I'm only using XP on that laptop because 1) Mandrake ACPI support is flaky, and I like my battery to live longer than an hour, and 2) the Fedora Core 3 DVD download hasn't finished yet.
Oh, and we used a total of 3.4 cents of Skype time, and had a good laugh about it.
Voice-recognition/synth stuff for Linux would indeed be nifty -- I want to do "cat message.txt | speak"... or some sort of program that scans syslog for certain sorts of messages and sends them over the speakers.
Very nice. I remember reading something about old voice-synth and recognition routines using 80's hardware, which is fairly impressive considering that the WinXP thing uses 20% of an Athlon 64 3200+.
... I discovered the voice mode of Opera (win2k/XP only, sadly) last night. The thing accepts voice commands: hold down scroll lock and tell it things like "reload", "back", "close window", "zoom in", etc.
You can even select a bunch of text and tell it to "speak", and it will read it to you.
Incidentaly, I had just discovered WinXP's onboard voice synth. A group of people were at a Krystal's and wanted to contact a friend.
We realized that:
--Nobody had a cell phone --Krystal's has wifi! (I boot up my laptop) --Our friend wasn't on AIM or similar --I have a VoIP client... we can call him! --We have no microphone --WinXP has a voice synth!
So, with a little mixer tweaking, I routed the voice synth output into Skype's input, called the poor schmuck, and had Microsoft Sam read him a message. (which was, if I recall, "We will be playing Starcraft at ten o'clock and such-and-such a place. Interested?")
The rating on a PSU needs to be higher than the actual steady-state power draw because of an initial surge that lasts under a second, which is not enough to heat up a room or affect a power bill. Computers don't magically guzzle juice when they're "booting up" -- after all, as far as the hardware is concerned, it's already pretty much in its final state as soon as the lilo screen appears. That takes about five seconds.
Nobody's claiming (I hope!) that it saves power to leave a machine on all night...
Re:Intel's past arrogance is killing them!
on
AMD 90nm Evaluated
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· Score: 1
Really, the only processor Intel has come up with since Pentium that the market has found a use for is the Centrino/Pentium-M.
Everything else, they've had to convince the market that they needs it.
I worked in a lab last summer doing vapor deposition stuff.
The temp in the building was probably around 72 (it's insane to keep it any lower than that--this was in Huntsville, AL, where summers are hot). However, when the ~15 kW of lab equipment all kicked on (heaters and coolers and microwave generators and computers and vacuum pumps and yada yada yada), it easily got to 85F.
Re:Electricity cost may be more/less than you thin
on
AMD 90nm Evaluated
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· Score: 1
The trick is that the extra power (above the amount of electricity you use) comes out of the ambient air, causing it to be even more frickin' cold right next to the heat pump.
There's a limit to the ratio between the electricity you put in and the heat you pump out of the cold place and into the hot place. However, that limit isn't caused by conservation of energy, which is the principle that prevents perpetual motion; it's caused by some thermodynamics stuff that I really ought to go back over.
Re:Electricity cost may be more/less than you thin
on
AMD 90nm Evaluated
·
· Score: 1
I used to think that, but going back over my thermo I've realized that you can get more than 100% efficiency out of a heater. It's true that heat from computers costs you less in the winter (since it helps then and hurts during the summer), but modern heating systems are more efficient than that analysis indicates... or so I think. I could be wrong.
The key is the phrase "heat pump".
Modern heat pumps, I believe, are nothing but refrigerators run backwards. For a simple analysis, consider your kitchen freezer: let's make up some numbers and say that it removes heat at a rate of 200 watts from the inside. Now, that heat has to wind up on the outside, so you wind up with 200 watts of heat being pushed outside.
This is impossible, of course: it takes extra energy to force heat to flow "uphill". Let's say the freezer has to spend 150 watts to run the compressor and the other gadgetry required to make those 200 watts of heat flow from cool to warm. All that energy eventually turns into heat, too, and you may as well push it to the outside.
So, you're burning 150 watts of electricity, removing 200 watts of heat from the fridge, and throwing those 200 watts of heat *plus* the 150 that your compressor generated into the ambient air. This is why freezers are so hot in the rear!
Now, consider a freezer run backwards, where the "cold end" is the outside air and the "ambient end" is the thing you're trying to heat. Poof, you put 150 watts of power in, and you get 350 watts of heat. We're not violating conservation of energy, of course, since the air around the heat pump on the outside has *lost* 200 watts of heat.
I think this is why we use electric heat at all. You might say that burning coal or natural gas to create power and then using that power to heat homes has an extra, inefficient conversion step in there -- since you could just burn the coal or gas.
But it's hard to make a natural-gas powered heat pump. All you can do with the natural gas in your home, really, is burn it and blow the heat inside. That's 100 watts of heat for every 100 watt-equivalents of gas burned. But, with a heat pump, you can get 80 watts of electricity out of those 100 watt-equivalents of gas, then use those 80 watts to run a heat pump--which will give you more than 100 watts of heat.
My mother's Athlon XP-M laptop idles around 25 watts. This is the complete power draw, counting the disks, LCD (on dim), and everything... as reported by/proc/acpi. (acpi doesn't totally work in my Athlon 64 laptop, but from relative battery life I imagine it pulls around 30-32.)
Also, let's do some math. Its battery has a capacity of 4.4 amp-hours, and can get about 3 hours on a charge while idling.
The battery puts out 14.1 volts, so its total capacity should be 62.04 watt-hours. Thus, to idle for three hours, the computer has to use about 21 watts.
Now, this is a monster laptop: large disk, 15 inch widescreen, and a non-Centrino processor. The battery, natch, is pretty big as well. I think the whole thing clocks in at a little under eight pounds.
My friends' small iBooks get ~5 hours to a charge, and I bet they have lower-capacity batteries than the big M5312. They have, of course, smaller LCD's and efficient G4 processors. I wouldn't be surprised if they draw 10-15 watts.
Then explain the concept of blackbody radiation to him, and that the WALLS are emitting dangerous infrared rays that will cause him to turn green, move to Soviet Russia, and change his name to Cerenkov.
You expect anyone other than a foaming-at-the-mouth conservative to carry a state in the Deep South?
In the national scheme I'm a political moderate--I'm pro-choice, in favor of private gun ownership, don't mind taxes that much if I get something in return (like roads, infrastructure, health care), opposed to most forms of affirmative action, and want smaller government.
But in the land of Bible thumpers (in Alabama people will walk up to you in parking lots and thump bibles at you) I look like frickin' Noam Chomsky.
The system actually results in two candidates who try to outdo each other in extremism on certain issues--"I'm harder on the War on Drugs than you are!"
It's hard to explain, but it doesn't result in true moderates running--it results in a sort of namby-pambiness in both candidates. They're not moderates, they're, as far as they can get away with it, do-nothings.
The problem is that we don't know whether or not the "true" difference was below the absolute-achievable noise floor, or the noise floor achieved with the method used.
Let me give a metaphor.
A company with near-limitless resources is in the business of deciding which of two buildings is higher, for some important reason or another.
Their standard method is to go to the top of each building with a metal ball and a tape recorder, drop the ball, and measure the length of time on the tape between release and impact. This method is accurate enough for nearly any situation that arose in the past
But they get a new assignment to compare two buildings, and the timings come out identical. The fate of billions of dollars is riding on the result. What to do?
Do you let the various PHB's of Buildometrics Inc., each one influenced by the owners of one building or the other, debate it using some procedural rules?
Or do you break out the interferometers?
The maddening thing about the Florida vote is not that Bush won, or that the result was below the noise floor... since that sort of thing can happen. The maddening thing is that the attempt to find a clear winner through measurement was given up too early and abandoned to the procedurists.
If you lived in a heavily liberal state, your voice wouldn't be heard either--only the handful of states close to 50% matter.
I've run some statistics on voting power per person (defined as the odds that your vote will decide your state multiplied by your state's electoral votes), and had to go back and doublecheck my math--a Florida voter's voting influence is orders of magnitude higher than mine (I am an Alabamian, sadly.)
The electoral college system is a horrid system--it promotes two candidates that try to be as much like each other as possible to the exclusion of third-party candidates (like we have now), and effectively disenfranchises lots of people. It can result in the election of a candidate even though a majority of the populace prefers the opponent through the "spoiler" phenomenon (Perot in 1992, Nader in 2000. Had Perot not been there, Bush probably would have won; had Nader not been there, Gore likely would have won.)
We need something else badly. Approval voting, Condorcet voting, or any of those other systems would be best, but even a straight primary-runoff system (as is used in American municipal elections) would be better than the electoral college.
Unfortunately a tremendous procedural inertia is built into the American system; attempting to use the political process to change the way politics is conducted requires a sustained, intense political effort-of-will, since the process for amending the US Constitution is so difficult. This isn't necessarily a bad thing (Pelor only knows what sorts of crazy amendments we'd be stuck with otherwise--google "Alabama constitution" for a demonstration), but it means the voting process won't be changed anytime soon.
Thanks for confirming that. I have a Mobile 3200+, and it seems to run pretty cool -- no fan most of the time unless the processor's being loaded pretty hard.
Kudos to AMD for making hardware that, with a minimum of fuss, does the Right Thing.
I had to download OVER A DOZEN MEGABYTES of ActiveX/Javascript/IE scripting bullshit to activate my Comcast cable connection.
Then that scripting took fifteen seconds to load... on an Athlon 64 3200+ with 512 megs of ram.
Then, I was installing a game from CD on that same machine. The cd drive is only 24x, which has a max read speed of 7200 KB/sec... hardly enough to saturate the processor, which was running at ~25% load at 40% throttle. Shouldn't saturate any of the busses, either, but I don't know all that much about all that. Yet, during this process, I could barely do web browsing/AIM.
I have a very fast computer, and I use that speed--I play games and do scientific computing. But I shouldn't have to have that speed in order to read my mail.
I think the desktop Athlon 64's do this. I believe they're exactly the same as the laptop ones, actually, except the mobile ones call it "PowerNow" and the desktop ones call it "Cool & Quiet."
Unfortunately, getting people to stop clicking on that big blue E isn't enough to stop them from being exposed to IE holes. IE's rendering engine is all over windows.
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I'm only using XP on that laptop because 1) Mandrake ACPI support is flaky, and I like my battery to live longer than an hour, and 2) the Fedora Core 3 DVD download hasn't finished yet.
Oh, and we used a total of 3.4 cents of Skype time, and had a good laugh about it.
Voice-recognition/synth stuff for Linux would indeed be nifty -- I want to do "cat message.txt | speak" ... or some sort of program that scans syslog for certain sorts of messages and sends them over the speakers.
Very nice. I remember reading something about old voice-synth and recognition routines using 80's hardware, which is fairly impressive considering that the WinXP thing uses 20% of an Athlon 64 3200+.
... I discovered the voice mode of Opera (win2k/XP only, sadly) last night. The thing accepts voice commands: hold down scroll lock and tell it things like "reload", "back", "close window", "zoom in", etc.
You can even select a bunch of text and tell it to "speak", and it will read it to you.
Incidentaly, I had just discovered WinXP's onboard voice synth. A group of people were at a Krystal's and wanted to contact a friend.
We realized that:
--Nobody had a cell phone
--Krystal's has wifi! (I boot up my laptop)
--Our friend wasn't on AIM or similar
--I have a VoIP client... we can call him!
--We have no microphone
--WinXP has a voice synth!
So, with a little mixer tweaking, I routed the voice synth output into Skype's input, called the poor schmuck, and had Microsoft Sam read him a message. (which was, if I recall, "We will be playing Starcraft at ten o'clock and such-and-such a place. Interested?")
I think the startup power thing is overrated.
The rating on a PSU needs to be higher than the actual steady-state power draw because of an initial surge that lasts under a second, which is not enough to heat up a room or affect a power bill. Computers don't magically guzzle juice when they're "booting up" -- after all, as far as the hardware is concerned, it's already pretty much in its final state as soon as the lilo screen appears. That takes about five seconds.
Nobody's claiming (I hope!) that it saves power to leave a machine on all night...
Really, the only processor Intel has come up with since Pentium that the market has found a use for is the Centrino/Pentium-M.
Everything else, they've had to convince the market that they needs it.
I worked in a lab last summer doing vapor deposition stuff.
The temp in the building was probably around 72 (it's insane to keep it any lower than that--this was in Huntsville, AL, where summers are hot). However, when the ~15 kW of lab equipment all kicked on (heaters and coolers and microwave generators and computers and vacuum pumps and yada yada yada), it easily got to 85F.
Out of curiosity, what machine is that?
The trick is that the extra power (above the amount of electricity you use) comes out of the ambient air, causing it to be even more frickin' cold right next to the heat pump.
There's a limit to the ratio between the electricity you put in and the heat you pump out of the cold place and into the hot place. However, that limit isn't caused by conservation of energy, which is the principle that prevents perpetual motion; it's caused by some thermodynamics stuff that I really ought to go back over.
I used to think that, but going back over my thermo I've realized that you can get more than 100% efficiency out of a heater. It's true that heat from computers costs you less in the winter (since it helps then and hurts during the summer), but modern heating systems are more efficient than that analysis indicates ... or so I think. I could be wrong.
:)
The key is the phrase "heat pump".
Modern heat pumps, I believe, are nothing but refrigerators run backwards. For a simple analysis, consider your kitchen freezer: let's make up some numbers and say that it removes heat at a rate of 200 watts from the inside. Now, that heat has to wind up on the outside, so you wind up with 200 watts of heat being pushed outside.
This is impossible, of course: it takes extra energy to force heat to flow "uphill". Let's say the freezer has to spend 150 watts to run the compressor and the other gadgetry required to make those 200 watts of heat flow from cool to warm. All that energy eventually turns into heat, too, and you may as well push it to the outside.
So, you're burning 150 watts of electricity, removing 200 watts of heat from the fridge, and throwing those 200 watts of heat *plus* the 150 that your compressor generated into the ambient air. This is why freezers are so hot in the rear!
Now, consider a freezer run backwards, where the "cold end" is the outside air and the "ambient end" is the thing you're trying to heat. Poof, you put 150 watts of power in, and you get 350 watts of heat. We're not violating conservation of energy, of course, since the air around the heat pump on the outside has *lost* 200 watts of heat.
I think this is why we use electric heat at all. You might say that burning coal or natural gas to create power and then using that power to heat homes has an extra, inefficient conversion step in there -- since you could just burn the coal or gas.
But it's hard to make a natural-gas powered heat pump. All you can do with the natural gas in your home, really, is burn it and blow the heat inside. That's 100 watts of heat for every 100 watt-equivalents of gas burned. But, with a heat pump, you can get 80 watts of electricity out of those 100 watt-equivalents of gas, then use those 80 watts to run a heat pump--which will give you more than 100 watts of heat.
I think, anyway.
69 is a normal operating temperature?
I have my apartment air conditioning set at 79 degrees F. Granted, I've lived with 100 degree summers all my life, but still...
Running a HVAC system down to 69 degrees seems like a waste of (mains) power.
"Low end centrinos idle in the low 60's".
... as reported by /proc/acpi. (acpi doesn't totally work in my Athlon 64 laptop, but from relative battery life I imagine it pulls around 30-32.)
That's incorrect, from my experience.
My mother's Athlon XP-M laptop idles around 25 watts. This is the complete power draw, counting the disks, LCD (on dim), and everything
Also, let's do some math. Its battery has a capacity of 4.4 amp-hours, and can get about 3 hours on a charge while idling.
The battery puts out 14.1 volts, so its total capacity should be 62.04 watt-hours. Thus, to idle for three hours, the computer has to use about 21 watts.
Now, this is a monster laptop: large disk, 15 inch widescreen, and a non-Centrino processor. The battery, natch, is pretty big as well. I think the whole thing clocks in at a little under eight pounds.
My friends' small iBooks get ~5 hours to a charge, and I bet they have lower-capacity batteries than the big M5312. They have, of course, smaller LCD's and efficient G4 processors. I wouldn't be surprised if they draw 10-15 watts.
Then explain the concept of blackbody radiation to him, and that the WALLS are emitting dangerous infrared rays that will cause him to turn green, move to Soviet Russia, and change his name to Cerenkov.
Or something.
You expect anyone other than a foaming-at-the-mouth conservative to carry a state in the Deep South?
In the national scheme I'm a political moderate--I'm pro-choice, in favor of private gun ownership, don't mind taxes that much if I get something in return (like roads, infrastructure, health care), opposed to most forms of affirmative action, and want smaller government.
But in the land of Bible thumpers (in Alabama people will walk up to you in parking lots and thump bibles at you) I look like frickin' Noam Chomsky.
The system actually results in two candidates who try to outdo each other in extremism on certain issues--"I'm harder on the War on Drugs than you are!"
It's hard to explain, but it doesn't result in true moderates running--it results in a sort of namby-pambiness in both candidates. They're not moderates, they're, as far as they can get away with it, do-nothings.
Moving in one year to go to graduate school.
The problem is that we don't know whether or not the "true" difference was below the absolute-achievable noise floor, or the noise floor achieved with the method used.
Let me give a metaphor.
A company with near-limitless resources is in the business of deciding which of two buildings is higher, for some important reason or another.
Their standard method is to go to the top of each building with a metal ball and a tape recorder, drop the ball, and measure the length of time on the tape between release and impact. This method is accurate enough for nearly any situation that arose in the past
But they get a new assignment to compare two buildings, and the timings come out identical. The fate of billions of dollars is riding on the result. What to do?
Do you let the various PHB's of Buildometrics Inc., each one influenced by the owners of one building or the other, debate it using some procedural rules?
Or do you break out the interferometers?
The maddening thing about the Florida vote is not that Bush won, or that the result was below the noise floor... since that sort of thing can happen. The maddening thing is that the attempt to find a clear winner through measurement was given up too early and abandoned to the procedurists.
Well, in 1876 they didn't have international election monitors.
You're right, of course, that 2000 wasn't totally unprecedented.
Well, down here in the Deep South, lots of people still haven't gotten over it.
Yeesh.
If you lived in a heavily liberal state, your voice wouldn't be heard either--only the handful of states close to 50% matter.
I've run some statistics on voting power per person (defined as the odds that your vote will decide your state multiplied by your state's electoral votes), and had to go back and doublecheck my math--a Florida voter's voting influence is orders of magnitude higher than mine (I am an Alabamian, sadly.)
The electoral college system is a horrid system--it promotes two candidates that try to be as much like each other as possible to the exclusion of third-party candidates (like we have now), and effectively disenfranchises lots of people. It can result in the election of a candidate even though a majority of the populace prefers the opponent through the "spoiler" phenomenon (Perot in 1992, Nader in 2000. Had Perot not been there, Bush probably would have won; had Nader not been there, Gore likely would have won.)
We need something else badly. Approval voting, Condorcet voting, or any of those other systems would be best, but even a straight primary-runoff system (as is used in American municipal elections) would be better than the electoral college.
Unfortunately a tremendous procedural inertia is built into the American system; attempting to use the political process to change the way politics is conducted requires a sustained, intense political effort-of-will, since the process for amending the US Constitution is so difficult. This isn't necessarily a bad thing (Pelor only knows what sorts of crazy amendments we'd be stuck with otherwise--google "Alabama constitution" for a demonstration), but it means the voting process won't be changed anytime soon.
Thanks for confirming that. I have a Mobile 3200+, and it seems to run pretty cool -- no fan most of the time unless the processor's being loaded pretty hard.
Kudos to AMD for making hardware that, with a minimum of fuss, does the Right Thing.
I had to download OVER A DOZEN MEGABYTES of ActiveX/Javascript/IE scripting bullshit to activate my Comcast cable connection.
Then that scripting took fifteen seconds to load... on an Athlon 64 3200+ with 512 megs of ram.
Then, I was installing a game from CD on that same machine. The cd drive is only 24x, which has a max read speed of 7200 KB/sec... hardly enough to saturate the processor, which was running at ~25% load at 40% throttle. Shouldn't saturate any of the busses, either, but I don't know all that much about all that. Yet, during this process, I could barely do web browsing/AIM.
I have a very fast computer, and I use that speed--I play games and do scientific computing. But I shouldn't have to have that speed in order to read my mail.
I think the desktop Athlon 64's do this. I believe they're exactly the same as the laptop ones, actually, except the mobile ones call it "PowerNow" and the desktop ones call it "Cool & Quiet."
Unfortunately, getting people to stop clicking on that big blue E isn't enough to stop them from being exposed to IE holes. IE's rendering engine is all over windows.
Or, considering the size of those downloads, will have the disk to *store* more than 640 patches.