This is correct, of course... however: I've already decreased the average power usage of my system with idling Firefox from about 8W to 6W (no Flash, Noscript, GIFs set not to animate, Profile and Firefox itself entirely on RAMDisk to minimize disk access etc.). I'd assume optimizing the browser directly would be much more effective, so getting half of the power savings I'm able to reach with a few simple (albeit drastic) tweaks is entirely within the realm of reality, IMHO.
Hmmm, the chart seems pretty clear: Average power consumption over a set period of time displaying the web page (either including or not including the power spike during the page load - at those figures, I'm assuming it includes the spike unless the laptop is running dedicated graphics).
The PDF seems to confirm this (see 2.2.2) - 6 minute test for each page, including the load spike.
As I type this in Firefox, Lenovo's Power Manager is showing power usage of about 6W. 1W less would be a 17% decrease! With the 9-cell battery currently attached, that's a 2h20m jump in battery life.
Of course, I've already dropped FIrefox's power consumption significantly using Adblock, Noscript and so on, so it's unlikely I'll see a full Watt of improvement by switching to IE, but for others, this could be huge.
Nope, swaps like crazy as soon as you have a few Firefox or Chrome tabs open, simply because they're godawful memory hogs... although Firefox has gotten better at staying under 2GB in the last release.
Of course, with a decently fast SSD, you don't really notice the swapping much (this is why adding an SSD to existing systems is often such a huge speed boost), but it's still not a conceptually sound way to run a computer... increased power consumption, (theoretically) reduced SSD lifetime...
I get the feeling you're confusing a new CPU + Mainboard + RAM bundle with a new machine. I'm still using the same machine I bought in 2006, even though the only component that's still the same is the case... throughout the years it's gotten 2 new CPU + Mainboard + RAM bundles, tons of different hard drives, 3 GPUs, 1 PSU and... well, that's about it.
Dropping in a new CPU without swapping anything else is difficult though, and if you're running a system with IDE drives, 20-pin ATX connector, no P4 connector and only 4-pin-Molex, you're not going to have any fun upgrading a larger bundle of components either. But for decently up to date systems (say 5 years), dropping in a new Mainboard + CPU + RAM bundle is much cheaper and more effective than just buying a new machine.
I think the word you're looking for is proprietary. Good luck adding storage when you run out of space, or upgrading to new GPUs when nVidia and AMD have a performance breakthrough one or two years down the line...
Oh wait Thunderbolt - you can hook up an external graphics card and external hard drives... so it's a bit like a supercharged netbook minus the display and keyboard and portability.
Hmmm... I'm a bit confused... which of these applications is porn-specific? OK, Winamp and ACDSee can technically play video, but I actually use neither of them for that purpose (Winamp is for music, ACDSee is for photo-management).
"As for drivers, I often have problems with USB devices like external hard disks or flash drives on Windows 7, then I usually have to troubleshoot the problem via a rather complicated process for non computer savvy people or simply plug in the device again and again until it works on its own."
Really? TBH, it sounds like you're either using very exotic USB devices or have broken USB ports. Are your chipset drivers installed?
"In other words, "I use MS Office because everyone else does, not because it's actually better.""
Morbid curiosity on my part: Does LibreOffice run VB Macros properly? I hate the damned things, but I still have to run and fix the ones my coworkers write...
I'm the same, unfortunately. I have Mint and Ubuntu VMs for Android stuff and general screwing around, but any time I actually want to work or play, it's plain old Windows 7. Reasons are the following, in order of most to least important:
1. Battery life. I'm getting about 12 hours per charge of wireless web & office out of a single 9-cell (approx. 90Wh) on my T520. On Linux, I'm lucky to get 8 hours... there ARE people out there who get similarly awesome battery life on Linux, but I can't for the life of me reproduce their settings - either I'm too Linux-Nooby to understand them or they're unable to explain properly. I've tried TLP, all the suggested kernel parameters, using powertop to find power-hogs... so far, instead of the ~6W I'm hitting in Windows, I'm lucky to hit 8 or 9W in Linux when doing the same things with the same display brightness.
I even bought a Linux-friendly version of the T520 - Intel graphics only, Intel 6300 Ultimate-N Wireless, no WWAN, regular old Bluetooth...
2. Perfect window and desktop management with the following tools: Dexpot, Allsnap, Winsplit Revolution and AutoHotKey. Linux distros offer many of these features built into its DE, but they're always missing something that the above combination of tools offers, and I haven't found separately installable Linux alternatives to all of them yet.
3. I quite like my Windows applications - Photoshop, MS Office, Matlab, Winamp... even ACDSee Pro. Running these applications in a virtualized environment on battery life would be stupid...
4. Windows (at least since Vista/7) seems less prone to breakage than common Linux distros. I can't count the times that a few simple updates have rendered my Mint or Ubuntu VMs unusable because of some setting or package I'd installed beforehand... if someone could tell me WTF I'm doing to keep fucking this up, I'd be very grateful.
"One 6Gb SAS drive (defacto local and network standard in 2013 Datacenters) can do 3-600 MB/s per port (a good deal faster than older 6Gb SAS drives)"
Spinning drives? o.O
Link please. I've been configuring relatively high-end Dell server hardware for the last few days, and all I've found inside are rebadged enterprise SATA drives from major manufacturers... connected via SAS, but that doesn't change their max read/write speeds.
Remote disks on GbE already are pretty much as fast as local disks... with the fastest desktop hard drives, you might gain a few percent of transfer speed - nothing really that noticeable. If you really wanted to see a difference, you'd need SSDs in the NAS - let's see, replacing 4x4TB HDDs in the NAS with 512GB SSDs... that'll be $12000 for 32 SSDs please.:)
"You're looking at things backwards. If you've got a 500 MB/s SSD, then you shouldn't look at 10GigE and say "that's twice as fast as I need, it's useless". You should look at the existing GigE and say "my SSD is four times faster, one gigabit is too slow"..."
Remember that both endpoints in the data transfer need to be able to exceed the 1Gbps in order for this to make sense. How many companies (or home users, for that matter) have large amounts of network-accessible data on SSD? The SSD in my laptop is irrelevant when the fileserver at work is running 7200RPM hard drives in RAID1...
"Even a cheap commodity magnetic hard disk can saturate a gigabit network today. The fact that lots of computers use solid state drives only made that problem worse. Transferring files between computers on a typical home network these days, I think the one gigabit per second network limitation is going to be the bottleneck for many people."
Ah, but commodity SSDs are 64-256GB... how much data can you really store on there? Even at 1Gbps you can transfer a full GB of data in unter 10 seconds... so say we've got two home-user laptops, each with a decent-sized 256GB SSD, 50GB of which are used for the OS and programs. Let's say there's actually 200GB of data on there that needs to be copied from one machine to the other... even at 1Gbps, that's only about 28 minutes to copy almost the entire disk. On 10GbE, that figure might drop to about 17 minutes (based on a 200MBps write speed on a typical consumer SSD)... is it worth the difference, especially for a home user?
Remember, even on GbE, you can copy a typical SD movie (let's say 1GB, although 500-700MB are more common) in less than 10 seconds. You can copy a typical FLAC album in 5 seconds. You can copy an H264 compressed FullHD movie in about 80 seconds. Why upgrade? If you're transferring files >10GB, you're not likely to have them on SSD anyway, but rather on a NAS or at least hard drives in general, which is once again bottlenecked by hard drive transfer rates...
Agreed... even at my place of work (big tech company with decent IT), data transfers aren't fast enough to max out the currently in place GBit Ethernet due to factors like hard drive read/write speeds. WTF would we need 10GbE for? Until everything's on SSD or super-fast RAID-arrayed HDDs, there's no point...
While a battery will degrade with time and accruing cycles, it's nowhere near as extreme as you're saying. Sure, if you're charging and discharging at 60+W and really abusing the battery by rapid-charging it right after it's been completely discharged (still warm) or other no-nos, you might see that rapid a drop in capacity, but these devices hardly draw 10W in normal usage scenarios. The batteries shouldn't lose much capacity at all during their first few hundred cycles...
Slashdot Mirror
Which works quite well. I also tried Feedly, but that comes with a weird Firefox add-on that causes high power consumption on battery...
You may be right about that, but even then, someone who runs a bog standard Firefox or Chrome would see a benefit in battery life by switching to IE.
Not that I'm advocating switching to IE, of course... just saying Firefox and Chrome need to start focusing more on reducing power consumption.
This is correct, of course... however: I've already decreased the average power usage of my system with idling Firefox from about 8W to 6W (no Flash, Noscript, GIFs set not to animate, Profile and Firefox itself entirely on RAMDisk to minimize disk access etc.). I'd assume optimizing the browser directly would be much more effective, so getting half of the power savings I'm able to reach with a few simple (albeit drastic) tweaks is entirely within the realm of reality, IMHO.
Hmmm, the chart seems pretty clear: Average power consumption over a set period of time displaying the web page (either including or not including the power spike during the page load - at those figures, I'm assuming it includes the spike unless the laptop is running dedicated graphics).
The PDF seems to confirm this (see 2.2.2) - 6 minute test for each page, including the load spike.
As I type this in Firefox, Lenovo's Power Manager is showing power usage of about 6W. 1W less would be a 17% decrease! With the 9-cell battery currently attached, that's a 2h20m jump in battery life.
Of course, I've already dropped FIrefox's power consumption significantly using Adblock, Noscript and so on, so it's unlikely I'll see a full Watt of improvement by switching to IE, but for others, this could be huge.
Because FLAC was already fucking awesome for 44.1kHz/16bit, which happens to cover probably 95% of use cases.
Nope, swaps like crazy as soon as you have a few Firefox or Chrome tabs open, simply because they're godawful memory hogs... although Firefox has gotten better at staying under 2GB in the last release.
Of course, with a decently fast SSD, you don't really notice the swapping much (this is why adding an SSD to existing systems is often such a huge speed boost), but it's still not a conceptually sound way to run a computer... increased power consumption, (theoretically) reduced SSD lifetime...
I get the feeling you're confusing a new CPU + Mainboard + RAM bundle with a new machine. I'm still using the same machine I bought in 2006, even though the only component that's still the same is the case... throughout the years it's gotten 2 new CPU + Mainboard + RAM bundles, tons of different hard drives, 3 GPUs, 1 PSU and... well, that's about it.
Dropping in a new CPU without swapping anything else is difficult though, and if you're running a system with IDE drives, 20-pin ATX connector, no P4 connector and only 4-pin-Molex, you're not going to have any fun upgrading a larger bundle of components either. But for decently up to date systems (say 5 years), dropping in a new Mainboard + CPU + RAM bundle is much cheaper and more effective than just buying a new machine.
I think the word you're looking for is proprietary. Good luck adding storage when you run out of space, or upgrading to new GPUs when nVidia and AMD have a performance breakthrough one or two years down the line...
Oh wait Thunderbolt - you can hook up an external graphics card and external hard drives... so it's a bit like a supercharged netbook minus the display and keyboard and portability.
That's good to know, thanks.
I'm more than ready to agree to that. I'm too stupid to keep Linux running smoothly in the long term...
Hmmm... I'm a bit confused... which of these applications is porn-specific? OK, Winamp and ACDSee can technically play video, but I actually use neither of them for that purpose (Winamp is for music, ACDSee is for photo-management).
"As for drivers, I often have problems with USB devices like external hard disks or flash drives on Windows 7, then I usually have to troubleshoot the problem via a rather complicated process for non computer savvy people or simply plug in the device again and again until it works on its own."
Really? TBH, it sounds like you're either using very exotic USB devices or have broken USB ports. Are your chipset drivers installed?
WinSCP? Or any of the other many secure copy options?
Are you sure that broken spreadsheet wasn't created or edited in another program (like LibreCalc or whatever it's called)?
"In other words, "I use MS Office because everyone else does, not because it's actually better.""
Morbid curiosity on my part: Does LibreOffice run VB Macros properly? I hate the damned things, but I still have to run and fix the ones my coworkers write...
I'm the same, unfortunately. I have Mint and Ubuntu VMs for Android stuff and general screwing around, but any time I actually want to work or play, it's plain old Windows 7. Reasons are the following, in order of most to least important:
1. Battery life. I'm getting about 12 hours per charge of wireless web & office out of a single 9-cell (approx. 90Wh) on my T520. On Linux, I'm lucky to get 8 hours... there ARE people out there who get similarly awesome battery life on Linux, but I can't for the life of me reproduce their settings - either I'm too Linux-Nooby to understand them or they're unable to explain properly. I've tried TLP, all the suggested kernel parameters, using powertop to find power-hogs... so far, instead of the ~6W I'm hitting in Windows, I'm lucky to hit 8 or 9W in Linux when doing the same things with the same display brightness.
I even bought a Linux-friendly version of the T520 - Intel graphics only, Intel 6300 Ultimate-N Wireless, no WWAN, regular old Bluetooth...
2. Perfect window and desktop management with the following tools: Dexpot, Allsnap, Winsplit Revolution and AutoHotKey. Linux distros offer many of these features built into its DE, but they're always missing something that the above combination of tools offers, and I haven't found separately installable Linux alternatives to all of them yet.
3. I quite like my Windows applications - Photoshop, MS Office, Matlab, Winamp... even ACDSee Pro. Running these applications in a virtualized environment on battery life would be stupid...
4. Windows (at least since Vista/7) seems less prone to breakage than common Linux distros. I can't count the times that a few simple updates have rendered my Mint or Ubuntu VMs unusable because of some setting or package I'd installed beforehand... if someone could tell me WTF I'm doing to keep fucking this up, I'd be very grateful.
Hmmm, that's true of course... I forgot RAID controllers. :)
Seeing some 210MB/sec results as well... still far from 600MB/sec.
I've just spent a few minutes looking at 15kRPM SAS drives, and they seem to top out around 170MB/sec. Where are the 600MB/sec you're speaking of?
"One 6Gb SAS drive (defacto local and network standard in 2013 Datacenters) can do 3-600 MB/s per port (a good deal faster than older 6Gb SAS drives)"
Spinning drives? o.O
Link please. I've been configuring relatively high-end Dell server hardware for the last few days, and all I've found inside are rebadged enterprise SATA drives from major manufacturers... connected via SAS, but that doesn't change their max read/write speeds.
Remote disks on GbE already are pretty much as fast as local disks... with the fastest desktop hard drives, you might gain a few percent of transfer speed - nothing really that noticeable. If you really wanted to see a difference, you'd need SSDs in the NAS - let's see, replacing 4x4TB HDDs in the NAS with 512GB SSDs... that'll be $12000 for 32 SSDs please. :)
"You're looking at things backwards. If you've got a 500 MB/s SSD, then you shouldn't look at 10GigE and say "that's twice as fast as I need, it's useless". You should look at the existing GigE and say "my SSD is four times faster, one gigabit is too slow"..."
Remember that both endpoints in the data transfer need to be able to exceed the 1Gbps in order for this to make sense. How many companies (or home users, for that matter) have large amounts of network-accessible data on SSD? The SSD in my laptop is irrelevant when the fileserver at work is running 7200RPM hard drives in RAID1...
"Even a cheap commodity magnetic hard disk can saturate a gigabit network today. The fact that lots of computers use solid state drives only made that problem worse. Transferring files between computers on a typical home network these days, I think the one gigabit per second network limitation is going to be the bottleneck for many people."
Ah, but commodity SSDs are 64-256GB... how much data can you really store on there? Even at 1Gbps you can transfer a full GB of data in unter 10 seconds... so say we've got two home-user laptops, each with a decent-sized 256GB SSD, 50GB of which are used for the OS and programs. Let's say there's actually 200GB of data on there that needs to be copied from one machine to the other... even at 1Gbps, that's only about 28 minutes to copy almost the entire disk. On 10GbE, that figure might drop to about 17 minutes (based on a 200MBps write speed on a typical consumer SSD)... is it worth the difference, especially for a home user?
Remember, even on GbE, you can copy a typical SD movie (let's say 1GB, although 500-700MB are more common) in less than 10 seconds. You can copy a typical FLAC album in 5 seconds. You can copy an H264 compressed FullHD movie in about 80 seconds. Why upgrade? If you're transferring files >10GB, you're not likely to have them on SSD anyway, but rather on a NAS or at least hard drives in general, which is once again bottlenecked by hard drive transfer rates...
Agreed... even at my place of work (big tech company with decent IT), data transfers aren't fast enough to max out the currently in place GBit Ethernet due to factors like hard drive read/write speeds. WTF would we need 10GbE for? Until everything's on SSD or super-fast RAID-arrayed HDDs, there's no point...
While a battery will degrade with time and accruing cycles, it's nowhere near as extreme as you're saying. Sure, if you're charging and discharging at 60+W and really abusing the battery by rapid-charging it right after it's been completely discharged (still warm) or other no-nos, you might see that rapid a drop in capacity, but these devices hardly draw 10W in normal usage scenarios. The batteries shouldn't lose much capacity at all during their first few hundred cycles...