14th Oct2011

Dennis Ritchie has Passed Away at 70

by Skibs

Dennis M. Ritchie (a.k.a. dmr) was found dead this Wednesday at his home in Berkeley Heights, New Jersey. Ritchie was modest by nature, but current-day technology is a testament to his contributions in computer science.

His legacy includes creating the C programming language, which proceeded BCPL, and inspired the design of pretty much every new language to pop-up after the 1970’s (C++, Objective C, Perl, Java, PHP, C#, Go, etc.). He was also a co-developer of UNIX, where he wrote the I/O portions as well as some of utilities.

Rest in Peace, dmr (September 9, 1941 – October 8, 2011).

[Sources: Dr.Dobb’s, New York Times]

12th Sep2011

Faster Boot Times in Windows 8

by Skibs

The first in a series of Windows 8 “fundamentals” has been posted on the MSDN blog. This entry is concerned with improving the “cold-boot” speeds of machines running Windows 8. The new boot scheme needed to achieve three goals: 1) Effectively zero watt power when off 2) A fresh session after every boot 3) Very fast times between pressing the power button and being able to use the PC.

With this criteria in mind, a “fast startup” modification was proposed which replaces with the lengthy system initialization phase of the boot process with a load of a hiberfile created exclusively of the kernel session followed by driver initialization. With this new scheme, the new OS boasts boot-up speeds which are, on average, 30%-70% shorter than would be had on Windows 7.

[Source: MSDN]