on GUIs and such things

[Shawn T. Rutledge]

On Thu, Jul 20, 2000 at 08:45:10PM -0400, Kragen Sitaker wrote:
> Persistence is useful for folks that need quick reboots; indeed,
> Windows 2000 and Linux both have the ability now to persist a running
> system image to disk so as to reboot more quickly; unfortunately, PCs

How do you do that on Linux?

> Persistence plus VNC could be a very useful combination: once you log
> in and start a program, you never have to restart it, ever.  Log out,
> unplug the machine, ship it around the world, move to another state,
> plug everything in and turn it back on, and log back in, and it's still
> running.  This might fall in the realm of "parlor tricks" rather than
> "killer apps", unfortunately.

I think it would be really cool.  It's the same sort of vision of
the Sun Ray workstation, but implemented more cleanly and with sessions
that save more state.  And since those machines use smart-cards, it's
easier to get really good security.

> Palm-sized computers benefit from transparent persistence;
> unfortunately, transparent persistence might not interact well with
> ten-thousand-cycle flash RAM.  I'm not sure whether palm-sized

Well I think it's better to just leave the data in RAM all the time, 
rather than copy it back to something that's artifically designed to 
resemble "disk" space (FLASH).  This has been the approach of two
of the more successful ones (Newton and Palm).  I would like to see 
larger computers move to this model too; the hard disk would get used
only as permanent swap space, and additionally the RAM image would be
entirely swapped out when the machine is shut down.  So that every object
can pretend to be in memory all the time.  I think the big thing that 
stops the idea is the reliability of software.  Memory leaks and 
corruption are absolutely verboten when you aren't planning on 
starting your memory image over from scratch once in a while.  It would
be best to exclusively use languages which prevent these problems.

-- 
  _______                   Shawn T. Rutledge / KB7PWD  ecloud@bigfoot.com
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