Re: How to make money fast (in science fiction)

In rec.arts.sf.science Tim Little <tim@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:
> (I missed this bit when making my earlier reply)
> 
> On 2008-04-03, Michael Ash <mike@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:
>> For what it's worth, my computer takes approximately two seconds,
>> although for obvious reasons I haven't measured it.
> 
> *Boggle*  Are you sure you're not talking about suspend-to-RAM rather
> than suspend-to-disk-and-power-off?

Sure, I'm talking about suspend to RAM. I explicitly mentioned both 
earlier.

> If it's a laptop (especially Mac) it almost certainly is not
> hibernating (S4), just suspending (S3).  Many will only hibernate
> automatically when the battery runs low, probably after days to weeks.

On a Mac this is configurable (although not in the GUI). The best setting,

if you're paranoid but also in a hurry, is to tell it to do both. This 
will wake from RAM if available, and wake from the hard drive if the power

has been cut. Since most people don't care about how long it takes to shut

down, this is good. I just do straight suspend to RAM since I don't care 
to write 7GB of RAM to my hard drive every time.

> Since desktop systems don't have any meanigful amount of internal
> battery backup, this obviously isn't a viable strategy for them.  The
> choices are either to continue to require wall power, or fully
> hibernate with the associated slow wakeup.

Desktop systems can have meaningful amounts of *external* battery backup, 
though. If you don't have a UPS then you're basically doomed on this 
question no matter what. I can hardly see the difference between losing 
power while in sleep mode and losing power while you're in the middle of 
using the thing. Well, except that if it's in sleep mode you've probably 
already saved what you're working on, so you're much less likely to lose 
any im****tant data.

Anyway, there's no reason besides being crappy that Windows couldn't 
implement a dual-mode solution like I mentioned above, or even demand-page

in the saved contents on wake instead of streaming it in all at once. (I'm

not aware of any system which actually does this second one, though.)

> Just as a point of note, I haven't seen a recent BIOS and hardware
> combination that can even *start* nontrivial disk activity from
> power-on within two seconds.  Most haven't even finished initializing
> the video subsystem by then.

I paid a bit more attention this time, and I think my computer is more 
like 3-4 seconds. Most of that seems to be spent waiting for the disks to 
spin up, although it could just be coincidence. Anyway, since a modern Mac

is just a PC with a funny brand on it, you should be able to count them as

BIOS/hardware combinations which can start nontrivial disk activity from 
power-on within a couple of seconds. Certainly you can install Windows on 
them, although I've never seen why you would want to except through a 
virtualizer.

-- 
Michael Ash
Rogue Amoeba Software