Geeky thoughts from Slashdot:
Imagine a visionary like Steve Jobs. He goes to his team and says “I don’t care what it takes, build me a computer which boots in one second”.
Ignore the past, the legacy of tens of years of layer after layer of OS software. Can it be done?
A 3 GHz dual-core processor can process 6 billion instructions in that first second. I know the disk is a problem. I’m not asking for all possible OS services to be up in a second… But I’m sure this could be improved greatly. It’s all out there in the open. People want this.
Good question. Back in The Day, my trusty old Apple IIe booted in maybe 20 seconds, and most of that was spinning up the five-and-a-quarter disk drive. Now it takes ten times that long for my Linux system to present me with my KDE desktop. Yet the hardware is literally millions of times faster than it was back in the 1980’s.
Hmm.