Hibernation
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Why hibernate or 'safe sleep' mode is no longer necessary in OS X Lion (Updated)
Update: Several commenters expressed concern that disabling safe sleep could expose you to the possibility of drive corruption if you lose power or your machine spontaneously restarts. This particular fear is groundless; Safe Sleep doesn't have anything to do with volume corruption (except if you inadvertently bounce your laptop around while the drive is still spinning to save the sleep image, as noted below). The technology that helps OS X deal with uncertain volume status is HFS+ journaling, and it's set on by default when your drive is first formatted for an OS X install. The file system journal keeps track of changes and updates to your drive; if your Mac loses power, the journal is 'replayed' to help restore the drive to a known good state. This is always at work regardless of the safe sleep status. Whether you choose to keep Safe Sleep on or not is a matter of personal preference, but if your machine is generally plugged in and you don't run the battery down below 20%, you are never actually taking advantage of the feature. If you want to chew up the drive space and take the time for the sleep image to write anyway, that's up to you. On SSD-equipped machines, the image save time is inconsequential but the loss of storage space is even more acute. Original post below. Introduced in 2005's PowerBooks, 'safe sleep' (or 'hibernate mode' as it's known in the Windows world) is a feature designed to preserve the current state of your Mac when you put it to sleep. Enabled by default on Apple's notebooks, the feature writes the entire contents of your RAM onto the hard disk when you put your Mac to sleep. The practical upshot of this is if your Mac loses power, the next time you start it up everything should be restored to exactly the way it was when you put your Mac to sleep. If you're running OS X Lion, this feature may sound very familiar. That's because it somewhat parallels the functionality of Lion's Autosave and Resume features, which also allow you to pick up where you left off, even after a power failure or a discretionary reboot. For that reason and several others, safe sleep mode seems like an unnecessary feature for most OS X Lion users. I've disabled it on my Mac, and if you're running Lion, you may be interested in doing the same thing on your own Mac. Even if safe sleep does duplicate features already built into OS X Lion, why even bother disabling it? I did it for two reasons. First, if the system has to write the contents of your RAM to the hard disk every time you put your Mac to sleep, it could take a long time for your Mac to actually fall asleep. While this process is relatively fast on the new SSD I just installed, on my old and extremely slow HDD it could take a minute or more for my Mac to actually fall asleep. If you're in the (bad) habit of grabbing your laptop and tucking it away in your bag before the pulsing power light tells you the machine is fully asleep, you could be moving your machine just as the drive is trying to write out the data for the sleep image; that's a prescription for drive trouble down the line. The second reason I disabled safe sleep was because of the large amounts of hard drive space it consumes. The 'sleep image' generated by safe sleep isn't restricted to the amount of RAM you're actively using; instead, it's equal to the entire amount of your RAM. On my system, this meant 6 GB of drive space was being consumed by the sleep image, and since I can think of many better uses for all that space, I decided to get rid of it. If you've now decided that you also want to disable safe sleep, you have a few options. SafeSleep is one third-party app that can get the job done for free, but be warned it's no longer being updated or supported. SmartSleep may be a better option, and it's even available on the Mac App Store, but it does cost US$3.99. A few other third-party solutions exist; those are just the first two that came to mind. However, it seems these solutions merely toggle your Mac's sleep mode and don't do anything to get rid of the space-consuming sleep image. Another option, for those of you who aren't afraid of the OS X Terminal, is to input the following commands (which will require you to enter your admin password): To remove the sleep image file: sudo rm -rf /var/vm/sleepimage To disable safe sleep mode: sudo pmset hibernatemode 0 Whether you use one of the third-party utilities or the Terminal commands, you'll now have reclaimed a portion of your hard drive space equal to the amount of RAM you have installed in your Mac. If you have Lion's Resume feature enabled, you shouldn't be losing out on anything by disabling safe sleep on your Mac. Resume plus Autosave accomplishes essentially the same thing, but without consuming unnecessarily huge swathes of your disk space and without making it take forever to put your Mac to sleep. There is one caveat to this: applications not yet updated with full Lion compatibility may not support Resume or Autosave features. If you find yourself heavily reliant on these apps and don't want to risk losing your data, you may want to leave safe sleep enabled despite the potential benefits of disabling it.
Nick Yee puts the Daedalus Project into hibernation
The Daedalus Project, for those who aren't familiar with this fantastic project by Nick Yee, is an in-depth look at the psychology of MMO gamers. As someone who plays MMOs, Nick has always taken a very fair and balanced look at the intricate worlds spanning the MMO genre, with results that were sometimes surprising. During the course of ten years of research, he's looked into everything from basic gender alignment questions to in-depth looks at genre, how emerging changes in game mechanics affect social interaction, and so very much more. To say it's been important, enlightening work is an understatement. In a recent blog posting, Nick has announced that he's going to be placing the Daedalus Project into 'hibernation' due to time constraints, the rigors of his everyday work, and his need to publish as a PhD. As anyone can imagine, running an enormous project like Daedalus has to take a great deal of time and effort. It would appear that rather than letting the quality of the work for this project of love suffer, he's opted to place it on hold for now. While it's definitely a loss for the MMO - and indeed educational - community, we can totally understand. All of us here at Massively would like to thank Nick for his unwavering dedication to bringing so many important things to light over the last ten years, and hope that all of his future challenges are equally as rewarding.
Movie Gadget Friday: 2010: The Year We Make Contact
Ariel Waldman contributes Movie Gadget Friday, where she highlights the lovable and lame gadgets from the world of cinema.Last week on Movie Gadget Friday we kicked off our two-part series in honor of the late Arthur C. Clarke with 2001: A Space Odyssey. This week continues our tribute as we look into some of the support systems on board Discovery 1 and the Leonov in 2010: The Year We Make Contact. While we hear Dave Bowman proclaim "My God, it's full of stars", we can't help but dig through this film full of gadgets. HAL 9000 and SAL 9000Designed as an artificial emotional intelligence machine, the HAL 9000 and SAL 9000 require human interaction for enhanced performance. Represented by a blue camera eye and female voice, SAL 9000 served as a guide to monitoring potential reactions by the previously disabled HAL 9000. Both machines incorporate keyboard and audio input to communicate with intelligent carbon-based lifeforms (read: us). The HAL 9000 is adept at facial, vocal, and vital sign recognition and makes decisions based on a strict understanding of logic. HAL maintains numerous responsibilities while acting as the brain and central nervous system of Discovery 1. Though HAL appears to be programmed to protect the crew, there are obvious and inherent flaws in his logic programming, resulting in -- spoiler alert -- in committing homicide to resolve conflicting commands. More after the jump.
Shifting Perspectives: How to group with a Druid part 3
Every Tuesday, Shifting Perspectives explores issues affecting druids and those who group with them, brought to you by David Bowers and Dan O'Halloran. This it the last in a series of features talking about How To Group With A Druid. I've already covered bear tanks, cat druids and Moonkin. Today, I will be exploring what Restoration druids bring to a 5 man group as well as what they don't do. If you feel I've left out any important points, be sure to leave a comment below! We love comments like healers love aggro control. WHAT TO EXPECT FROM A RESTORATION DRUID HEALING: Druids are built to be solid healers in both regular and heroic 5 man instances. They don't have to drop 40+ talent points to be good at it. Don't be surprised if you're druid healer is actually specced 31 points in Balance and 30 points in Restoration. That's more than enough for them to get you through alive. On the other hand, don't be screaming for healing non-stop if you are not the main tank. It's your job to control your aggro, not the healers job to blow half his mana on non-tanks. I understand mistakes happen, wandering mobs appear out of nowhere, the MT gets overwhelmed and loses control of an add or two. But if the healer is dumping more healing on you than the MT for every encounter, you need to scale back your dps or talk to your tank about their taunt tactics.
Vista's Aero interface blamed for truncated battery life
Considering just how many copies of Windows Vista that Microsoft has moved, it's not too surprising that a few (potentially rightful) whiners are calling the new operating system out for glaring issues. Not too long after users were complaining over sluggish file movements and bogus ads, it seems that the Aero Glass interface is the latest target of concern. Reportedly, the battery life of laptops is being diminished by having the eye candy cranked up, all while Microsoft claims that the OS touts "improved power management capabilities." Of course, Core Duo users cried this same river when trading more horsepower for minutes, but engineers from HP and Lenovo have actually concocted their own power settings after finding the canned options unsuitable. Still, it seems to make perfect sense that flipping on a glitzy interface that obviously requires more juice to run correctly would negatively impact the battery life, but until we start strapping potent fuel cells into our portable machines, this unfortunate trend is likely to continue.
Widget Watch: Deep Sleep
Safe Sleep is basically a 'deeper sleep' feature that debuted on the 15-inch and 17-inch PowerBooks last year, and as far as I know, it's included (and enabled by default) on all of Apple's MacBook/Pro portables (and yes, I hear it's basically like the Windows 'Hibernate' state). This deep sleep differs from the typical Sleep state that most of us are used to: it writes everything currently in memory (your open apps, the files you're working on, etc.) to the hard drive, and actually powers down the machine, saving the battery power that slowly siphons during the normal Sleep mode. Waking from this mode naturally takes a little longer, and a progress bar unique to this feature is displayed while the machine is waking from Safe Sleep. If you want to see it in action, Rob Griffiths (of Macworld and Mac OS X Hints fame) posted a good video demonstration of Safe Sleep on his black MacBook (so jealous!) to YouTube. By default, the new MacBook/Pro behavior is to use a little of both worlds: they write everything to the drive while they're going to sleep, but still use 'regular Sleep' unless power is lost from both AC and the battery. If power is lost, the machine switches over to Safe Sleep automatically - yet another reason to send those Apple engineers a batch of cookies. But what if you want to bypass the regular Sleep status and use Safe Sleep by default all the time?Enter the Deep Sleep Dashboard widget - one-click access to putting your Mac down for an extended nap. Documentation is included with the widget explaining what's going on, and it also has a list of the machines known to support this feature. To top things off, if you just aren't a fan of widgets, the author also packaged Deep Sleep as a simple command line utility, linked in small print at the bottom of Deep Sleep's page.[via MacUser]
