I have a question: is it possible to underclock laptops to improve battery life? I'm thinking of buying a T23 Thinkpad, and I want the big screen. That means I'd be getting a 1GHz+ CPU, which is massively overpowered. That means the battery life takes a serious hit, and a decent battery life is important enough to me to be worth a bit of fiddling under the hood. I'd be prepared to underclock that bad dog down to say 1/4 speed for 90% of what I do. Can SpeedStep do this, or is ther any other way to achieve this result?
What's the point of all the research into battery technology going into keeping my lap hotter for the same length of time? I believe the T23 line generates something like 75W of waste heat! It's like some kind of portable space heater rather than an efficient computing device.
There is an interesting project underway in the UK called consume --
Fed up with being held to ransom in the local loop, phased by fees to
ISP's, concious of community? OK so lets build a fresh network, one
that is local, global, fast, expanding, public and user-constructed.
I keep meaning to get in touch with them about setting up a node, but somehow I doubt there's much demand in the bit of London where I live...
I went through my old email, and, although I doubt anyone will read this comment, the site from whence you can obtain all those Infocom games on one CD is <http://www.lacegem.com/orders.html>.
The page is more of an aquamarine than a peppermint, according to xcolorsel, so I don't suppose that helped much... --
The Z-code file for the Hitchhiker's Guide is available off Douglas Adams' web site. Download this, and buy the Activision reissue of "Classic text adventure masterpieces" and you'll have pretty much everything Infocom ever did. If you have a Pilot, put a copy of Frotz on it and you can play on the move. Some of the games have mildly annoying copy protection which means you have to look something up in the PDF manual, but by and large it's fantastic. I paid about £25 or so I think -- unfortunately I can't remember the URL, but I do remember the page was a sort of pepperminty green. Oh, and check out if-archive. --
Of course watermarking will not work. As Bruce Schneier says in Secrets and Lies:
Great idea, but it just won't work.
The problem is that in order for [the copyright owner] to be able to take a copy of [the artwork] and find the embedded watermark, it has to be findable. And if [the copyright owner] can find it, a pirate can find it too. Companies that market this stuff try to tell you that their watermarking schemes can't be removed for this or that technobabble reason. It just isn't true. As with a subliminal channel, it is virtually impossible to find a good watermark unless you know exactly where to look. But unlike a subliminal channel, the detection mechanism will eventually be made public. Either it will leak into the hacking community like everything else does, or it will be made public the first time a court case turns on watermarking evidence. The mechanisms for watermarking will eventually become public, and when they do, they can be reverse engineered and removed from the [digital content].
Does anyone know where accurate statistics are kept on the distribution popularity/usage?
It's extremely difficult to get even inaccurate figures on Linux usage, never mind accurate figures on the usage of individual distributions. Tracking of sales/downloads is not centralised, and once installed they can be hard to tell apart, and hard if not impossible to find.
Debian is especially hard to estimate, since I suspect the vast majority of installs are over the net, and once installed Debian is highly upgradeable. I installed slink for instance, bought some CDs while I was on a modem, and have been upgrading over ADSL ever since. Oh, and I installed three more boxes purely over the net, two of which are inside the firewall at my current work and one of which is an intermittently-connected laptop.
Besides, who cares? It's not a pissing match, and Debian in particular is not composed primarily of beancounters...
While I'm typing this, I'd recommend giving a couple of distributions a try; personally I've kind of settled down with Debian after a brief flirtation with RedHat. Do buy at least one set of CDs though whether you need them or not -- it's important to get some degree of financial support back to Software in the Public Interest (see the Debian web site).
If you can work out who reads a file that you sent into the bowels of an organisation, you can figure out who to send your `I Love You' trojan, with its `send me all of the spreadsheets on your machine' payload. Imagine delivering something attractive to the finance department, or to the HR department. There's a lot of value that can be generated from this kind of social engineering (and, conversely, a lot of damage that can be caused). Simply getting information on what browser the people on the inside of the firewall are using might be interesting. --
or you can use backticks to generate your list (watch out for files with spaces in the names though...):
for f in `find . -type f -name '*.ps' -print`; do
echo $f;
lpr $f;
done
Try reading up on bash functions if you want to do complicated things. The hyperlinked help you mention sounds nice, but I reckon bash is probably bloated enough already without all that extra gubbins in it. If you need to read a manual your shell script might be better written in something a little more legible and flexible -- like Perl, Python or whatever -- horses for courses and all that. --
AVS has a GUI very like this (see the second picture on the right, unfortunately a little small). It is a really fantastic way of specifying data transforms and visualisation, and could be generalised into a nice generic piping mechanism. Control panels (dials, sliders and so on) can be inserted to modify the data stream, and there are bindings for writing your own modules. The connectors are colour-coded (in the manner of resistors) so that you can't hook them up incorrectly. Most tasks can be done entirely with the mouse.... --
Who are the likely manufacturers for hardware oggvorbis decoders? I'm thinking of buying an MP3 player, but if this is going to come off soon I'll wait. The existing MP3 players all seem to require either USB or Windows (or both), and I'm definitely sold on the idea of open solid-state music...
Keep up the good work, congratulations on finding someone to fund it!
> Locate is great for finding files. Problem with > it is threefold: > > 1) Let's say I install something, > like LessTif. The LessTif rpm doesn't modify my > ld.so.conf so I > have to put the path to libXm in > there myself. Where did the RPM put it? Can't > use locate > because I haven't yet run > updatedb.
> 2) Not portable. Maybe there is a locate > workalike on AIX or Tru64, but I haven't found > it.
2) GNU fileutils contains locate; portable up the wazoo. Why settle for a workalike when you can have the real thing?
> 3) find has some great options. Like -exec, > -owner, etc.
3) this is true
4) have you seen rgrep? nifty
5) don't try reimplementing locate as a shell script, use the full thing. It does quite a lot of compression, optimising, and has exclude lists and so forth.
damn this text mode *sucks* for laying stuff out. The lines with all the > ini them are quotes.... -- W.A.S.T.E.
It's funny you should mention scroll bars. I have to use a Windows NT 4.0 box at work, and one of the things that drives me absolutely around the twist (apart from the random lockups) is the behaviour of Windows' scroll bars. They act like ordinary control widgets, and deactivate if you move the mouse too far from them. In other words, if you want to scroll down you have to keep the pointer within a few tens of pixels of the scroll bar in the X direction, or the thumb pops back up to where you started scrolling! Argh! Why can't it just read the Y position?
Personally, I prefer the old Athena scroll bars, as seen in XTerm, with the left/right click to move down/up by different amounts and the middle button to free scroll. I get the impression you're talking about the *look* of the scroll bars, rather than the functionality when you say `how about putting in GTK scrollbars everywhere' (paraphrase) -- this is modifiable by third-party libraries such as Xaw3D -- scroll down the page to see more alternative sets. These changes can be made without recoding applications!
In order to use GTK code changes would be required to all applications with scrollbars. This would be a nightmare, and besides, GTK doesn't have X resources so you can't so easily modify widget behaviour.
It's a shame that X didn't provide an attractive widget set in the first place (or, alternatively, that Motif was, and is, so expensive). Motif, with its rich configuratbility via resources seems cleaner to me in many ways thatn GTK. I presume this will be fixed in later GTK releases, and I hope to see support for X resources at some point...
I've begun to ramble now, so I'll stop, but I'll just round off by saying that vanilla X is almost certainly more configurable than you're giving it credit for.
Slashdot Mirror
I have a question: is it possible to underclock laptops to improve battery life? I'm thinking of buying a T23 Thinkpad, and I want the big screen. That means I'd be getting a 1GHz+ CPU, which is massively overpowered. That means the battery life takes a serious hit, and a decent battery life is important enough to me to be worth a bit of fiddling under the hood. I'd be prepared to underclock that bad dog down to say 1/4 speed for 90% of what I do. Can SpeedStep do this, or is ther any other way to achieve this result?
What's the point of all the research into battery technology going into keeping my lap hotter for the same length of time? I believe the T23 line generates something like 75W of waste heat! It's like some kind of portable space heater rather than an efficient computing device.
E15...
I went through my old email, and, although I doubt anyone will read this comment, the site from whence you can obtain all those Infocom games on one CD is <http://www.lacegem.com/orders.html>. The page is more of an aquamarine than a peppermint, according to xcolorsel, so I don't suppose that helped much...
--
The Z-code file for the Hitchhiker's Guide is available off Douglas Adams' web site. Download this, and buy the Activision reissue of "Classic text adventure masterpieces" and you'll have pretty much everything Infocom ever did. If you have a Pilot, put a copy of Frotz on it and you can play on the move. Some of the games have mildly annoying copy protection which means you have to look something up in the PDF manual, but by and large it's fantastic. I paid about £25 or so I think -- unfortunately I can't remember the URL, but I do remember the page was a sort of pepperminty green. Oh, and check out if-archive.
--
For the hour glass cursor thing try xalf.
--
The Palm OS Emulator for Linux is called POSE. You can find it here. If you're running Debian, apt-get install pose should do the trick.
--
Yours isn't even prime...
--
Of course watermarking will not work. As Bruce Schneier says in Secrets and Lies:
--
Something tells me that whoever wrote this should perhaps not be taken entirely seriously....
--
It's extremely difficult to get even inaccurate figures on Linux usage, never mind accurate figures on the usage of individual distributions. Tracking of sales/downloads is not centralised, and once installed they can be hard to tell apart, and hard if not impossible to find.
Debian is especially hard to estimate, since I suspect the vast majority of installs are over the net, and once installed Debian is highly upgradeable. I installed slink for instance, bought some CDs while I was on a modem, and have been upgrading over ADSL ever since. Oh, and I installed three more boxes purely over the net, two of which are inside the firewall at my current work and one of which is an intermittently-connected laptop.
Besides, who cares? It's not a pissing match, and Debian in particular is not composed primarily of beancounters...
While I'm typing this, I'd recommend giving a couple of distributions a try; personally I've kind of settled down with Debian after a brief flirtation with RedHat. Do buy at least one set of CDs though whether you need them or not -- it's important to get some degree of financial support back to Software in the Public Interest (see the Debian web site).
--
Only if they're distributing the watch. Which they don't seem to be (more's the pity).
--
Run it inside vmware...? (I'll get me coat)
--
If you can work out who reads a file that you sent into the bowels of an organisation, you can figure out who to send your `I Love You' trojan, with its `send me all of the spreadsheets on your machine' payload. Imagine delivering something attractive to the finance department, or to the HR department. There's a lot of value that can be generated from this kind of social engineering (and, conversely, a lot of damage that can be caused). Simply getting information on what browser the people on the inside of the firewall are using might be interesting.
--
Here are a couple of example for loops in bash:
for f in foo bar baz; do
echo $f;
lpr $f;
done
or you can use backticks to generate your list (watch out for files with spaces in the names though...):
for f in `find . -type f -name '*.ps' -print`; do
echo $f;
lpr $f;
done
Try reading up on bash functions if you want to do complicated things. The hyperlinked help you mention sounds nice, but I reckon bash is probably bloated enough already without all that extra gubbins in it. If you need to read a manual your shell script might be better written in something a little more legible and flexible -- like Perl, Python or whatever -- horses for courses and all that.
--
Insightful? Have you not heard of cross-compilers?
--
Dammit, just posted that, and then found a nice explanation complete with illustration: here it is.
--
AVS has a GUI very like this (see the second picture on the right, unfortunately a little small). It is a really fantastic way of specifying data transforms and visualisation, and could be generalised into a nice generic piping mechanism. Control panels (dials, sliders and so on) can be inserted to modify the data stream, and there are bindings for writing your own modules. The connectors are colour-coded (in the manner of resistors) so that you can't hook them up incorrectly. Most tasks can be done entirely with the mouse....
--
Who are the likely manufacturers for hardware oggvorbis decoders? I'm thinking of buying an MP3 player, but if this is going to come off soon I'll wait. The existing MP3 players all seem to require either USB or Windows (or both), and I'm definitely sold on the idea of open solid-state music...
Keep up the good work, congratulations on finding someone to fund it!
--
And some of us have gone back to lurking....
--
> Locate is great for finding files. Problem with > it is threefold:
>
> 1) Let's say I install something, > like LessTif. The LessTif rpm doesn't modify my > ld.so.conf so I
> have to put the path to libXm in > there myself. Where did the RPM put it? Can't > use locate
> because I haven't yet run > updatedb.
1) rpm -qlp foo.rpm (RedHat)
dpkg --listfiles foo (Debian)
> 2) Not portable. Maybe there is a locate > workalike on AIX or Tru64, but I haven't found > it.
2) GNU fileutils contains locate; portable up the wazoo. Why settle for a workalike when you can have the real thing?
> 3) find has some great options. Like -exec, > -owner, etc.
3) this is true
4) have you seen rgrep? nifty
5) don't try reimplementing locate as a shell script, use the full thing. It does quite a lot of compression, optimising, and has exclude lists and so forth.
damn this text mode *sucks* for laying stuff out. The lines with all the > ini them are quotes....
--
W.A.S.T.E.
s/long distance/short distance/
Doh!
--
W.A.S.T.E.
Which is quite a long physical distance if you run in 1600x1200, which I do...
...by which time you've lost your position in the text you're reading. Why can I not configure this bizarre behaviour?
Just because the functionality is there does not mean that you have to use it.
--
W.A.S.T.E.
It's funny you should mention scroll bars. I have to use a Windows NT 4.0 box at work, and one of the things that drives me absolutely around the twist (apart from the random lockups) is the behaviour of Windows' scroll bars. They act like ordinary control widgets, and deactivate if you move the mouse too far from them. In other words, if you want to scroll down you have to keep the pointer within a few tens of pixels of the scroll bar in the X direction, or the thumb pops back up to where you started scrolling! Argh! Why can't it just read the Y position?
Personally, I prefer the old Athena scroll bars, as seen in XTerm, with the left/right click to move down/up by different amounts and the middle button to free scroll. I get the impression you're talking about the *look* of the scroll bars, rather than the functionality when you say `how about putting in GTK scrollbars everywhere' (paraphrase) -- this is modifiable by third-party libraries such as Xaw3D -- scroll down the page to see more alternative sets. These changes can be made without recoding applications!
In order to use GTK code changes would be required to all applications with scrollbars. This would be a nightmare, and besides, GTK doesn't have X resources so you can't so easily modify widget behaviour.
It's a shame that X didn't provide an attractive widget set in the first place (or, alternatively, that Motif was, and is, so expensive). Motif, with its rich configuratbility via resources seems cleaner to me in many ways thatn GTK. I presume this will be fixed in later GTK releases, and I hope to see support for X resources at some point...
I've begun to ramble now, so I'll stop, but I'll just round off by saying that vanilla X is almost certainly more configurable than you're giving it credit for.
--
W.A.S.T.E.
Notes? Urgh. Couldn't you just use Coda?
--
W.A.S.T.E.