Presto ‘instant-on’ operating system enters beta

[dammy]

Keep crying man, shutdown is for losers.

I keep seeing people say that and it makes me laugh.  I remember all too well of instant shut down of my Amiga only to be greeted with disk errors that even Disk Salvage couldn't repair.  Wipe and reinstall, oh that was so much fun for the joy of instant off, not.

I'm far older now, I'll take my shutdown sequence with little fear of disk corruption and like it.  

Dammy

[Tension]

dammy wrote:

Keep crying man, shutdown is for losers.

I keep seeing people say that and it makes me laugh.  I remember all too well of instant shut down of my Amiga only to be greeted with disk errors that even Disk Salvage couldn't repair.  Wipe and reinstall, oh that was so much fun for the joy of instant off, not.

I'm far older now, I'll take my shutdown sequence with little fear of disk corruption and like it.  

Dammy

All you need to do is turn it off when the HDD light isn`t flashing and you`ll be sweet as a goose.

Shutdown makes me lose.  :angry:

[Levithicus]

My Pegasos II with MorphOS boots in 7 sec and shuts down instantly. :-D

[amigakid]

Hmmn never had a problem with that, maybe if you turned it off when it wasn't writing to the HDD then you wouldn't reboot with errors, but I guess if your too lazy to see if the HDD light is flashing or have a short memory and can't remember that you where installing something to the HDD then shutdown is perfect for you.  (I have used Amigas since 1986 and have NEVER had an issue with messing up my Workbench from turning the computer off).

[bloodline]

Tension wrote:

dammy wrote:

Keep crying man, shutdown is for losers.

I keep seeing people say that and it makes me laugh.  I remember all too well of instant shut down of my Amiga only to be greeted with disk errors that even Disk Salvage couldn't repair.  Wipe and reinstall, oh that was so much fun for the joy of instant off, not.

I'm far older now, I'll take my shutdown sequence with little fear of disk corruption and like it.  

Dammy

All you need to do is turn it off when the HDD light isn`t flashing and you`ll be sweet as a goose.

Shutdown makes me lose.  :angry:

Sure... unless you use a modern file system... have you never heard of things like caches and deferred writes, etc...? You have no idea what the computer is actually doing with your data, and if you need high performance and advanced file system features, then a little flashy LED tells you nothing.

All modern File system are journled, so just switching off shouldn't nuke the File system (like it so easily could in AmigaOS), but you can still loose data... you have been warned!

[adolescent]

I'm going to have to agree with bloodline on this one.  You can never be sure what's been committed to disk.  HD activity lights are not a good way to tell if it's safe to shut down.  For example, the MacBook Pro doesn't even have a HDD activity light!

[ferrellsl]

Gosh, just more marketing propaganda.  Since when has 30-50 seconds been reclassified as "instant"?

Instant on means instantly on and available....not wait 30 seconds to one minute......

[adolescent]

@ferrellsl

30 seconds seems like a long time but consider POST, hardware initialization, etc. and the actual load time is a couple of seconds.  It's still much faster than anything out there.  The iPhone/iPod touch takes over 30 seconds to boot!  

[TheGoose]

Blah blah blah Linux distro ... stopped reading.

  :lol:

[ferrellsl]

Like I said, "instant on" means instantly.  And the load time of this Linux distro is far greater that 2 seconds.  So yes, it IS a long time when compared to "instant" which is what they're calling it....probably someone in the sales department pushing that term as opposed to the R&D team.

As for your iPod taking so long to boot, you should try different hardware.  I have a USB-stick that plays MP3s and it is truly instant on.  As soon as it's powered up, it will play whatever song I choose and no waiting for anything.

[adolescent]

@ferrellsl

But you can't compare a simple MP3 player with something that can do much more (ie. play games, surf the internet, etc.).

Are you really saying that the instant you press the power button on your MP3 player a MP3 can be played?  Come now.  Even magic MP3 players have to load some sort of operating environment, initialize hardware, load the contents of memory card, etc.

As for the marketing.  The Presto page never says "instant on" it's the media that is calling it that. :rtfm:  

[paolone]

Gosh, just more marketing propaganda. Since when has 30-50 seconds been reclassified as "instant"?

Right. If 30-50 seconds are "instant on", Icaros is on even before you switch the power button.

Some times ago I had to evaluate some DVD recorders with hard drive for the mags I work on, and all of them pissed me off for a simple reason: you needed to wait for them loading their operating system. Damnit! When I had my low-res junky VHS tape recorder, I just needed to press the stanby button and exactly 1 second after I could start recording. What does the hell mean that I have to wait for the f***ing operating system and software? The TV program won't wait for this and I'd loose some minutes of the show.

It's exactly why I laugh everytime someone suggests to take a PC and place Vista inside to launch the media center. So what? Should I wait for the operating system, the drivers, and the software to load only to watch my TV? On my TV-set I just have to turn it on and press on the remote the key for the channel I want to see. That's "instant on", not an operating system that need 50, 30 or also even 10 seconds to boot. "Instant on" means less than 3 seconds, and I'm good with it.