Hmm. Do you get that same loss of quality when converting a virgin.wav using LAME -extreme?
Also: it doesn't really matter if the hack has to convert the protected WMA's to.wav first; even if you could recover unprotected WMA's from the Napster files, anyone with enough geekitude to crack Napster security isn't going to listen to WMA's anyway.
The processors in modern laptops are responsible for only a small part of the power consumption during operations that are not CPU-intensive (i.e. almost everything). Most of the power draw comes from all the other gadgets that go into a computer, especially the screen.
When under heavy load (running seti@home, for instance), laptop processors do suck up a lot of juice... but for 90% of tasks, the processor consumes very little power.
This is true for the most recent offerings of both AMD and Intel.
However, assuming the originals are 128kbps WMA's, the additional artifacting introduced by transcoding them to (say) 192 or 224kbps LAME will be trivial compared to what's already there from the original low-bitrate WMA encode.
It's like worrying about a -90dB noise floor on an A/D converter that you're using to digitize 20-year-old cassettes that have been played hundreds of times.
Windows XP lacks many useful features from the command line. For instance, tools like find, grep, the many features in ls, symlinks ("shortcuts" aren't nearly as versatile), and many others have no Windows equivalents.
Many times while attempting to connect to a wireless network I have wished for the simplicity of iwconfig.
This makes Windows much less attractive than Linux from a "power user" standpoint; it is easier for me to type a few commands than to go fishing in menus to find what I want.
Does Microsoft have any plans to modernize the command-line support in Windows?
That's what dark matter is -- just ordinary matter that isn't part of luminous objects and, thus, is invisible.
Wired Magazine seems to be getting their terms confused:
Whereas baryons account for 4 percent of the total matter and energy in the universe, dark matter is thought to make up 23 percent. The remaining 73 percent of the so-called matter-energy budget consists of what scientists call "dark energy."
But one candidate for the "dark matter" (everything we can't see) *is* "baryons" -- which is just a funny term for "protons and neutrons", which is just a funny term for "ordinary stuff". (The other candidates for dark matter are unknown new particles--WIMPs and so on.)
So, basically, what these guys have found is an intergalactic gas cloud of heavy gas. They mention C, N, O, and Ne in the article; those are four of the principle products in stellar nuclear fusion, so that makes sense. However, they don't mention anything about H and He, the principal components of the universe. They used X-ray absorption, however, and since H (and I think He also) don't have electron transitions in the X-ray band, hydrogen would be invisible to their technique.
So they really don't know what the density of the cloud is, 'cause they can't measure the presence of hydrogen, which is *usually* the dominant component of the interstellar medium (as I recall).
If the cloud is principally heavy gas, then it's obviously left over from exploding stars. The explanation that comes to mind is that parts of the exploded star blew off with enough velocity to escape the local gravity and found themselves in intergalactic space. Whether it takes exotica to prevent them from being "pulled into galaxies" is another question. We know from previous observation that gravitationally-bound systems can contain local concentrations of matter whose kinetic energy keeps them from falling into the central concentration of mass in the system: q.v. Sol III (known as Terra to the locals).
Basically, this Wired article is *very* short on actual scientific facts. Maybe the original study actually says something and doesn't just try to impress readers with the word "baryon"; accurate measurements of the intergalactic medium *are* sorely needed by astrophysics, and whether the missing mass lurks in galaxies, in galactic halos, or between galaxies is (as I recall) an open question.
On a more technical note, it'd be interesting to see how much the X-ray absorbtion lines are smeared out in these measurements; I don't know if they have enough data for really good spectrography, but knowing that would give a rough estimation of the kinetic energy of the cloud: the gas atoms traveling away from us would have their spectra redshifted more than those traveling toward us.
Simply because the people who wrote it aren't assholes. They don't have copy-protection to make my life difficult, and they compete on features rather than on marketing.
They offer a student discount, and want a letter from the registrar or a copy of your grades to prove your status. My university is run by trolls, so I wrote them and asked them if I could post a small note on my Uni webspace as proof that I was a student.
Six hours later the response came back: "Sure, that's fine. Greetings from Norway!"
Disclaimer: I have used nothing but AMD chips for many years.
High peak power consumption isn't that big of a deal (except for cooler bulk) for desktop use as long as the new dual-core chips can throttle down when under light load and use less power when they do.
Use your program of choice to monitor CPU load vs. time, and look at the usage profile. Computers spend 95% of their time just idling.
(My machine is running at 14% load, 36% throttle right now. I even have a switch to lock it at 800MHz out of 2200 (to save power), and don't notice a change in desktop performance when I do.)
That said, the P4's power consumption is just grotesque.
I have a friend who is planning on using her ham license to set up a wifi point on Channel 1 (which, apparently, overlaps an amateur band).
To satisfy the amateur requirement that all transmissions must identify themselves by callsign at least every ten minutes, she's going to use hers as the SSID (broadcast).
... what sort of advantage do these chips have over the low voltage Athlon 64 mobiles? From what I understand, those have the power economy of the Centrinos but much better performance.
Sure, but this disk isn't always connected to the machine. Is there any way to have the swap "fall back" to the internal when the external isn't available?
How much of a slowdown will these programs hit WinXP with?
My machine is an otherwise speed-demonish laptop with a 4200 RPM hard drive, and I multitask like a demon... between fullscreen, 512-ram-using games and the Windows desktop.
Needless to say this causes a whole, whole lot of disk thrashing.
Do these desktop-search programs access the disk enough to compound my disk-swapping woes?
(On that note, I have a 7200 RPM external disk. Is there any way I can get WinXP to use it for at least some swap, or put a disk cache over there, or do SOMETHING?)
I had a machine stolen about three months ago, and notified the local police. It was running the GMail notifier (that checks mail on bootup), so I emailed Google from my gmail account and told them: "The only machine running the GMail notifier keyed to *account name* was recently stolen. From now on, if someone logs into this gmail account, they're doing it from a stolen machine; could you give the IP address to the local police so they can track it down?
GMail wouldn't do it, even though there's no threat to user privacy here: the police are the only ones getting information, and that information was requested by the owner of the account.
That got me thinking: someone (laptop manufacturers) should run a phone-home service, that keeps a log of the IP addresses that send in requests (with an authentication string specific to the user or computer). That way, using that same string and a password, you could get a list of all the IP addresses your machine has connected to the Internet from... which could be turned over to the police if necessary. If you trust the site explicitly, you could even run an applet that will respond to remote instructions (including flashing the BIOS with a "THIS IS STOLEN PROPERTY" message on bootup) when the site's notified that it is stolen. Once laptops start including onboard GPS, this would make recovery a snap.
This won't do anything to deter sophisticated thieves, who will start formatting drives, but it would be cheap to implement and would provide another layer of protection from theft.
The suggestion is to use freenet to distribute torrents, not to actually serve as a tracker. It can do that, surely, since torrents are tiny and one-shot downloads. This makes the MPAA's whack-a-mole game more difficult, since they have to go after each individual tracker rather than any centralized site hosting torrents (pointers to trackers).
I remember the stink when people noticed that their P4's were throttling back when they were under extreme load... i.e., playing Quake 3. Understandably they weren't too happy.
I noticed something similar with an Athlon XP-M, in an eMachines 5312 (the eMachines 53xx series had some problems with airflow). It throttled back because of thermal overload under Linux only, and when running on AC only; when running on DC, it stayed at full speed.
Under Windows it didn't throttle back gracefully; it just shut down without warning.
Out of curiosity, how far do Pentium M's throttle back when they're idling? My Athlon 64 goes only down to 800 MHz, which is still overkill-and-a-half for most everything. Seems like they could undervolt and throttle it down even more to save power, but I'm sure there's a reason -- the engineers at AMD are smart people, and the Ath64 wasn't exactly designed as a power-conserving laptop chip.
I use SpeedswitchXP as an adjustable space heater on my Athlon 64 laptop. At 800MHz it puts out very little heat at all (underclocked and undervolted), but at 2.2GHz it generates a fair bit of heat.
P4's are power hogs. They (AFAIK) have no processor power management capability, and will thus chug along at 3.4GHz even when you're playing Zork. I'd imagine that they use at least 100 W (for just the processor). The folks at http://www.techreport.com/onearticle.x/7417 did a test: an idling P4 system without monitor uses 150 W, and under load the complete system sucked down 230.
Another website gives the power use of just the processor (P4 EE 3.4 GHz) under full load at right under 200 W.
Athlon 64's, even the desktop models, use basically the same technology that's been in laptop processors for a while. (Note that this WAS NOT turned on in the Ath64 tests in the link above.) They can underclock themselves (down to 800 MHz, typically), lower the core voltage, and use other tricks to decrease power consumption when under light load. This dramatically decreases power consumption without hurting performance. The sources I've seen cite desktop Ath64 power use at something near 70/100 W (idle/loaded), but the idle numbers seem too high: my laptop Ath64 uses around 20 W for the WHOLE SYSTEM (idling), and from what I hear the desktop A64's are basically the same as the mobiles, so the desktop version should be able to idle at under 70 W.
Desktop video cards (for gaming) can use a hundred watts or more.
So, in short, a desktop machine can use 100 W or less (Athlon 64 at idle), to as high as maybe 400 W (P4 system playing Doom 3). All this is without a monitor: my guess is that a 15" LCD uses no more than 15-20W, and a CRT may use 100W or more.
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Hmm. Do you get that same loss of quality when converting a virgin .wav using LAME -extreme?
.wav first; even if you could recover unprotected WMA's from the Napster files, anyone with enough geekitude to crack Napster security isn't going to listen to WMA's anyway.
Also: it doesn't really matter if the hack has to convert the protected WMA's to
The processors in modern laptops are responsible for only a small part of the power consumption during operations that are not CPU-intensive (i.e. almost everything). Most of the power draw comes from all the other gadgets that go into a computer, especially the screen.
When under heavy load (running seti@home, for instance), laptop processors do suck up a lot of juice... but for 90% of tasks, the processor consumes very little power.
This is true for the most recent offerings of both AMD and Intel.
Sitting here with an Athlon 64 laptop on my lap, with shorts on -- it's barely warm, and the system fan isn't running.
Since the mobile A64's hit the market, is there any reason to get a P4 laptop?
However, assuming the originals are 128kbps WMA's, the additional artifacting introduced by transcoding them to (say) 192 or 224kbps LAME will be trivial compared to what's already there from the original low-bitrate WMA encode.
It's like worrying about a -90dB noise floor on an A/D converter that you're using to digitize 20-year-old cassettes that have been played hundreds of times.
Windows XP lacks many useful features from the command line. For instance, tools like find, grep, the many features in ls, symlinks ("shortcuts" aren't nearly as versatile), and many others have no Windows equivalents.
Many times while attempting to connect to a wireless network I have wished for the simplicity of iwconfig.
This makes Windows much less attractive than Linux from a "power user" standpoint; it is easier for me to type a few commands than to go fishing in menus to find what I want.
Does Microsoft have any plans to modernize the command-line support in Windows?
Wired Magazine seems to be getting their terms confused:
But one candidate for the "dark matter" (everything we can't see) *is* "baryons" -- which is just a funny term for "protons and neutrons", which is just a funny term for "ordinary stuff". (The other candidates for dark matter are unknown new particles--WIMPs and so on.)
So, basically, what these guys have found is an intergalactic gas cloud of heavy gas. They mention C, N, O, and Ne in the article; those are four of the principle products in stellar nuclear fusion, so that makes sense. However, they don't mention anything about H and He, the principal components of the universe. They used X-ray absorption, however, and since H (and I think He also) don't have electron transitions in the X-ray band, hydrogen would be invisible to their technique.
So they really don't know what the density of the cloud is, 'cause they can't measure the presence of hydrogen, which is *usually* the dominant component of the interstellar medium (as I recall).
If the cloud is principally heavy gas, then it's obviously left over from exploding stars. The explanation that comes to mind is that parts of the exploded star blew off with enough velocity to escape the local gravity and found themselves in intergalactic space. Whether it takes exotica to prevent them from being "pulled into galaxies" is another question. We know from previous observation that gravitationally-bound systems can contain local concentrations of matter whose kinetic energy keeps them from falling into the central concentration of mass in the system: q.v. Sol III (known as Terra to the locals).
Basically, this Wired article is *very* short on actual scientific facts. Maybe the original study actually says something and doesn't just try to impress readers with the word "baryon"; accurate measurements of the intergalactic medium *are* sorely needed by astrophysics, and whether the missing mass lurks in galaxies, in galactic halos, or between galaxies is (as I recall) an open question.
On a more technical note, it'd be interesting to see how much the X-ray absorbtion lines are smeared out in these measurements; I don't know if they have enough data for really good spectrography, but knowing that would give a rough estimation of the kinetic energy of the cloud: the gas atoms traveling away from us would have their spectra redshifted more than those traveling toward us.
I pirate software, but I paid for Opera.
Why?
Simply because the people who wrote it aren't assholes. They don't have copy-protection to make my life difficult, and they compete on features rather than on marketing.
They offer a student discount, and want a letter from the registrar or a copy of your grades to prove your status. My university is run by trolls, so I wrote them and asked them if I could post a small note on my Uni webspace as proof that I was a student.
Six hours later the response came back: "Sure, that's fine. Greetings from Norway!"
I don't mind paying those guys.
You're a military contractor, right?
Disclaimer: I have used nothing but AMD chips for many years.
High peak power consumption isn't that big of a deal (except for cooler bulk) for desktop use as long as the new dual-core chips can throttle down when under light load and use less power when they do.
Use your program of choice to monitor CPU load vs. time, and look at the usage profile. Computers spend 95% of their time just idling.
(My machine is running at 14% load, 36% throttle right now. I even have a switch to lock it at 800MHz out of 2200 (to save power), and don't notice a change in desktop performance when I do.)
That said, the P4's power consumption is just grotesque.
Alabama gets more hate from me 'cause I live here. Huntsville isn't so bad, but once you get out, it gets pretty bad.
Georgia, however, is worse. People in Alabama are sort of passive rednecks--Georgian rednecks are the more active variety.
"[N]one of what they have posted is even remotely close to any church I've ever been to."
You've not been to Alabama, have you?
I have a friend who is planning on using her ham license to set up a wifi point on Channel 1 (which, apparently, overlaps an amateur band).
To satisfy the amateur requirement that all transmissions must identify themselves by callsign at least every ten minutes, she's going to use hers as the SSID (broadcast).
... what sort of advantage do these chips have over the low voltage Athlon 64 mobiles? From what I understand, those have the power economy of the
Centrinos but much better performance.
Sure, but this disk isn't always connected to the machine. Is there any way to have the swap "fall back" to the internal when the external isn't available?
How much of a slowdown will these programs hit WinXP with?
My machine is an otherwise speed-demonish laptop with a 4200 RPM hard drive, and I multitask like a demon... between fullscreen, 512-ram-using games and the Windows desktop.
Needless to say this causes a whole, whole lot of disk thrashing.
Do these desktop-search programs access the disk enough to compound my disk-swapping woes?
(On that note, I have a 7200 RPM external disk. Is there any way I can get WinXP to use it for at least some swap, or put a disk cache over there, or do SOMETHING?)
1) I emailed them from the account in question, so I apparently have the password
... not to have it sent to the police.
2) I emailed them from the IP address that had been using the account for months
3) If I'm pulling some scam, I'd want the information
Because the police only cracked the ring two weeks after the theft...
I had a machine stolen about three months ago, and notified the local police. It was running the GMail notifier (that checks mail on bootup), so I emailed Google from my gmail account and told them: "The only machine running the GMail notifier keyed to *account name* was recently stolen. From now on, if someone logs into this gmail account, they're doing it from a stolen machine; could you give the IP address to the local police so they can track it down?
GMail wouldn't do it, even though there's no threat to user privacy here: the police are the only ones getting information, and that information was requested by the owner of the account.
That got me thinking: someone (laptop manufacturers) should run a phone-home service, that keeps a log of the IP addresses that send in requests (with an authentication string specific to the user or computer). That way, using that same string and a password, you could get a list of all the IP addresses your machine has connected to the Internet from... which could be turned over to the police if necessary. If you trust the site explicitly, you could even run an applet that will respond to remote instructions (including flashing the BIOS with a "THIS IS STOLEN PROPERTY" message on bootup) when the site's notified that it is stolen. Once laptops start including onboard GPS, this would make recovery a snap.
This won't do anything to deter sophisticated thieves, who will start formatting drives, but it would be cheap to implement and would provide another layer of protection from theft.
I had a laptop in a nondescript backpack swiped out of my car a few months ago.
Dunno how they knew there were goodies inside, but there was a laptop-theft-ring operating in Huntsville at the time...
The suggestion is to use freenet to distribute torrents, not to actually serve as a tracker. It can do that, surely, since torrents are tiny and one-shot downloads. This makes the MPAA's whack-a-mole game more difficult, since they have to go after each individual tracker rather than any centralized site hosting torrents (pointers to trackers).
I remember the stink when people noticed that their P4's were throttling back when they were under extreme load ... i.e., playing Quake 3. Understandably they weren't too happy.
I noticed something similar with an Athlon XP-M, in an eMachines 5312 (the eMachines 53xx series had some problems with airflow). It throttled back because of thermal overload under Linux only, and when running on AC only; when running on DC, it stayed at full speed.
Under Windows it didn't throttle back gracefully; it just shut down without warning.
Out of curiosity, how far do Pentium M's throttle back when they're idling? My Athlon 64 goes only down to 800 MHz, which is still overkill-and-a-half for most everything. Seems like they could undervolt and throttle it down even more to save power, but I'm sure there's a reason -- the engineers at AMD are smart people, and the Ath64 wasn't exactly designed as a power-conserving laptop chip.
I use SpeedswitchXP as an adjustable space heater on my Athlon 64 laptop. At 800MHz it puts out very little heat at all (underclocked and undervolted), but at 2.2GHz it generates a fair bit of heat.
Well, I have an AMD K6-2 @ 400 sitting in my bedroom, all lonely, plugged into a dusty motherboard that hasn't seen voltage for years.
Anyone know a good place to get ancient RAM?
It depends.
P4's are power hogs. They (AFAIK) have no processor power management capability, and will thus chug along at 3.4GHz even when you're playing Zork. I'd imagine that they use at least 100 W (for just the processor). The folks at http://www.techreport.com/onearticle.x/7417 did a test: an idling P4 system without monitor uses 150 W, and under load the complete system sucked down 230.
Another website gives the power use of just the processor (P4 EE 3.4 GHz) under full load at right under 200 W.
Athlon 64's, even the desktop models, use basically the same technology that's been in laptop processors for a while. (Note that this WAS NOT turned on in the Ath64 tests in the link above.) They can underclock themselves (down to 800 MHz, typically), lower the core voltage, and use other tricks to decrease power consumption when under light load. This dramatically decreases power consumption without hurting performance. The sources I've seen cite desktop Ath64 power use at something near 70/100 W (idle/loaded), but the idle numbers seem too high: my laptop Ath64 uses around 20 W for the WHOLE SYSTEM (idling), and from what I hear the desktop A64's are basically the same as the mobiles, so the desktop version should be able to idle at under 70 W.
Desktop video cards (for gaming) can use a hundred watts or more.
So, in short, a desktop machine can use 100 W or less (Athlon 64 at idle), to as high as maybe 400 W (P4 system playing Doom 3). All this is without a monitor: my guess is that a 15" LCD uses no more than 15-20W, and a CRT may use 100W or more.
Mmm, goatsex.