DJA wrote:
Rick Funderburg wrote:
DJA wrote:
He claims to know what each option does while at the same time
wondering why it exists in the first place. Hello? At least if he
going to belittle a design, feature, or functional implementation,
he should properly explain what it does and why and then give some
non-specious examples of when that feature or option might be useful.
He is not wondering why each feature exists. He is wondering if the
UI really needs to provide the user with an explicit way to activate
each feature.
Which, in my opinion, it does. I've never heard any complain Linux had
these options. Only that they didn't always work well.
I agree with you, but I don't think that it is fair to say that he
doesn't understand those features. He understands those features, and
is trying to convince people that he has come up with a novel way of
making use of them simpler.
I can see where some of his arguments hold some appeal. For example, it
would be nice to have my computer automatically go from suspend-to-ram
to suspend-to-disk state after a while, if I was under battery power.
It would also be nice to enable user switching on the lock screen.
For example, he doesn't seem to understand the different sleep
modes. Otherwise why would he make technically illiterate statements
like
"So, if Windows used RAM that was effectively nonvolatile, by swapping
memory out to flash drives during idle time, effectively you would be
able to remove power whenever you're in "away" mode without losing
anything"?
This gives the impression that he thinks Microsoft actually makes
the hardware Windows runs on! Besides, what does he think Suspend to
drive does?
Microsoft does not create the hardware, but it can use what is
there. Did you follow Joel's link to hybrid disk drives? In the
future, disks are going to have non-volatile memory as cache. Vista
will use this and call it ReadyDrive. Also, I believe Vista will
have an option to use any user-installed flash memory as a
non-volatile cache (called ReadyBoost).
-- Rick
So what. Suspend to Disk is available now and has been for some time.
That someday flash-based disk drives may be common place is
irrelevant. The same mechanism available today (ACPI power states)
will be used to suspend to those new-tech drives as well. The author
is wondering why we need anything but shutdown. In fact, he seems to
wonder why we even need shutdown.
Yeah, the thing is that if you have enough fast flash memory, the line
between suspend-to-ram and suspend-to-disk may be blurred a bit. Right
now, people often will choose suspend-to-ram instead of suspend-to-disk
because the latter is slow. If you can eliminate the slowness, there
would be no need to ever use suspend-to-ram. It is a lot of
hypothesizing about the future state, for sure, but it does relate to
some of the concepts that Microsoft worked into Vista (ReadyBoost and
ReadyDrive).
I won't argue with you about the main premise in the article because I
agree with you. I just take offense to calling Joel ignorant without
basis. I think it is true that he is perhaps unwisely advocating some
UI changes in the name of simplifying things for 80-90% of users, and I
also agree that some of his suggestions are infeasible for the moment.
-- Rick
--
[email protected]
http://www.kernel-panic.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/kplug-list
