Even so, my wife has to work (mostly to get health insurance for us).
When it becomes necessary, check out catastrophic (high deductible) health insurance. The cost is a fraction of full coverage, there's very little paperwork, and the cost difference between catastrophic and full coverage is sometimes more than the deductible! If you do have a lot of routine expenses you can tax shelter those costs with a HSA (Health Savings Account). A competent insurance agent should be able to help you out.
Biggest bang-for-the-buck: remove all your Intel Xeon and P4 machines and replace them with AMD Opteron dualcores, preferably the HE (High Efficiency 55W max) series. Each core will do more work than a Xeon and burn a fraction of the power doing it. Sun's new multicore CPU is interesting if you don't need x86 compatibility.
Power supply efficiency is important too. I switched to Seasonic high-efficiency power supplies for my desktops years ago. I'm not sure what you'd do about rackmount servers. There's been mention of making servers that plug directly into DC power so one power supply can feed several machines but I haven't followed that closely. Besides lowering power consumption you're also generating less waste heat, reducing the load on your A/C.
I've been undervolting my HP zv5000z Athlon 64 notebook since July of 2004, and I got the idea from Silent PC Review where people were undervolting desktop Athlon 64s. I switched to using CrystalCPUID to manage speed and voltage since that initial post was written and most people have switched to RMclock. Lots of people on R3000 Forums and the HP forum at NotebookReview.com have been undervolting their notebooks. I believe I was the instigator on both of those forums.
Anyhow, I'm still undervolting, now with a Mobile-class Athlon 64 3200+ CPU that I swapped in some time ago (HP only used DTR-class chips). AMD is very conservative with their default voltage levels so there's lots of room to work with. I've set my CPU to run at roughly Low Voltage-class levels, close to what a Turion ML is rated to do. The machine is solid. I got great battery life before and even better battery life now. I was able to play DVD video for 3 hours (12 cell battery) and get closer to 4 hours in general use. That's with a 7200RPM HD too. Not bad for a desktop-replacement behemoth.
Note that if your machine usually runs at AMD's 800MHz idle speed, undervolting won't buy you much (if anything). AMD's PowerNOW! is already extremely efficient in normal use. If it jumps to full speed a lot, undervolting does wonders.
So, there's no need to suffer with a 32-bit-only Intel CPU and their awful integrated GPU if you want a long-lasting notebook.
(Anyone know how to undervolt under Linux? That's the one thing I've been missing...)
Dude, it's Godzilla. Godzilla breathes fire. He needed the Pentium EE to do that. Darn AMD and their efficient design! Though I suppose he could have overclocked...
(Seriously, for that much coin I'd have gone for a dual processor, dual core Opteron system. Four REAL cores, none of this HypeThreading crap.)
AMD reported earnings yesterday. They earned $0.45 per share, far above "analyst" estimates. They are very profitable and becoming moreso as they take big chunks out of Intel's hide.
Intel slowed AMD's run to profitability last year when they shifted production from chipsets to flash memory (they use the same fabs). Dumping flash below cost hurt AMD more than it hurt Intel... at the time. Then Intel ran short of chipsets. Oops!
Intel is rapidly undergoing death-by-management. Never let marketing weasles run a tech company. I haven't bought an Intel CPU since the Pentium 3, the last good desktop CPU Intel made.
Perhaps we'll find out that they actually torture prisoners in secret locations to fight the war on terror, similiar as China tortures a diverse range of seperatists for their own "war on terror"
You know why media reports about Gitmo have been scarce lately? Some bright military public affairs officer told the "journalists" that they were actually looking at Castro's prisons where he tortures pro-democracy dissidents and librarians and they lost all interest.
China's gulag system is called Laogai. If you're Chinese, live in mainland China, and think that "one man, one vote" is a good idea, there's a good chance you'll get up close and personal with the laogai system.
Meanwhile, Western leftists think that the occasional terrorist mass murderer getting slapped around is much more worthy of attention and support than peaceful political dissidents in leftist dictatorships, even dictatorships that have strayed from the "faith" like China.
You people are incapable of a sense of proportion, aren't you?
The NSA is stamping your PC with the Mark of the Beast, a... cookie? So if you ever visit a NSA website again they'll know it's a return visit? This is useful... how?
Oh, this is all about riling up room-temperature-IQ journalists (I'll be charitable and note I mean Fahrenheit) into another hissy-fit over the fact that Bush is still president. Never mind. Go read some history.
instead of Intel P4/Xeon blast furnaces. Then you won't need to switch chassis designs, you'll spend a helluva lot less on electricity, and you should be able to use all your rack space without the county fire marshall ticketing you. Really, this shouldn't be news by now.
Heck, even the standard Opteron dualcores are probably good enough depending on just how bad your power-density problems are. The 55W max HE's are just particularly impressive.
The Opteron 270 HE dualcore CPU would be a better choice to compare against Yonah. Dual 2GHz cores, each with 1MB L2 cache, 55W TDP. Same speed but twice the cache of the Athlon 64 X2 3800+. Mind you that's a 90nm chip, not 65nm like Yonah. Consider that to be the baseline for what a dualcore Turion will do. I suspect they'll cut the clockspeed back a bit in order to bring the wattage down even further.
I'm looking forward to the dualcore Turions. Dualcore 32-bit CPUs seem... silly.
One of these would be fun to have. (And the notebook's nice too...) They appear to be out in Europe already and should hit America soon.
Throw in an AMD Turion MT40 (2.2GHz, 25W) CPU (see ewiz.com), 2GB RAM (Crucial PC3200, ~$240), that Hitachi 100GB 7200RPM HD (see zipzoomfly.com), along with the stock 17" widescreen and 256MB Radeon X700 GPU and you'll have a seriously nice gaming notebook.
If you want something really outrageous, the Clevo D900K notebooks take Athlon 64 X2 dualcore CPUs and GeForce 7800 Go GPUs. Heavy though.
There are some nice 15.4" Turion notebooks with X700 GPUs too from Acer and MSI.
Hopefully we'll see some really neat stuff next year when nVidia's new notebook chipset comes out.
My notebook has a lowly GeForce 440 Go though because apparently nobody at HP is into gaming. Nice machine otherwise though.
Is anyone else bothered by all these paternalistic, lead-the-unwashed-masses-by-the-hand approaches? Just give me my salary and I'll decide how I want to spend it. I'll make an exception for little things done in the name of tax efficiency though (buying bus passes for employees because it's a business tax deduction, etc), and even then only until the Flat Tax can be passed (alas, it won't be by President Bush).
The Bush administration is unaccountable to over 50% of the US population, who did not vote for them.
Over 50%, which is better than Clinton ever did and a helluva lot better than the fraction of 1% who control your average dictatorship. Learn a sense of proportion, 'kay?
And if you actually read the.xxx TLD article you linked to, it says:
The multinational pressure, unprecedented in ICANN's seven-year history, places the organization in a delicate position.
The Whitehouse can't censor much of anything, regardless of what you think they want. Dictatorships like China can.
Yes, for the same reason I want criminals to be able to vote. Every nation should be represented in a fair and democratic Internet administration, not just the people we like.
So not giving repressive dictatorships a vote would be undemocratic? Wouldn't that be like putting those same dictatorships on the UN's Human Rights Committee? Oh, wait...
It would be sheer idiocy to give goverments unaccountable to their people ANY control when we can avoid it. Unless you think it'd be okay for China's dictators to vote.tw addresses dropped from DNS, etc.
1) The PIC uses a fraction of the electricity a Dell/Intel PC uses. 2) The PIC should be much easier to maintain, both from a software and hardware perspective. Granted, you can't do as much with it, but you weren't going to play Doom3 on that Dell box with Intel's Extreme (crap) GPU anyhow. 3) Ditch the HD and WinCE and these would make great LTSP clients.
In short, TCO should be a LOT lower.
That said, I suspect that the pricing is deliberately on the high side to keep from competing with real PCs and to make the inevitable bundled-with-Internet service plans look better. I can see some businesses buying them for their low-level workers; think of the power and heat reductions from a cubicle farm full of PICs vs. Dells. (Granted, a smart business would get AMD-based PCs with power management enabled, but if we're talking about Dell customers...)
Buy the highest efficiency p/s with a 120mm fan
on
Silent 500W Power Supply
·
· Score: 5, Informative
You're better off buying a high-efficiency power supply that has a 120mm thermistor-controlled fan. Seasonic's S12 500W is my current favorite. The 120mm fan is virtually silent at moderate loads and not too bad at higher loads. High efficiency means less waste heat for the fan to need to cool and lower electric bills.
Lenovo and AMD get along pretty well. When will Lenovo make an AMD Turion version of the Thinkpad? THAT would get my attention. Same old 32-bit-only notebook in a new shiny case, not so much.
Maybe it's because my behind lacks the padding the average programmer has, but I really really like my Humanscale Freedom chair. I can sit in this thing for a LOT longer than I can with a cheap chair before getting uncomfortable. If you don't have such problems then you probably won't want to spend the $1K but if you do it's a godsend. (Yes, I know, get up, walk around, but...) I like it much better than the Aeron (I think I'm too skinny for those).
The rest of my furniture is cheap stuff though. A couple of folding tables work well.
I never got into the multiple monitors thing either but I really like my new Samsung 204T 20" LCD. (They were on sale, couldn't resist.) They're not that expensive, about half what the 19" LCD it replaced originally cost me, and 1600x1200 gives you almost 50% more pixels to work with than 1280x1024. Check 'em out.
Air quality is the other big thing with me. I recently figured out that paint fumes do very bad things to my head, and energy-efficient new construction seals buildings so tight that the interior doesn't "breathe" all that well. (I live on the top floor and they repaint the common hallway every other year, and the fumes have nowhere to go but the upstairs apartments, slowly, and I was told by my allergist to keep my windows closed because that's what you're supposed to do to keep out the pollen and mold that I thought was messing with my head... but now that I'm almost done with immunotherapy open windows help a LOT more than they hurt.) Do yourself a favor and buy Low or No VOC (Volitile Organic Compounds) paint the next time you do indoor painting. Make sure the powers-that-be at work know to do this too. It's a cheap way to make a BIG difference in indoor air quality. I bet that much of the "Sick Building Syndrome" thing is caused by this.
HDTV in North America (and Korea) is 9GB/hour, so a 25GB single-layer Blu-ray disc stores 2:45 or thereabouts of video without the serious nuisance of transcoding to a more space-efficient format. These things are going to sell like hotcakes to the HTPC market, at least once media costs get semi-reasonable. Pioneer's Blu-ray drive is definitely going on my shopping list. I just hope the street prices for the drives and media are semi-reasonable. I'm not even going to consider HD-DVD.
It's called tortious interference. Near as I can tell, Intel is guilty as hell. This lawsuit was a long time coming. AMD is now just strong enough that chip customers are willing to take a chance and cooperate with the investigation. If Intel retaliates it won't hurt as much anymore.
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Even so, my wife has to work (mostly to get health insurance for us).
When it becomes necessary, check out catastrophic (high deductible) health insurance. The cost is a fraction of full coverage, there's very little paperwork, and the cost difference between catastrophic and full coverage is sometimes more than the deductible! If you do have a lot of routine expenses you can tax shelter those costs with a HSA (Health Savings Account). A competent insurance agent should be able to help you out.
Biggest bang-for-the-buck: remove all your Intel Xeon and P4 machines and replace them with AMD Opteron dualcores, preferably the HE (High Efficiency 55W max) series. Each core will do more work than a Xeon and burn a fraction of the power doing it. Sun's new multicore CPU is interesting if you don't need x86 compatibility.
Power supply efficiency is important too. I switched to Seasonic high-efficiency power supplies for my desktops years ago. I'm not sure what you'd do about rackmount servers. There's been mention of making servers that plug directly into DC power so one power supply can feed several machines but I haven't followed that closely. Besides lowering power consumption you're also generating less waste heat, reducing the load on your A/C.
I've been undervolting my HP zv5000z Athlon 64 notebook since July of 2004, and I got the idea from Silent PC Review where people were undervolting desktop Athlon 64s. I switched to using CrystalCPUID to manage speed and voltage since that initial post was written and most people have switched to RMclock. Lots of people on R3000 Forums and the HP forum at NotebookReview.com have been undervolting their notebooks. I believe I was the instigator on both of those forums.
Anyhow, I'm still undervolting, now with a Mobile-class Athlon 64 3200+ CPU that I swapped in some time ago (HP only used DTR-class chips). AMD is very conservative with their default voltage levels so there's lots of room to work with. I've set my CPU to run at roughly Low Voltage-class levels, close to what a Turion ML is rated to do. The machine is solid. I got great battery life before and even better battery life now. I was able to play DVD video for 3 hours (12 cell battery) and get closer to 4 hours in general use. That's with a 7200RPM HD too. Not bad for a desktop-replacement behemoth.
Note that if your machine usually runs at AMD's 800MHz idle speed, undervolting won't buy you much (if anything). AMD's PowerNOW! is already extremely efficient in normal use. If it jumps to full speed a lot, undervolting does wonders.
So, there's no need to suffer with a 32-bit-only Intel CPU and their awful integrated GPU if you want a long-lasting notebook.
(Anyone know how to undervolt under Linux? That's the one thing I've been missing...)
Better yet, go here and get the H.264 torrent (or whichever encoding you prefer). That page also gives you a slew of very useful Asterisk links.
Dude, it's Godzilla. Godzilla breathes fire. He needed the Pentium EE to do that. Darn AMD and their efficient design! Though I suppose he could have overclocked...
(Seriously, for that much coin I'd have gone for a dual processor, dual core Opteron system. Four REAL cores, none of this HypeThreading crap.)
AMD reported earnings yesterday. They earned $0.45 per share, far above "analyst" estimates. They are very profitable and becoming moreso as they take big chunks out of Intel's hide.
Intel slowed AMD's run to profitability last year when they shifted production from chipsets to flash memory (they use the same fabs). Dumping flash below cost hurt AMD more than it hurt Intel... at the time. Then Intel ran short of chipsets. Oops!
Intel is rapidly undergoing death-by-management. Never let marketing weasles run a tech company. I haven't bought an Intel CPU since the Pentium 3, the last good desktop CPU Intel made.
Perhaps we'll find out that they actually torture prisoners in secret locations to fight the war on terror, similiar as China tortures a diverse range of seperatists for their own "war on terror"
You know why media reports about Gitmo have been scarce lately? Some bright military public affairs officer told the "journalists" that they were actually looking at Castro's prisons where he tortures pro-democracy dissidents and librarians and they lost all interest.
China's gulag system is called Laogai. If you're Chinese, live in mainland China, and think that "one man, one vote" is a good idea, there's a good chance you'll get up close and personal with the laogai system.
Meanwhile, Western leftists think that the occasional terrorist mass murderer getting slapped around is much more worthy of attention and support than peaceful political dissidents in leftist dictatorships, even dictatorships that have strayed from the "faith" like China.
You people are incapable of a sense of proportion, aren't you?
The NSA is stamping your PC with the Mark of the Beast, a... cookie? So if you ever visit a NSA website again they'll know it's a return visit? This is useful... how?
Oh, this is all about riling up room-temperature-IQ journalists (I'll be charitable and note I mean Fahrenheit) into another hissy-fit over the fact that Bush is still president. Never mind. Go read some history.
They should decide which copy protection system they want DVDJon to break and get it over with. Geeze.
Or they could skip the crypto crap and save everyone some time and money, but that just seems too obvious.
instead of Intel P4/Xeon blast furnaces. Then you won't need to switch chassis designs, you'll spend a helluva lot less on electricity, and you should be able to use all your rack space without the county fire marshall ticketing you. Really, this shouldn't be news by now.
Heck, even the standard Opteron dualcores are probably good enough depending on just how bad your power-density problems are. The 55W max HE's are just particularly impressive.
Wait for the AMD dualcore version. Less heat, WAY more performance. It's a standard Clevo D900K notebook, also sold by M-Tech, VoodooPC, Alienware, etc.
The Opteron 270 HE dualcore CPU would be a better choice to compare against Yonah. Dual 2GHz cores, each with 1MB L2 cache, 55W TDP. Same speed but twice the cache of the Athlon 64 X2 3800+. Mind you that's a 90nm chip, not 65nm like Yonah. Consider that to be the baseline for what a dualcore Turion will do. I suspect they'll cut the clockspeed back a bit in order to bring the wattage down even further.
I'm looking forward to the dualcore Turions. Dualcore 32-bit CPUs seem... silly.
One of these would be fun to have. (And the notebook's nice too...) They appear to be out in Europe already and should hit America soon.
Throw in an AMD Turion MT40 (2.2GHz, 25W) CPU (see ewiz.com), 2GB RAM (Crucial PC3200, ~$240), that Hitachi 100GB 7200RPM HD (see zipzoomfly.com), along with the stock 17" widescreen and 256MB Radeon X700 GPU and you'll have a seriously nice gaming notebook.
If you want something really outrageous, the Clevo D900K notebooks take Athlon 64 X2 dualcore CPUs and GeForce 7800 Go GPUs. Heavy though.
There are some nice 15.4" Turion notebooks with X700 GPUs too from Acer and MSI.
Hopefully we'll see some really neat stuff next year when nVidia's new notebook chipset comes out.
My notebook has a lowly GeForce 440 Go though because apparently nobody at HP is into gaming. Nice machine otherwise though.
Is anyone else bothered by all these paternalistic, lead-the-unwashed-masses-by-the-hand approaches? Just give me my salary and I'll decide how I want to spend it. I'll make an exception for little things done in the name of tax efficiency though (buying bus passes for employees because it's a business tax deduction, etc), and even then only until the Flat Tax can be passed (alas, it won't be by President Bush).
The Bush administration is unaccountable to over 50% of the US population, who did not vote for them.
.xxx TLD article you linked to, it says:
Over 50%, which is better than Clinton ever did and a helluva lot better than the fraction of 1% who control your average dictatorship. Learn a sense of proportion, 'kay?
And if you actually read the
The multinational pressure, unprecedented in ICANN's seven-year history, places the organization in a delicate position.
The Whitehouse can't censor much of anything, regardless of what you think they want. Dictatorships like China can.
Yes, for the same reason I want criminals to be able to vote. Every nation should be represented in a fair and democratic Internet administration, not just the people we like.
.tw addresses dropped from DNS, etc.
So not giving repressive dictatorships a vote would be undemocratic? Wouldn't that be like putting those same dictatorships on the UN's Human Rights Committee? Oh, wait...
It would be sheer idiocy to give goverments unaccountable to their people ANY control when we can avoid it. Unless you think it'd be okay for China's dictators to vote
The current system works. Leave it alone.
1) The PIC uses a fraction of the electricity a Dell/Intel PC uses.
2) The PIC should be much easier to maintain, both from a software and hardware perspective. Granted, you can't do as much with it, but you weren't going to play Doom3 on that Dell box with Intel's Extreme (crap) GPU anyhow.
3) Ditch the HD and WinCE and these would make great LTSP clients.
In short, TCO should be a LOT lower.
That said, I suspect that the pricing is deliberately on the high side to keep from competing with real PCs and to make the inevitable bundled-with-Internet service plans look better. I can see some businesses buying them for their low-level workers; think of the power and heat reductions from a cubicle farm full of PICs vs. Dells. (Granted, a smart business would get AMD-based PCs with power management enabled, but if we're talking about Dell customers...)
You're better off buying a high-efficiency power supply that has a 120mm thermistor-controlled fan. Seasonic's S12 500W is my current favorite. The 120mm fan is virtually silent at moderate loads and not too bad at higher loads. High efficiency means less waste heat for the fan to need to cool and lower electric bills.
Lenovo and AMD get along pretty well. When will Lenovo make an AMD Turion version of the Thinkpad? THAT would get my attention. Same old 32-bit-only notebook in a new shiny case, not so much.
Translation: I think it's a warning to not run Windows on everything. There's something about the bazillion different Linux distros in there too.
Maybe it's because my behind lacks the padding the average programmer has, but I really really like my Humanscale Freedom chair. I can sit in this thing for a LOT longer than I can with a cheap chair before getting uncomfortable. If you don't have such problems then you probably won't want to spend the $1K but if you do it's a godsend. (Yes, I know, get up, walk around, but...) I like it much better than the Aeron (I think I'm too skinny for those).
The rest of my furniture is cheap stuff though. A couple of folding tables work well.
I never got into the multiple monitors thing either but I really like my new Samsung 204T 20" LCD. (They were on sale, couldn't resist.) They're not that expensive, about half what the 19" LCD it replaced originally cost me, and 1600x1200 gives you almost 50% more pixels to work with than 1280x1024. Check 'em out.
Air quality is the other big thing with me. I recently figured out that paint fumes do very bad things to my head, and energy-efficient new construction seals buildings so tight that the interior doesn't "breathe" all that well. (I live on the top floor and they repaint the common hallway every other year, and the fumes have nowhere to go but the upstairs apartments, slowly, and I was told by my allergist to keep my windows closed because that's what you're supposed to do to keep out the pollen and mold that I thought was messing with my head... but now that I'm almost done with immunotherapy open windows help a LOT more than they hurt.) Do yourself a favor and buy Low or No VOC (Volitile Organic Compounds) paint the next time you do indoor painting. Make sure the powers-that-be at work know to do this too. It's a cheap way to make a BIG difference in indoor air quality. I bet that much of the "Sick Building Syndrome" thing is caused by this.
Skype's encryption is good enough for the ChiComs to want to block it. If it can piss off the world's largest dictatorship it's good enough for me.
Please know that communism and authoritarian government are not the same!
Name one that didn't turn into the other.
HDTV in North America (and Korea) is 9GB/hour, so a 25GB single-layer Blu-ray disc stores 2:45 or thereabouts of video without the serious nuisance of transcoding to a more space-efficient format. These things are going to sell like hotcakes to the HTPC market, at least once media costs get semi-reasonable. Pioneer's Blu-ray drive is definitely going on my shopping list. I just hope the street prices for the drives and media are semi-reasonable. I'm not even going to consider HD-DVD.
It's called tortious interference. Near as I can tell, Intel is guilty as hell. This lawsuit was a long time coming. AMD is now just strong enough that chip customers are willing to take a chance and cooperate with the investigation. If Intel retaliates it won't hurt as much anymore.