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Instant On

prog21.dadgum.com

31 pointssilentbicycle17 comments

Mobile devices these days are most definitely _not_ "instant on" devices. They are "always on" devices which fool you into thinking they are off.

Try it. Power down your phone, start the clock and measure how long it takes to boot....

....see?

Hey, stupid definition-wisecracking – I’m in!

Mobile devices most definitely are “instant on”. Try it. Press the power button, the device is immediately off, press it again, the device is immediately on. Nearly everyone would call that “instant-on”.

That the devices don’t really ever power down completely is merely an implementation detail, not really relevant for the scope of this discussion. (At least no warranting a statement like “most definitely not instant on”.)

Agreed with OP. What makes the Mac Book Air so impressive, is that it's both. An aggressive sleep feature means that, unlike my MacBook Pro, which had an identical work pattern - I have _yet_ to have my MBA run out of batter. The MBP would routinely run out every three-four days.

At the same time, when it _does_ run out of battery - it powers up in 15 seconds. Not _quite_ instant on, but it makes a measurable difference in how you feel about powering it up to use. Ironically - you never do because it's always on. :-)

Then every desktop or notebook that goes into sleep mode or even just a blank screen saver is "instant on", too.

So it means nothing.

I would argue that they are, yes. At least to some extent. (I use my laptop that way. My mom doesn’t.)

What has changed is the UI. People are now often encouraged to send their devices to sleep, that’s not really the case with even current laptops. Truly powering down is an equal citizen on desktop operating system instead of some weird function only nerds would use (like it is on smartphones).

You mean the "weird function" that people use to conserve their batteries or that they see happen when their Droid updates?

I’m not familiar with Android phones. I have never seen or heard of anyone intentionally rebooting or shutting down his or her iPhone or iPod touch, though.

Battery power is also a factor that comes into play here. These devices are "always on" for days at a time. Powering down isn't really the issue so much as leaving your perception. You can forget about them ("turn them off") and when you start using them a day or two later they come on in an instant.

When it comes to a laptop you can't necessarily leave it and come back, you have to be cognizant of how long it's been standing by or hibernating or whatnot.

Right, but the idea is that things are becoming instantly available again. It's not that these devices don't take any time at all from a cold start, but the fact that we're leaving things in standby mode these days. I don't power down my iPhone each time I'm done using it, I just lock it.

Except I do the same thing with my desktop. It's actually much faster than any iPhone or iPad at coming back to life after not using it.

A more-fair comparison for current devices would be mobile vs a laptop or pc coming out of sleep mode... but even then it's not fair unless the pc has an SSD rather than a drive that has to spin up and seek.

All of his 1970-1980's devices ran from ROM rather than media. A C64 computer could boot up to a Basic prompt very quickly, but to load a program took many minutes. Apples and Ataris were similar, unless the program was on a ROM pack. To compare that to todays computer you have to stop at the initial BIOS screen, because that's where the ROM loading stops and media loading starts.

Modern devices are more powerful and more flexible partly because their functionality isn't burnt into a ROM anymore. Only the initial loader is ROM, and the rest is loaded from media.

The one thing that would make this faster is if computers remembered their initial hardware and software state after bootup and could quickly verify if anything has changed since the last boot. That would avoid the time consuming initialization of hardware and software. Of course, the hardware would need to remember its state too, and that's probably the sticking point.

Every mac laptop is instant-on by this definition. And while I agree that it's one of the features of Macs that I love, it hardly makes my monster 17" macbook pro a "mobile device"...

The new MacBook Airs are 'Instant On' the few seconds difference that the SSD makes compared to other Macs is actually noticeable and very much appreciated. It makes quickly turning it on to check something a lot more fluid.

TLDR lower response time increases usage.

I see Instant On and Crash-Only Programs as being two very similar goals. Sure one is about turning on and one is about turning off, but both of them exist because we're attempting to fight the problem of complex software. It'd be interesting to see if making a program crash-only (not relying on data structures which can become corrupt) leads to noticeable boot speed improvements. The published literature on crash-proof software seems to think so.

"Instant On" is actually the norm, not the exception. There's really only 1 popular device that isn't "instant on" and that's the computer (smartphones and video game consoles are just extensions).

Think about cars, microwaves, TVs, virtually any audio component, etc.

In general, the more software a device has, the longer it takes to use it after turning it on.

Slightly off-topic, this is why I've copied all my DVDs to hard-drive. I have some DVDs that take 5 minutes to reach the opening credits of the movie.

video games today are even worse! they take also two minutes to get you into the game. then the game have cut scenes that you have to keep pressing A to get to back to the fun part.

Main reason i hacked my wii is to cut the crap on most intro and whatnot a game have (not to mention the time to speed up the disc).

a player that is using the official disc takes around 2min to start playing COD:black ops.

Myself, using a USB driver and a dump of my disc (which is pretty much the setup pirates uses, with the added benefit of being cheaper and not having to walk to a store) waste less than 1min to start playing. not to mention that multiplayer load times are faster too. so i'm usually roaming the level some 2sec before the rest.

NB: i didn't see the need of all that while playing mario kart. just used the disc and was happy. pretty sleak interface and no lame 1min company logo animation like COD:black ops.

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