I think BeOS just took a snapshot of the memory contants and dumped them to disk. Really, not a bad idea at all. Afterall, why do we need to reinitialize all of those inits, etc., at startup? Why not load the last image of the system back into memory?
It reminds me of the old Snapshot ][ card I had for my Apple ][+. It allowed you to copy games by dumping an image to disk.
Come the think of it, FWB had an extension for a while that met us halfway there. IIRC it loaded all of the extensions into memory before running them, reducing startup times by a nice amount.</strong><hr></blockquote>
Apple had a similar function but never enabled it. it was called "preserve memory contents on shut down". Now they only have "preserve memory contents on sleep" and that's one of the reasons OS X wakes up so fast
preserve on shut down I hink had bugs and would only work on UMA 1 or great based boards
Instant anything is never (ok nearly never there are instances where it is) possible but that's because I'm fussy. Significantly quicker boot times will come in the next few years.
Largely boot times are the result of memory having been cleared at shutdown. New technologies like MRAM will allow this to be avoided in future. As a result starting up the computer becomes like waking it up from sleep.
Just never shut the thing off though. There is no need.
On a side note has anyone else noted Mac OS X boots faster if you hold Command-v at the start? Or is that just me?
Actually, I had the exact discussion with a few guys at Apple the other night after they showed the channel here the iMac in all it's glory. I have been told by a couple of technicians and engineers that OS X.2 will indeed have a much faster startup as the OS will now load extensions and "startup processes" in some sorta parallel processing. I can't remember the term they used, but it kinda sounded like while it's doing the RAM test and what-not, it can also be loading extensions at the same time "in parallel", hence dropping the startup time by a fair bit. Will see when 10.2 comes out if this is true!!
Well, since UMA 1.0, the boards are supposed to support that RAM onto HD loading mechanism that is now only used for deep sleep, because there were unfixed data corruption/loss issues.
You were suppoed to load all the contents of RAM onto the HD on shutdown, and then just copy the file back into RAM on startup, as we know it from VPC, when choosing "save PC state".
That's a damn fast way to get things done, and I sure hope the issues will be fixed some day.
However, until we're there I'd simply turn off teh computer. Like 40% or so of our daily energy consumption are only due to devices running in standby, sleep, suspend modes or even worse, running idle at full power.
I know the US usually choose personal comfort over long-time survival, but maybe it's time to rethink things once in a while. After all other countries have succeeded in reducing their power waste and protecting the environment, or at least trying to do so. The US are just FAR behind in many points there. You pay for the electricity you use every month, so there absolutely also is an argument speaking for a shut down and unplug of a machine that is not being used: you save money, apart from protecting the environment.
If you ever happen to have a watt-meter at hand, measure the power consumption of your electrical devices and do some maths. You'll quickly see that a lot of the devices consume a HELL LOT of power, even if they do noting at all, and are not used at all.
We learned to turn off the lights, turn off the stereo when not listening to it, turn off the TV when not watching (turn off, not standby), so why not turn off the computer either? After all, of all the devices listed above, computers consume most power of all. An easy way to do it right: connect your devices to a switched powerplug cable that you can buy in every bigger non-grocery store.
When you're done just flip the switch and all your devices will use 0 watts/hour, as opposed to 3-90 watts/sec.
My Mac starts up in 53sec, which isn't really fast.
But honestly, do I HAVE to sit in front of the Mac while it's starting up? Seen it once, seen it forever, so you may as well go fetch a cup of coffee, go to the toilet, blow your nose or whatever during that time and you won't have to wait for the computer to start up and annoy you.
It's as it's always been: As soon as something is available in masses, people start to abuse/waste it. That's true for money, power, natural ressources and electricity. Why?
Are you sure you won't want to adjust those numbers?
3-90 watts/sec is 10,800W - 324,000W!!!
</strong><hr></blockquote>
Actually a Watt is a measure of power, not energy, you probably meant to use kiloWatt-hour instead of Watt, which is what the utilities charge by (unless still using BTUs).
Mac OS 9.2.1 - (lots of extensions) I can take a nap waiting for this puppy to boot.
Mac OS X 10.1.2 - Pretty snappy. About as fast as NT at work (of course, NT takes forever to shut down network connections).
Windows XP - This is pretty quick, much faster than OSX. Of course, that's actually when it is working. I am currently trying to resolve a USB conflict, and several re-install later, I decided to be cute and try something... long story longer, it's kinda broken again.
Moral of the story: don't let engineers who think they know it all work on anything you own.
PS: I, too, would like to see instant own computers. Personally, I think it's possible. Judicious application of flash RAM here and there (well, if flash had the appropriate re-write cycles), and I think you can do fun things.
Actually a Watt is a measure of power, not energy, you probably meant to use kiloWatt-hour instead of Watt, which is what the utilities charge by (unless still using BTUs).
Michael</strong><hr></blockquote>
Yes, and Watt is measured per hour - a toaster uses around 1000 Watts per hour (1kWh) and G-News is stating that a turned off computer uses 324kWh.
Yes, and Watt is measured per hour - a toaster uses around 1000 Watts per hour (1kWh) and G-News is stating that a turned off computer uses 324kWh.</strong><hr></blockquote>
No, no. A Watt is a measure of power, energy used per unit time, energy is measured accorcing to SI units as Joules (1 Joule equals 1 Watt-second, or 1 Watt for 1 second), but this is too small a unit for the utilities, so they use a kiloWatt-hour or 3,600,000 Joules (1 kiloWatt for 1 hour, not 1 kW per hour) as their unit of measurement.
A toaster uses about 1000 Watts, or put another way, 1 kiloWatt-hour per hour.
G-News said 90 Watt per second which is 324kWh/h.</strong><hr></blockquote>
No, you said Watts per hour, which is not the correct measurement.
G-News was also wrong to say Watts per second.
The correct measure is just Watts (not per second per hour or anything else). You cannot compare Watts/sec with kWh/h, as one is a measure of rate of change of power (Watts/sec) and one is a measure of power (kWh/h = kW), it's like comparing a speed in miles per hour with a distance in miles, it's meaningless.
Think of Watts as speed (say meters per second to stick with SI units) and then kWh is a distance (say a mile to include the same nonstandard unit as kWh is. The standard distance would be in meters (Joules)).
There is something to be said about conserving power. The reason I gave up eating beef is not to save some dumb cows life, but becuase it takes 11 pounds of Grain to make 11 pounds of bread, whereas it takes 11 pounds of grain to make 1 pound of beef: and there are a lot of people going hungry becuase they cannot get enough bread.
This "turn your computer off" is a very similar argument.
It is not, however, the argument to be discussed in "Future Hardware."
Instant On
BeOS is a great example, as mentioned above. It's darn close.
I gotta say, I _love_ how I can simply open and shut my iBook and its just ON... and then OFF.... and the ON... and OFF... just like that.
<strong>It probably uses more power during the start up process once then it does just sleeping the computer for a few hours</strong><hr></blockquote>
That may well be, and I didn't mean to imply that it's wrong to keep your computer on.
I just mean that it's a Moral argument and not a "Technically Feasable" argument.
I, for one, leave mine on, and like the fast wake ups, and also choose to believe that it takes less power to sleep than to go through the wake up process.
Comments
<strong>
I think BeOS just took a snapshot of the memory contants and dumped them to disk. Really, not a bad idea at all. Afterall, why do we need to reinitialize all of those inits, etc., at startup? Why not load the last image of the system back into memory?
It reminds me of the old Snapshot ][ card I had for my Apple ][+. It allowed you to copy games by dumping an image to disk.
Come the think of it, FWB had an extension for a while that met us halfway there. IIRC it loaded all of the extensions into memory before running them, reducing startup times by a nice amount.</strong><hr></blockquote>
Apple had a similar function but never enabled it. it was called "preserve memory contents on shut down". Now they only have "preserve memory contents on sleep" and that's one of the reasons OS X wakes up so fast
preserve on shut down I hink had bugs and would only work on UMA 1 or great based boards
Largely boot times are the result of memory having been cleared at shutdown. New technologies like MRAM will allow this to be avoided in future. As a result starting up the computer becomes like waking it up from sleep.
Just never shut the thing off though. There is no need.
On a side note has anyone else noted Mac OS X boots faster if you hold Command-v at the start? Or is that just me?
<img src="graemlins/smokin.gif" border="0" alt="[Chilling]" />
You were suppoed to load all the contents of RAM onto the HD on shutdown, and then just copy the file back into RAM on startup, as we know it from VPC, when choosing "save PC state".
That's a damn fast way to get things done, and I sure hope the issues will be fixed some day.
However, until we're there I'd simply turn off teh computer. Like 40% or so of our daily energy consumption are only due to devices running in standby, sleep, suspend modes or even worse, running idle at full power.
I know the US usually choose personal comfort over long-time survival, but maybe it's time to rethink things once in a while. After all other countries have succeeded in reducing their power waste and protecting the environment, or at least trying to do so. The US are just FAR behind in many points there. You pay for the electricity you use every month, so there absolutely also is an argument speaking for a shut down and unplug of a machine that is not being used: you save money, apart from protecting the environment.
If you ever happen to have a watt-meter at hand, measure the power consumption of your electrical devices and do some maths. You'll quickly see that a lot of the devices consume a HELL LOT of power, even if they do noting at all, and are not used at all.
We learned to turn off the lights, turn off the stereo when not listening to it, turn off the TV when not watching (turn off, not standby), so why not turn off the computer either? After all, of all the devices listed above, computers consume most power of all. An easy way to do it right: connect your devices to a switched powerplug cable that you can buy in every bigger non-grocery store.
When you're done just flip the switch and all your devices will use 0 watts/hour, as opposed to 3-90 watts/sec.
My Mac starts up in 53sec, which isn't really fast.
But honestly, do I HAVE to sit in front of the Mac while it's starting up? Seen it once, seen it forever, so you may as well go fetch a cup of coffee, go to the toilet, blow your nose or whatever during that time and you won't have to wait for the computer to start up and annoy you.
It's as it's always been: As soon as something is available in masses, people start to abuse/waste it. That's true for money, power, natural ressources and electricity. Why?
G-news
<strong>When you're done just flip the switch and all your devices will use 0 watts/hour, as opposed to 3-90 watts/sec.</strong><hr></blockquote>
Are you sure you won't want to adjust those numbers?
3-90 watts/sec is 10,800W - 324,000W!!!
No wonder your electric bill can get big
[ 01-20-2002: Message edited by: JLL ]</p>
<strong>
Are you sure you won't want to adjust those numbers?
3-90 watts/sec is 10,800W - 324,000W!!!
</strong><hr></blockquote>
Actually a Watt is a measure of power, not energy, you probably meant to use kiloWatt-hour instead of Watt, which is what the utilities charge by (unless still using BTUs).
Michael
Mac OS X 10.1.2 - Pretty snappy. About as fast as NT at work (of course, NT takes forever to shut down network connections).
Windows XP - This is pretty quick, much faster than OSX. Of course, that's actually when it is working. I am currently trying to resolve a USB conflict, and several re-install later, I decided to be cute and try something... long story longer, it's kinda broken again.
Moral of the story: don't let engineers who think they know it all work on anything you own.
PS: I, too, would like to see instant own computers. Personally, I think it's possible. Judicious application of flash RAM here and there (well, if flash had the appropriate re-write cycles), and I think you can do fun things.
<strong>
Actually a Watt is a measure of power, not energy, you probably meant to use kiloWatt-hour instead of Watt, which is what the utilities charge by (unless still using BTUs).
Michael</strong><hr></blockquote>
Yes, and Watt is measured per hour - a toaster uses around 1000 Watts per hour (1kWh) and G-News is stating that a turned off computer uses 324kWh.
<strong>
Yes, and Watt is measured per hour - a toaster uses around 1000 Watts per hour (1kWh) and G-News is stating that a turned off computer uses 324kWh.</strong><hr></blockquote>
No, no. A Watt is a measure of power, energy used per unit time, energy is measured accorcing to SI units as Joules (1 Joule equals 1 Watt-second, or 1 Watt for 1 second), but this is too small a unit for the utilities, so they use a kiloWatt-hour or 3,600,000 Joules (1 kiloWatt for 1 hour, not 1 kW per hour) as their unit of measurement.
A toaster uses about 1000 Watts, or put another way, 1 kiloWatt-hour per hour.
Michael
<strong>A toaster uses about 1000 Watts, or put another way, 1 kiloWatt-hour per hour.
Michael</strong><hr></blockquote>
And didn't I say that?
G-News said 90 Watt per second which is 324kWh/h.
<strong>
And didn't I say that?
G-News said 90 Watt per second which is 324kWh/h.</strong><hr></blockquote>
No, you said Watts per hour, which is not the correct measurement.
G-News was also wrong to say Watts per second.
The correct measure is just Watts (not per second per hour or anything else). You cannot compare Watts/sec with kWh/h, as one is a measure of rate of change of power (Watts/sec) and one is a measure of power (kWh/h = kW), it's like comparing a speed in miles per hour with a distance in miles, it's meaningless.
Think of Watts as speed (say meters per second to stick with SI units) and then kWh is a distance (say a mile to include the same nonstandard unit as kWh is. The standard distance would be in meters (Joules)).
Michael
<strong>
No, you said Watts per hour, which is not the correct measurement. </strong><hr></blockquote>
Picking nits here?
<strong>
Picking nits here?</strong><hr></blockquote>
I'm a lecturer in electronics, it's what I do.
Michael
(he he)
There is something to be said about conserving power. The reason I gave up eating beef is not to save some dumb cows life, but becuase it takes 11 pounds of Grain to make 11 pounds of bread, whereas it takes 11 pounds of grain to make 1 pound of beef: and there are a lot of people going hungry becuase they cannot get enough bread.
This "turn your computer off" is a very similar argument.
It is not, however, the argument to be discussed in "Future Hardware."
Instant On
BeOS is a great example, as mentioned above. It's darn close.
I gotta say, I _love_ how I can simply open and shut my iBook and its just ON... and then OFF.... and the ON... and OFF... just like that.
Very cool.
<strong>In ANY case, dot dot dot
This "turn your computer off" is a very similar argument.
It is not, however, the argument to be discussed in "Future Hardware."
Very cool.</strong><hr></blockquote>
no it isn't.
When in sleep the mac uses just a couple watts more power. it's something like 3 watts when off and 5 when sleeping.
It probably uses more power during the start up process once then it does just sleeping the computer for a few hours
<strong>It probably uses more power during the start up process once then it does just sleeping the computer for a few hours</strong><hr></blockquote>
That may well be, and I didn't mean to imply that it's wrong to keep your computer on.
I just mean that it's a Moral argument and not a "Technically Feasable" argument.
I, for one, leave mine on, and like the fast wake ups, and also choose to believe that it takes less power to sleep than to go through the wake up process.
Agreed.
<strong>
And didn't I say that?
G-News said 90 Watt per second which is 324kWh/h.</strong><hr></blockquote>
Let me try to fix this up for anyone still confused, mmicist did but it
might not be immediately clear. I liked eleventh grade physics anyway, so
i might stretch out the grey matter before i forget it all together
Watt is a measurement of power. Power is how much energy (power != energy)
is consumed in a space of time. Power is a rate, meaning it is expressed
in terms of something else (rates are usually expressed in terms of time).
This rate is Joules/second (or joules per second, or J/s, or J s^-1, or...)
Energy (measured in joules, J) on the other hand is a quantity. Quoting
something's power consumption as "90 Watt per second" is equivalent to
saying "90 Watt per second per second", which would be a measure of how
fast the device's power consumption would change in one second (changing
by "90 Watt per second", every "second", hence "per second per second").
So for example, let's say that the P4 of a particular clockspeed
dissipates 70 W. This means it dissipates 70 joules of energy each second.
Multiply that by 3600 seconds, and you will get "joules per hour",
obviously. To demonstrate with fractions:
J s
--- * --- = J
s 1
So a certain number of J/s -- Watt -- is multiplied by a certain number
of seconds, leaving a certain number of joules.
As for kilowatt-hour, or kWh, it is a measure of energy, seeing as the
rate (kilowatt, or kilojoule/sec) has been multiplied by an arbitrary
number of seconds, the same unit as the denominator in J/s, hence leaving
J. To illustrate:
1 kWh == 1000 J/second, for one hour == 1000 J/s * 3600 s == 3.6 million J.
If you have done any calculus and understood any of it (understood? no,
not me
y-value-for-an-arbitrary-value-of-x to the gradient of the curve at that
point is one of the great unwashed
Hope i haven't been patronising to anyone
<strong>
I'm a lecturer in electronics, it's what I do.
Michael</strong><hr></blockquote>
But you knew what I meant in the first place - you just couldn't resist
[ 01-20-2002: Message edited by: JLL ]</p>
<strong>
But you knew what I meant in the first place - you just couldn't resist
[ 01-20-2002: Message edited by: JLL ]</strong><hr></blockquote>
Well, I only jumped in because you were trying to correct G-news, if you want to do that it behoves you to get your facts right.
I believe it is important to get these things right, otherwise confusion will reign.
Michael