out that SCO's latest offering is illegally incorporating code it has no right to...
It was the earthquake that made me think of it - the thing is, the vertical movement due to the quake was small, so the huge movement of rock produced relatively little change in angular momentum.
If you elevated that rock all the way into space then you'd get a lot more change for a given mass.
But it would still require a really really large amount of rock.
Yep, once we get that space elevator working, we'll be able to ship huge amounts of rock up and down, adjusting the angular momentum of the Earth, and thus its spin rate...
I wonder just how much mass would be required to adjust the length of a day by the required fraction of a second per year?
Google exists almost entirely in the web sphere. As such, it's in their interests that the web is consistent and reliable. When you get people like MS who simply can't be bothered to fix or update their browsers, that hurts everyone.
So currently everyone has to jump through hoops coding both a standards compliant site, and also an IE compliant site. Most people haven't got a hope of persuading MS to fix their issues, so they just deal with it.
Google, on the other hand, is potentially big enough to say "why should *we* have to jump through hoops fixing MS issues? FU MS, *you* fix the issues."
So it's not about zealotry for a particular browser - it's about someone finally being big enough to drag MS into line.
As for how they'd actually handle it, granted, it might be a little tricky to win people over, but I daresay it could be done. Imagine that you've looking at Google maps or whatever with IE, and the display is messed up. Google have detected that you're using IE, so they've included a link at the bottom of the page "having problems with the display - click here".
That takes you to a note which reads something like the following:
"Google is always seeking to bring you the newest and best features of the web. Unfortunately, Microsoft appears to have ceased active development of their Internet Explorer web browser some years ago, and it does not support the latest features. Fortunately however, a number of free, up-to-date alternatives are available. Click here, here, or here"...
(Yes, I know IE7 is in development, but A) it won't be available to those of us not running XP, and B) may still contain plenty of issues.)
So your average person gets the message that "Google is recommending I switch browsers".
Who do you trust? Who does your boss trust? Even PHBs have certainly heard of Google.
Perhaps a more interesting question would be why they bothered to make it work with IE, rather than requiring IE to work with PNGs. How long is it before Google is strong enough, at least in the web sphere, to dictate terms to Microsoft?
Maybe they're there already - it's not implausible that they could release something that doesn't work properly with existing versions of IE, along with an explanatory note to upgrade to a working browser.
If they put in a direct link to Firefox say, the takeup could be huge, dwarfing the installed base to date. All of us here may know about all the alternative browsers, but your average joe doesn't - but if Google were to start pushing people towards them... now *that* would be news.
Why exactly is flash RAM slow? If it's because the circuitry for individual bits is slow to respond, then why can't the problem be fixed by parallelizing - either have multiple chips, or have multiple simultaneous accesses from each chip - or both.
Also, is flash RAM slow to read, or just to write? Because it's the former that's important in this case.
Some good points about changes made to the state of the OS once it's in use causing problems to a clean state hibernation restore, but I don't think they're insoluble.
The registry should really be a database file on disc. It still could be - I can see no reason why this couldn't happen transparently - the existing API calls for acessing it need not change. Who knows, maybe this is one of the killer features that MS has planned for Longhorn?...
Most configuration changes in windows itself are stored in the registry, so this should fix that problem.
If you have to install a driver you usually have to reboot anyhow, so no loss there. In any event, that's not a frequent occurrence.
The real problem would be configuration changes to things that have to be loaded during boot, but which aren't part of windows itself - ie: drivers. The simplest solution I can think of here is to simply detect if the config files for the device have changed and if so, do the full boot sequence rather than the fast boot sequence. But again, such changes would be relatively rare - you lose nothing by doing the full boot when forced to, but still stand to gain by doing a quick restore when you can.
Why assume that devices may have changed every time you boot, when 99 times out of a hundred they won't have on a typical machine?
The default position should be to assume that nothing has changed, as with hibernation. If a change is detected - any change - then do a full boot. Even for the one time when you have to "redo" the boot sequence, you still gain massively on the other 99 times.
If booting takes so long because of the monstrous amount of initialization necessary to wake up all the connected devices, how come restore from hibernate is so much faster?
For a really fast boot time, why not store the boot file in flash RAM?
Even if a modern OS has dumped 200 megs of stuff into RAM by the time it's finished booting, that's easily affordable at today's flash RAM prices. You could fit a 256 meg chip to the motherboard (which I'm sure both Apple and MS could mandate if they wanted). If for whatever reason more space was required, the overflow could be put on disc.
And since a boot is a fairly rare event, you don't have to worry about the maximum number of write cycles with flash RAM.
Surely the OS has to know what memory is in use, otherwise there would be chaos. How would it allocate blocks of memory if drivers were "secretly" allocating their own blocks?
As for detecting new hardware - that's such a rare event that it should be treated as an exception, rather than the norm. Most days I boot my computer, there's a marked absence of strange new hardware...
I've never understood why it takes so long to boot a computer. It takes far longer than the time necessary to transfer the actual amount of data that ends up in memory after the boot sequence.
Why not use something more like a resume from hibernation, where you just restore the contents of memory directly from the disc in one go and be done with it?
Actually using hibernation rather than booting is no good, becuase it only restores you to the state that your computer was in last time you used it, which might not be "clean". For example, if you had been running something with a memory leak, hibernation won't fix that.
But the solution is simple - instead of writing the hibernate data to disc just before you shut down, instead store it just after you've finished booting, so that you've got a "clean" system ready.
This way you get a "clean" system every time at the speed of a restore from hibernation. (And if something goes wrong, you still have the option to do a "full" boot.)
Some might say that you need to go through all the slow processing of a full boot in case anything's changed. Really? Restoring from hibernation seems to cope with that possibility.
More likely, most times, nothing will have changed. And for the times when it has, well, you do the extra configuration necessary after the restore - you're still no worse off.
So why are we still forced to sit through full boot cycles?
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Wouldn't it be possible to make a PSU that adjusts its power rating to what is required? It seems daft to have to get a PSU that only runs anywhere close to maximum capacity for a few seconds when spinning up drives at boot up, and then spends the rest of its time wasting electricity.
Why not have a 1kW PSU that can supply 1kW max, but draws 150W (or whatever you computer needs) the rest of the time?
Processors seem to be able to do this. Why not PSUs?
Cool! When you land, you can then play air hockey on the wings!
Won't this potentially start an arms race? Sure, it's only 2MHz now, but then the other mobo manufacturers may decide to add a 5MHz boost to put their boards back in front. Then ASUS will have to add a 10MHz boost, and so on.
I think the issue here isn't whether 2MHz is significant per se, but that it forces everyone to start to drift further and further away from the rated speed. Eventually this process is going to result in distortions that *do* matter.
Bollocks.
You seem to be missing the fundamental point that most of the information in question came from Google itself.
If the boss of Smith and Wesson routinely got shot at by nutcases toting guns he sold them, then he might be a bit more careful about who his company sold guns to. As it is, they're probably rarely affected, so it's "not their problem" - the more they sell, the better.
In this case, Google is routinely hoovering up all the details of our lives, and all we can do is trust them because they're supposed to be the good guys, and the only assurance of that we have is their word. Sort of. Just exactly what does "do no evil" mean in the context of privacy issues anyhow?
Google has provided us with all sorts of wonderful facilities but they are long overdue in providing serious answers to privacy concerns. As a publicly traded company, it's about time they started acting like grown ups.
So far all attempts to get them to provide definitive answers to such questions have come to nothing, so eventually someone (CNet in this case) forced the issue by making it matter to them personally.
It had to come to this eventually. If you're doing something that affects millions of people, and any concerns they raise are just deflected with "na na na na na - I can't hear you", then sooner or later, somebody somewhere is going to have no option but to force you to just ANSWER THE FUCKING QUESTION.
Your own argument is actually in favour of the opposite position of the one you think it is - Google is ploughing ahead regardless, "just because they can".
I'd think that he'd be the favourite round these parts on the grounds that he has been a regular Linux columnist for the UK's Computer Shopper magazine, and is obviously au fait with the whole open source scene, judging by his website.
What the hell is it with this unelected bunch of goons? First they do their level best to introduce patents across the EU, despite the will of the (elected) parliament, now they're sticking their noses into another area they know bugger all about.
It really is high time that the EU Commission was given the boot.
And they wonder why people across the EU are jumping at the chance to say NO to the EU constitution, which cements the Commission into place...
How on earth did we get this bunch of cretins foisted upon us, and why aren't we the people of the EC allowed to say "actually, no, we don't want them, we never have"?
Democracy? Pah!
Sure, Mac OS was a lot prettier but then it cost the moon and the stars along with both your arms and legs.
So that's why the Mac has always come with a one button mouse...
My memory may be going, but I seem to dimly recall that after this whole SCO fiasco erupted, a number of open-source projects put terms in their licenses that explicity forbid SCO from including them into any future SCO offerings.
Anyone else recall this? If so, wouldn't it be fun if it turns out that SCO's latest offering is illegally incorporating code it has no right to...
It was the earthquake that made me think of it - the thing is, the vertical movement due to the quake was small, so the huge movement of rock produced relatively little change in angular momentum.
If you elevated that rock all the way into space then you'd get a lot more change for a given mass.
But it would still require a really really large amount of rock.
Yep, once we get that space elevator working, we'll be able to ship huge amounts of rock up and down, adjusting the angular momentum of the Earth, and thus its spin rate...
I wonder just how much mass would be required to adjust the length of a day by the required fraction of a second per year?
If you're really worried about being identified when you've been blown up, then wear dog tags.
The idea of implanting a chip that can be surreptitiously read at any time is just stupid, frankly.
The scrolling gets a lot faster if you close the help panel on the left. Another bug?
It's all about standards.
Google exists almost entirely in the web sphere. As such, it's in their interests that the web is consistent and reliable. When you get people like MS who simply can't be bothered to fix or update their browsers, that hurts everyone.
So currently everyone has to jump through hoops coding both a standards compliant site, and also an IE compliant site. Most people haven't got a hope of persuading MS to fix their issues, so they just deal with it.
Google, on the other hand, is potentially big enough to say "why should *we* have to jump through hoops fixing MS issues? FU MS, *you* fix the issues."
So it's not about zealotry for a particular browser - it's about someone finally being big enough to drag MS into line.
As for how they'd actually handle it, granted, it might be a little tricky to win people over, but I daresay it could be done. Imagine that you've looking at Google maps or whatever with IE, and the display is messed up. Google have detected that you're using IE, so they've included a link at the bottom of the page "having problems with the display - click here".
That takes you to a note which reads something like the following:
"Google is always seeking to bring you the newest and best features of the web. Unfortunately, Microsoft appears to have ceased active development of their Internet Explorer web browser some years ago, and it does not support the latest features. Fortunately however, a number of free, up-to-date alternatives are available. Click here, here, or here"...
(Yes, I know IE7 is in development, but A) it won't be available to those of us not running XP, and B) may still contain plenty of issues.)
So your average person gets the message that "Google is recommending I switch browsers".
Who do you trust? Who does your boss trust? Even PHBs have certainly heard of Google.
Perhaps a more interesting question would be why they bothered to make it work with IE, rather than requiring IE to work with PNGs. How long is it before Google is strong enough, at least in the web sphere, to dictate terms to Microsoft?
Maybe they're there already - it's not implausible that they could release something that doesn't work properly with existing versions of IE, along with an explanatory note to upgrade to a working browser.
If they put in a direct link to Firefox say, the takeup could be huge, dwarfing the installed base to date. All of us here may know about all the alternative browsers, but your average joe doesn't - but if Google were to start pushing people towards them... now *that* would be news.
Why can't the same reasoning be applied to spam then? Especially if you're on a capped download or pay-per-byte plan.
Maybe it doesn't cost that much to receive spam, but there *is* a cost.
Why exactly is flash RAM slow? If it's because the circuitry for individual bits is slow to respond, then why can't the problem be fixed by parallelizing - either have multiple chips, or have multiple simultaneous accesses from each chip - or both.
Also, is flash RAM slow to read, or just to write? Because it's the former that's important in this case.
Oops - my mistake - it's the Itanium that's dual endian, not the x86 series.
/. about dual endianness, but remembered it wrong.
Knew I'd seen something on
Here's a posting referring to the dual endianness of the Itanium.
Some good points about changes made to the state of the OS once it's in use causing problems to a clean state hibernation restore, but I don't think they're insoluble.
The registry should really be a database file on disc. It still could be - I can see no reason why this couldn't happen transparently - the existing API calls for acessing it need not change. Who knows, maybe this is one of the killer features that MS has planned for Longhorn?...
Most configuration changes in windows itself are stored in the registry, so this should fix that problem.
If you have to install a driver you usually have to reboot anyhow, so no loss there. In any event, that's not a frequent occurrence.
The real problem would be configuration changes to things that have to be loaded during boot, but which aren't part of windows itself - ie: drivers. The simplest solution I can think of here is to simply detect if the config files for the device have changed and if so, do the full boot sequence rather than the fast boot sequence. But again, such changes would be relatively rare - you lose nothing by doing the full boot when forced to, but still stand to gain by doing a quick restore when you can.
Why assume that devices may have changed every time you boot, when 99 times out of a hundred they won't have on a typical machine?
The default position should be to assume that nothing has changed, as with hibernation. If a change is detected - any change - then do a full boot. Even for the one time when you have to "redo" the boot sequence, you still gain massively on the other 99 times.
If booting takes so long because of the monstrous amount of initialization necessary to wake up all the connected devices, how come restore from hibernate is so much faster?
For a really fast boot time, why not store the boot file in flash RAM?
Even if a modern OS has dumped 200 megs of stuff into RAM by the time it's finished booting, that's easily affordable at today's flash RAM prices. You could fit a 256 meg chip to the motherboard (which I'm sure both Apple and MS could mandate if they wanted). If for whatever reason more space was required, the overflow could be put on disc.
And since a boot is a fairly rare event, you don't have to worry about the maximum number of write cycles with flash RAM.
Hey presto - (almost) instant boot!
Surely the OS has to know what memory is in use, otherwise there would be chaos. How would it allocate blocks of memory if drivers were "secretly" allocating their own blocks?
As for detecting new hardware - that's such a rare event that it should be treated as an exception, rather than the norm. Most days I boot my computer, there's a marked absence of strange new hardware...
I've never understood why it takes so long to boot a computer. It takes far longer than the time necessary to transfer the actual amount of data that ends up in memory after the boot sequence.
Why not use something more like a resume from hibernation, where you just restore the contents of memory directly from the disc in one go and be done with it?
Actually using hibernation rather than booting is no good, becuase it only restores you to the state that your computer was in last time you used it, which might not be "clean". For example, if you had been running something with a memory leak, hibernation won't fix that.
But the solution is simple - instead of writing the hibernate data to disc just before you shut down, instead store it just after you've finished booting, so that you've got a "clean" system ready.
This way you get a "clean" system every time at the speed of a restore from hibernation. (And if something goes wrong, you still have the option to do a "full" boot.)
Some might say that you need to go through all the slow processing of a full boot in case anything's changed. Really? Restoring from hibernation seems to cope with that possibility.
More likely, most times, nothing will have changed. And for the times when it has, well, you do the extra configuration necessary after the restore - you're still no worse off.
So why are we still forced to sit through full boot cycles?
I'm sure someone here can provide a more complete answer, but I think the short answer is that the latest Intel chips can run either endian mode.
They're waiting for the original patents to expire...