I wanted to post some follow-up to my prior post about sports where the contestants go to the edge and fall down. As I see it, the sports fall into the following rough classes:
Some notes from the bi-annual Olympics crackfest...
I'm starting to say that Curling might be the best Olympic sport. Why?
On the downside, not everybody is familiar with the game, the games can take quite a long time and the tournament even longer for just one medal, and compared to a multi-person race it's a slow game. It's not slow compared to an even that is many hours of time trials, though those events have brief bursts of high-speed excitement mixed in with waiting. And yes, I'm watching Canada-v-USA hockey now too.
We all know how annoying it is that today's much faster computers take such a long time to boot, and OS developers are working on speeding it up. Some time ago I proposed a defragmenter that notice what blocks were read in what order at boot and put the contiguous on the disk. I was told that experiments with this had not had much success, but more recently I read reports of how the latest Linux distributions will boot as much a 3 times faster on solid state disks as on rotating ones. There are some SSDs with performance that high (and higher) but typical ones range more in the 120 mb/second rate, better than 80 mb/second HDDs but getting more wins from the complete lack of latency.
However, today I want to consider something which is a large portion of the boot time, namely the power-on-self-test or "POST." This is what the BIOS does before it gets ready to load the real OS. It's important, but on many systems is quite slow.
I propose an effort to make the POST multitask with the loading of the real OS. Particularly on dual-core systems, this would be done by having one core do the POST and other BIOS (after testing all the cores of course) and other cores be used by the OS for loading. There are ways to do all this with one core I will discuss below, but this one is simple and almost all new computers have multiple cores.
Of course, the OS has to know it's not supposed to touch certain hardware until after the BIOS is done initializing it and testing it. And so, there should be BIOS APIs to allow the OS to ask about this and get events as BIOS operations conclude. The OS, until given ownership of the screen, would output its status updates to the screen via a BIOS call. In fact, it would do that with all hardware, though the screen, keyboard and primary hard disk are the main items. When I say the OS, I actually mean both the bootloader that loads the OS and the OS itself once it is handed off to.
Next, the BIOS should, as soon as it has identified that the primary boot hard disks are ready, begin transferring data from the boot area into RAM. Almost all machines have far more RAM than they need to boot, and so pre-loading all blocks needed for boot into a cache, done in optimal order, will mean that by the time the OS kernal takes over, many of the disk blocks it will want to read will already be sitting in ram. Ideally, as I noted, the blocks should have been pre-stored in contiguous zones on the disk by an algorithm that watched the prior boots to see what was accessed and when.
Indeed, if there are multiple drives, the pre-loader could be configured to read from all of them, in a striping approach. Done properly, a freshly booted computer, once the drives had spun up, would start reading the few hundred megabytes of files it needs to boot from multiple drives into ram. All of this should be doable in just a few seconds on RAID style machines, where 3 disks striped can deliver 200mb/second or more of disk read performance. But even on a single drive, it should be quick. It would begin with the OS kernel and boot files, but then pre-cache all the pages from files used in typical boots. For any special new files, only a few seeks will be required after this is done.
On a recent trip on a plane equipped with personal inflight video screens for each seat, I decided to watch a movie quickly and then have a nap. So I started watching the movie right after settling into the seat, about 20 minutes before takeoff. I figured with that I would watch the 1:30 minute movie through the meal service and be ready for the nap about an hour into the flight. What I learned instead was a greater awareness of just how many announcements there are on a typical flight these days. That's because the in-flight system paused the video with each announcement and put it through my noise cancelling headphones.
The many announcements included:
The cacophony is getting worse, almost as bad as when you're sitting in the terminal with the endless announcements. They know people hate that in the terminals and offer the paid lounge with no announcements, but I've said they should just use cell phones instead and give us peace. On Japanese Shinkansen, they also offer a "quiet car" with no announcements -- it is up to you to set your own alarm to make sure you don't miss your stop if you want to sleep or relax. The trains are so on-time you can do this.
How about doing something like this, at least on a modern airplane where you have a personal screen for each seat?
I recently went to the DLD conference in Germany, briefly to Davos during the World Economic Forum and then drove around the Alps for a few days, including a visit to an old friend in Grenoble. I have some panoramic galleries of the Alps in Winter up already.
Each trip brings some new observations and notes.
On to Part Two
This weekend I spoke at BIL, a conference that was created to play off of the famous and expensive TED conference. BIL began as an un-conference, which is to say an ad-hoc conference created on short notice where the attendees are the speakers. Such conferences tend to be free or near-free. The movement begain with Tim O'Reilly's FOO Camp. FOO camp is for Tim's friends, and he has far more friend that can come. One year, he was explaining how he rotated among people and so some of those who were not invited that particular year (including myself) had a "BAR" camp which was a tremendous success, and created a trend.
The first two BILs were a lot of fun and worked pretty well. They had a variety of sub-par speakers, as these "anybody who wants to can talk" conferences often have, but there was always tons of hall conversation or sessions in other rooms to make up for that. And a modest number of TED speakers came over and gave their TED talks for free at BIL, and various regular TED attendees came as well.
This year's BIL did not live up to the earlier standard, and the hard-working and generous organizers are fully aware of that, so this is not an attempt to criticise them, but rather to look at the problem. Many things went wrong, including a last minute need to move the conference from a Saturday and Sunday(with only Saturday morning overlap with TED) to Friday and Saturday morning, which had total overlap with TED and minimal weekend time. This change was forced because no venue could be found (cheaply enough, at least) which would offer Saturday afternoon and Sunday. However, it was a ruinous change -- attendance on the workday Friday was way down, and even lower on Saturday, and no TED speakers came though a few attendees showed up, mostly near the end in the 2 hours after TED that BIL went on. The "outdoor" post-sessions were of limited success as a conference, but OK socially (I did not attend the planned Sunday events.)
Tomorrow, I will be speaking on pre-Robocar technology at BIL an unconference that parallels the famous and expensive TED conference. This is in Long Beach, CA. Unconferences are fun, cheap and often as good as expensive conferences. I will also be attending a reception at TED tonight for Singularity University, which I lecture at, so I may see you if you're at TED as well.
Last night's EFF bash was a great success. Thanks to Adam Savage and all the others who made it go so well.
In early 2000, after a tumultuous period in the EFF's history, and the staff down to just a handful, I was elected chair of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. I had been on the board for just a few years, but had been close to the organization since it was founded, including participating with it as a plaintiff in the landmark supreme court case which struck down the Communications Decency Act in 1996.
I'll have many more observations about my recent trip to DLD, Davos and the Alps soon, but one thing I've decided I do want to find (or train) is a travel agent/helper who can assist well with unscheduled travel (ie. a road or railpass trip.)
With unscheduled travel, you don't know in the morning where you will end up that night. You only figure it out later in the day. Sometimes you just drive until it starts getting late and then you pick where you will end the night. It's hard (or expensive) to do this in high season but in low season you can always find a room, and I and many others like that sort of freedom.
So when you do pick where you want to end up you have a few options:
There are problems with all these approaches. Method 3 (especially using tripadivsor) helps you avoid turkey hotels and find the better values. However, the databases cover only a fraction of the hotels, and the online reservations systems also cover only a small fraction of hotels in an area. There will be better values out there. On the other hand, many hotels offer a better price through the internet than if you call them, or will charge even more if you just walk in.
I'm at DLD in Munich, and going to Davos tomorrow. While at DLD I made a brief mention during a panel on identity and tracking of my concept of the privacy dangers of the AIs of the future, which are able to extract things from recorded data (like faces) that we can't do today.
I mentioned a new idea, however, which is a search engine which focuses on the negative, because though advanced algorithms it can tell the difference between positive and negative content.