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IDF Roundup – P2P, Serial ATA and fast boots

Satan Clara over and out

Serial ATA swapshop

Prototype Serial ATA PCs were on show, demonstrating hot pluggable hard disks. But only for Linux users. The Windows drivers doesn't have the functionality at the moment. Right now the Linux demo makes the physical connection, creates a mount point, mounts the file system, and drops a new icon onto the desktop transparently. You still have to press a release button on the drive to undock the unit, although we're sure someone will find a way to do this by dragging it to the wastebasket.

Peer To Peer Update

Intel talked about Trutella, a Gnutella-based client with some trust metrics thrown in. As we reckoned at the time of the Groove launch, , trust was a core issue that could make or break the P2P business. Although MojoNation has focused on these values, and Advogato and Kuro5hin have trust models for specific applications, this science is in its infancy.

At this stage Trutella gives a binary answer: yes, this guy's OK, no not; but it's clear that the team knows that far more sophistication is required for the technology to be usable. In another talk, David Grawrock from Chipzilla described the involvement of the TCPA organization. (IBM, Compaq, HP and Microsoft were founders). Grawrock said the trust model sees to it that identity credential doesn't have any unique information to ensure anonymity. So a challenger doesn't know the identity of the client.

Andrew Chien, CTO of Entropia also described how the grid harnesses 140,000 (and rising) distributed PCs for doing parallel computation work. Entropia's been working on this for four years, and has twigged something many of the arrivals have missed - geographic presence. Why hop around the world for something when it might be round the corner?

Speedy Boots

This isn't news, but it may be worth knowing. Intel's push to reduce boot times involves Rapid BIOS. POST times these days are much better than they what they were, but that leaves lengthy load times for Windows users. Officially recommended remedies in the Rapid BIOS session included enabling DMA, and disabling the junk that insists on loading itself in the Windows system tray. Good advice. ®

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