Re: Singularitarian demographics

From: Chris Capel (pdf23ds@gmail.com)
Date: Wed Aug 09 2006 - 06:38:06 MDT


On 8/8/06, Robin Lee Powell <rlpowell@digitalkingdom.org> wrote:
> On Tue, Aug 08, 2006 at 03:40:10PM -0700, Charles D Hixson wrote:
> > >That's not true, Windows XP takes much less time to boot up than
> > >Windows 95... I think people who have been around for 10 years
> > >know pretty well that computers evolved both qualitatively and
> > >quantitatively.
> > >
> > On identical hardware? I'm sorry, but I don't think so. Mind
> > you, I don't really have any experience of MSWind XP, so I could
> > be wrong, but I *think* you're noticing faster CPUs and disk
> > drives.
>
> I can't speak to Win95 vs. WinXP, but WinXP is faster than Win2K on
> identical hardware in every case I've tried, unless the hardware has
> less than 256MiB of RAM (which is ridiculous on any machine that
> runs 2K anyways). It might be faster there too, but I haven't
> tried.

Windows XP contains many optimizations specifically geared toward fast
booting and shutdown. IIRC, the main one is that most driver
initialization is done in a manner about as parallel as possible.
(This is in striking contrast to Linux, whose startup script runs
pretty much everything serially.) Windows also records statistics
about program disk usage and rearranges sectors on the hard disk to
make program startup faster. I'm sure there are other things I don't
know about.

Chris Capel

-- 
"What is it like to be a bat? What is it like to bat a bee? What is it
like to be a bee being batted? What is it like to be a batted bee?"
-- The Mind's I (Hofstadter, Dennet)


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