Wishes for a perfect world

Among the things I'd like to have:

Instant-on computers (tablets, cell phones, etc). Turn them on, and three seconds later they're ready to use.

A decent airline seat (see Interjet) on a supersonic or hypersonic plane.

Low traffic streets (and unicorns, and pet dinosaurs, and a real deity! <w>)

A microwave oven that heats the food evenly. Rotating turntables and magnetron fans help, but it's far from perfect yet. While we're at it, a conventional oven that cooks evenly, too.

A coffee cup which keeps hot coffee hot.

A portable device battery that can be charged in under 15 minutes every time.



More as I think of them or recall them.

Quote: Nareed

Instant-on computers (tablets, cell phones, etc). Turn them on, and three seconds later they're ready to use.

Somebody was just telling me that have such computers now. I think he referred to them as a "solid state" computer. Meaning it didn't have a hard disk drive. No moving parts at all except for the CD/DVD player.

Quote: Wizard

Somebody was just telling me that have such computers now. I think he referred to them as a "solid state" computer. Meaning it didn't have a hard disk drive. No moving parts at all except for the CD/DVD player.

Tablets and phones are solid state, too (BTW that was a big ad-word in the late 70s and early 80s TVs and Stereo systems.) The iphone 4 running ios 7.something takes about 2 minutes to be ready to use. That's not bad, but it's not instant-on. My Nexus 7 (2012) running Android 5.1 takes longer, about 3.5 minutes, then it's sluggish until it gets updates and backup notifications up; say between 5-7 minutes all told. IMO that's rather slow.

There are some laptop and desktop PCs using SSDs (solid state drives), instead of electromechanical hard drives. I've never tried one.

Quote: Wizard

Somebody was just telling me that have such computers now. I think he referred to them as a "solid state" computer. Meaning it didn't have a hard disk drive. No moving parts at all except for the CD/DVD player.

I was aboot to post the same thing. While not instant, the difference is staggering. I recently upgraded to a proper gaming rig with an SSD. I just timed it with a stopwatch; from the moment I pushed the power button to being able to click and navigate pages took 29sec. It's not "instant", but compared to a regular HD, the SSD blows it out of the water. Loading games and whatnot are even closer to "instant". They're a bit pricey (~$400 for 1Tb), but worth it if speed is a priority.

A few big benefits to SSDs:

No magnetic head crashes. They can handle being dropped a lot better than a HDD can.

Near zero file seek times / read latency. No need to ever defragment, great for multiprocessing systems with lots of random access files open at the same time.

a few drawbacks

sequential read/writes, burst performance used to be worse than hard drives. I don't know if this is still the case.

an individual cell of a ssd has a limited number of writes that you can do before it stops working. They have worked around this problem by providing extra cells outside of the published capacity of the drive, and by advanced "wear-leveling" techniques where they spread out the writes across the drive through time.

If you tried to run an operating system on an old Compact Flash card, with a swap file, you could easily kill it within a day.

Now, lots of laptops are being shipped with ssds, and swapfiles, and they claim the drives will last for decades.

Quote: Dalex64

Now, lots of laptops are being shipped with ssds, and swapfiles, and they claim the drives will last for decades.

That's really interesting.

Does any of this applies also to cell phones and tablets? Or do they use some other type of memory?

The same sort of memory, NAND based flash, is or was pretty much the same in all of those devices. I haven't been in the hardware industry for a few years, so I'm not up on all of the latest developments.

The life of the device all comes down to the controller and the wear leveling.

Smaller devices, and devices with less free space, will get used up faster since there are fewer available cells to spread out the writes.

For phones and tablets, I don't think there is much concern, since they don't do a whole lot of writing.

You used to have to make sure you bought camera grade compact flash for cameras, too, or you'd chew them up as well. I think today's SD cards are probably all good for that now. The hardware has matured a lot over the past 5 to 10 years.

Quote: Nareed

Among the things I'd like to have:

A coffee cup which keeps hot coffee hot.

Katie Wainfan at age 7 in between her dancing and poetry activities invented the "Hot Cubes" that keep coffee hot without diluting it. She later went on the London School of Economics and a turn as a Page in the House of Commons. If the name Wainfan seems familiar to you, her father and mother were rocket scientists who invented the Facetmobile and are well known in the design of small home-built aircraft.

Quote: Wizard

Somebody was just telling me that have such computers now. I think he referred to them as a "solid state" computer. Meaning it didn't have a hard disk drive. No moving parts at all except for the CD/DVD player.

You really aren't a tech nerd.
Usually you say "solid state drive" and they have been available for about 5 years. If you look at the Mac list, you see that about half only have solid state drives. Also the CD/DVD player is frequently omitted today, as it is a power hog. In some cases heat generation is so low that you don't even need a fan.

http://www.apple.com/mac/compare/

I think if you really want a machine that runs for 24 hours on battery it will have a virtual display

Quote: Dalex64

For phones and tablets, I don't think there is much concern, since they don't do a whole lot of writing.

I'm constantly downloading and deleting podcasts in my phone, not to mention making heavy use of Gmail. On the tablet it comes closer to being used as a desktop PC, in casual use; ie plenty of facebook, web browsing, email, videos, etc. Plus I download and delete audio books and e-books as well. Not to mention frequent updates of apps on both devices, and installing and deleting apps as well.

Still, it's not like I check the RAM use frequently...

when I first heard of SSDs, I thought they were essentially the same as a regular HD, just solid state. I'd no idea there were inherent limitations on them. It reminds me a bit of the old, old, PCs which were shipped with a report of the number of faulty sectors on the 40 MB HD.