He means that if you put a vane on the thing and let it spin freely, the lead wire may get wrapped around the post, and then it won't be able to spin freely anymore. But if you give it some slack and put a plug at the bottom, you can just unplug it and unwrap it once a month or so.
I'm having trouble believing that their measurements are significant. We're talking differences of a few watts out of about 30 watts at idle and about 50 watts at load, and their precision is in single watts with no error bars.
My laptop's battery drain rate at idle (with wireless etc off) is 11.5 +- 1.5 watts according to PowerTOP, and if you toss in a power brick it's gonna be even more variable (particularly because Lenovo's power bricks suck the big one). Percentage-wise, my laptop's power consumption varies from minute to minute by more than Phoronix' measurements, depending on whether the hard drive is spinning, how many redraws it had to do, and how many interrupts it had to service. With wireless on, it would also vary by how many packets it sends and receives.
You could make this difference significant: turn off networking or get on a private subnet, wait a half-hour for background stuff to complete, and average over a period of at least another hour. But their.00 everywhere made me think that they didn't do this.
Also, you have to normalize for CPU frequency scaling: different versions of Ubuntu probably scale the CPU to different speeds under battery+load, meaning that some would take longer and use less power (but not necessarily less energy: power = energy / time).
Of course, Ubuntu 7.10 does use more power than previous versions. It has trackerd enabled by default, which inconsiderately re-indexes your hard drive even when you're running on battery; that has to cost a couple watts when it's running. It also has compiz on by default, which wakes up the CPU and graphics card every 20ms in order to sync to the vblank; that probably costs a half-watt or so.
Pick a program that isn't native to Windows or Linux default installations. Then try to type in the instructions for installing such a program in both windows and linux. How would the average user install the program on their machine? Could you document the steps for Linux? How would those steps compare to a windows installation? I'll go with Ubuntu, since that's what I'm most familiar with, and assume that you're trying to install AbiWord. We'll ignore the fact that the Ubuntu default installation has many more programs than a Windows default installation.
On Ubuntu, you click Applications -> Add/Remove. Then you click the Office category and scroll to AbiWord (it happens to be at the top, because the list is alphabetical). Check AbiWord, hit "Apply Changes", type your password, and it'll install. What's more, it'll keep AbiWord up to date automatically.
On Windows, you find it on the internet, download it, double-click it, click through the "You're running a program off the internet" dialogs, type your admin password, and it'll install. But it won't keep the installation up to date. You have to do that yourself.
Of course, if the package isn't in the Ubuntu package system, you have to... find it on the internet, download it, double-click it, click through the warning, type your admin password, and it'll install. But it won't keep the installation up to date. You have to do that yourself.
So does this mean I can't just take the dead hooker out of my trunk, throw her in a hot bathtub for awhile, and get away with using the HOV lanes? No it doesn't, but somehow getting lots of pictures taken of your dead hooker seems like a bad idea, even if it means you get to use the HOV line.
FIC Neo 1973 GTA01B... I didn't forget it; I was just comparing the iPhone to the Greenphone.
okay, it's only in beta as of now, but waiting a bit could be very, very interesting as on the software side it can do way more than the iphone. It's not in beta yet. Beta is where you have a convincing set of apps, and more than 4 hours of standby time. Oh, and the ability to make calls without using the command line. Also, you didn't mention that the FIC Neo greatly outclasses both the iPhone and the Greenphone in sheer ugliness.
Goodies: Linux + GNU + package system. Everything else follows from that. ... eventually. Still, a very interesting device.
Wow... adding 800gb/s to the workload of a southbridge would be quite a jump in required power, no? PCI-e is usually on the north bridge for exactly that reason.
Laptops, from any manufacturer, come in just a handful of known configurations, and generally are customizable only by RAM, and maybe hard drive upgrades. Easy to make them in advance overseas. Really? The last laptop I got (a Lenovo x61s) was configurable by memory, hard drive, processor, screen type, wireless antenna, wireless LAN card, wireless WAN card, fingerprint reader, onboard Bluetooth, Robson cache, battery, smart card reader, and a host of software options. The screen type and wireless antenna were bundled, but everything else was independent.
On my laptop, the GNOME screen dimmer (widget+hotkey) stuff is pretty fucked up. It was almost unusable a month ago, but it's been improving steadily. Hopefully will be much better in 2.20 final.
And yes, the front end of screen dimming is the DE's problem.
We're being punished for noticing. No, we're being punished for bitching about it. Cuz, like, bitching about Slashdot's quality isn't on topic for a thread on OLPC.
Compiz is the thing that MS gets criticized to death when they dare to use it in their OS (called sometimes bloat, or stupid effects, shit, etc), and that is critically aclaimed when Apple, some Linuzzz distro or use it in their distributions. Having used all three, I'd like to point out that the Windows implementation isn't just a resource hog, it's also nearly useless and ugly as sin. When Apple made an interface that ugly (brushed metal), there were more complaints. When Linux distributors make interfaces that ugly, people just don't use them.
Personally, I like Compiz because it adds Expose, faster rendering, and slightly nicer looking transitions, and I dislike it because it's unstable. That's it. The wobbly windows, the ripple effects, all these are totally useless to me, and I really hope Ubuntu doesn't turn them on by default. But Expose would be a new, useful feature, even with multiple desktops already available.
That's also a large part of why people like OS X's effects: they're part of new, useful features.
can't a quantum computer generate extraordinarily large keys even faster than it can break them? Not... really? Generating large RSA keys is probably always going to be a polynomial-time proposition. With a classical computer, it's something like O((log N)^4). It would probably be faster on a quantum computer, but probably not by much. Perhaps O((log N)^3.5) or so (sqrt log n speedup from using Grover's algorithm). Given how much slower first-generation quantum machines will be than computers (assuming that anyone manages to build one at all), the classical machine will be faster.
In any case, last I checked, the real reason you can't factor RSA keys on quantum computer is that it has to be able to fit the RSA key into quantum memory (probably times a small constant, like 2 or 3), and the record these days is perhaps 16 bits. You'd need to do that to generate a key, too.
... and I don't regret it.
62% said they had accessed another person's computer without permission I'm sure I've checked email and browsed the web on my friends' machines before. And we're talking "accessed"? I've certainly "accessed" machines sending me mailworms, to see which of my contacts got infected.
There are more serious instances of this too. Some people I interned with would abuse various Windows services to pop up (usually sexually explicit) messages on each other's screens. We were all friends there, and the whole thing was pretty much winked at, but the people involved ought to be answering "yes" here.
50% read confidential or sensitive information without a legitimate reason Everything relating to upcoming products is sensitive and confidential at most companies, but I'm sure engineers look at what other groups are doing even if it has nothing to do with their work.
Plus, I've read some of the Diebold letters, some of those leaked DHS memos, and some of the New York Times articles on leaked government this and that (it's still confidential, guys!). I bet a lot of you did too. I had no reason to look at most of them other than morbid curiosity, and I'm pretty sure that doesn't count as "legitimate".
42% said they had knowingly violated their company's privacy, security or IT policies Only 42%? How many of you have checked your email, a news site, or even (gasp) Slashdot on a work machine? I'll bet you violated your company's IT policies right there. Personally, I've also violated the security policies by installing cygwin, emacs, firefox and perl; by installing the Blaster patch early; and by not always locking the terminal while I go when I went for a coffee.
I've probably even violated my company's privacy policy, if not knowingly. I interned in hospital IT once, and I'll bet some of the scripts I wrote there violated HIPPA in some way, because HIPPA is byzantine. I bet if I'd worked there for more than a summer, I'd have knowingly violated it at some point. It's hard to debug database apps without seeing some rows.
O.J.: Radio interview quote from Marine Corps General Reinwald and a female radio host. He wants to host some boy scouts at the training center for some practise excercises. As follows FEMALE INTERVIEWER: So, General Reinwald, what things are you going to teach these young boys when they visit your base? GENERAL REINWALD: We're going to teach them climbing, canoeing, archery, and shooting. FEMALE INTERVIEWER: Shooting! That's a bit irresponsible, isn't it? GENERAL REINWALD: I don't see why, they'll be properly supervised on the rifle range. FEMALE INTERVIEWER: Don't you admit that this is a terribly dangerous activity to be teaching children? GENERAL REINWALD: I don't see how. We will be teaching them proper rifle discipline before they even touch a firearm. FEMALE INTERVIEWER: But you're equipping them to become violent killers. GENERAL REINWALD: Well, you're equipped to be a prostitute, but you're not one, are you? The radio went silent and the interview ended. You gotta love the Marines!
If you want it to ask only on conflicts, you can write a wrapper script that runs in batch mode, greps the output for conflicts, and pops up the graphical one if there are any.
You're either not looking or your google-fu is weak. 136,000 hits. I can recommend advantech, but there are literally tons of models available, in singles or quantity. A little of both: I've looked before, but not particularly seriously. Lots of sites sell PC/104 boards, but most of them require you to request quotes by email or phone and are hard to get in onesies.
As for size, processor power and energy consumption, I looked at Advantech, and it appears that most of their offerings are bigger than the PX (which, you will note, is smaller than a PC/104 board) and have a less powerful Geode LX800 processor (comparable to an 800 MHz C3 by AMD's own numbering scheme, and thus slower than a 1GHz C7). You can get Pentium M boards, though; they have a higher power consumption than the PX, but are probably significantly faster.
Still, thanks for the link; these things look better than a Soekris box if I need to power up an embedded project.
Lenovo knows that XP is just plain better than Vista. That's why on every page of their online store, it's clearly stated that Lenovo recommends Windows Vista® Business for business computing and that Lenovo recommends Windows Vista® Home Premium for personal computing.
Why is this nonsense still perpetuated? The instruction set is irrelevant - it's just an interface to tell the processor what to do...
What's not to like? To start with, the complexity makes it a total pain in the ass to write kernels, compilers, runtime systems, analyses, debuggers and verifiers for x86. On top of that, it costs lots of engineering time, silicon and power to implement all those microcode crackers and fancy superscalar optimizations; this is why x86 can't hold a candle to ARM in the embedded world.
But maybe you meant missing instructions? No load-linked/store conditional or bus snooping. No double (or even 1.5) compare-and-swap. No hardware transactional memory support. Those three make it pretty hard to write fast concurrent code. And streaming operations are improving, but could be much better; there's a reasonable chance that cache coherency will soon be too expensive for practical use.
Maybe you're interested in single-threaded, native code performance; this is, after all, what x86 traditionally shines at. Here you'll find the lack of 3-register instructions to be a performance problem, even if the chip reduces this burden. There's no shuffle (like Altivec, although something like that is coming in Penryn, I think?), finite-field or bit twiddling operations, or conditional operations (a la ARM).
So yeah. There are a lot of things that the x86 instruction set could do better. I don't expect it to do them all, but there are certainly a lot of reasons to change it.
The Geode development boards have been around for many years, are a bit smaller than this thing, are lower power, and can include CPUs that will absolutely run rings around the 1GHz Via C7, while running fanless. Link? To such a board that can actually be bought in onesies?
Soekris boards are indeed pretty good; I have a net4801 myself. But except for the 3 ethernet ports, the Epia PX is probably better. It's smaller, it's almost as cheap (I've heard $280 when released in the US, compared to $260 for the net4801, but add $60 for the Epia's PSU and RAM), it's almost as cool, and it's about 5 times faster. It supports up to 1 (2?) GB RAM, SATA, USB 2.0, VGA, DVI; the only thing it doesn't have is 2x PCI and 3x ethernet.
Still, you gotta be impressed that the net4801 doesn't have a heatsink on the processor, whereas the PX has a heatsink and a fan.
Either that or the man page is wrong. I haven't tried it, but read the manual for mount-2.12r on 2.6.20:
Note that the filesystem mount options will remain the same as those on
the original mount point, and cannot be changed by passing the -o
option along with --bind/--rbind.
I was trying to buy an out-of-print board game, and prices for the whole game were unreasonable. So I tried to buy two incomplete sets (one missing a few pieces, and one missing half), which should have been cheaper. I won the very incomplete one for almost nothing. The seller didn't ship it for a few weeks, and when I asked what was going on, she gave no reason and refunded my money. I complained to eBay, which did nothing, so I'm now stuck with an incomplete copy.
Slashdot Mirror
Not to ruin your joke or anything, but Vista runs about 3 watts cooler than Ubuntu on my laptop.
He means that if you put a vane on the thing and let it spin freely, the lead wire may get wrapped around the post, and then it won't be able to spin freely anymore. But if you give it some slack and put a plug at the bottom, you can just unplug it and unwrap it once a month or so.
I'm having trouble believing that their measurements are significant. We're talking differences of a few watts out of about 30 watts at idle and about 50 watts at load, and their precision is in single watts with no error bars.
.00 everywhere made me think that they didn't do this.
My laptop's battery drain rate at idle (with wireless etc off) is 11.5 +- 1.5 watts according to PowerTOP, and if you toss in a power brick it's gonna be even more variable (particularly because Lenovo's power bricks suck the big one). Percentage-wise, my laptop's power consumption varies from minute to minute by more than Phoronix' measurements, depending on whether the hard drive is spinning, how many redraws it had to do, and how many interrupts it had to service. With wireless on, it would also vary by how many packets it sends and receives.
You could make this difference significant: turn off networking or get on a private subnet, wait a half-hour for background stuff to complete, and average over a period of at least another hour. But their
Also, you have to normalize for CPU frequency scaling: different versions of Ubuntu probably scale the CPU to different speeds under battery+load, meaning that some would take longer and use less power (but not necessarily less energy: power = energy / time).
Of course, Ubuntu 7.10 does use more power than previous versions. It has trackerd enabled by default, which inconsiderately re-indexes your hard drive even when you're running on battery; that has to cost a couple watts when it's running. It also has compiz on by default, which wakes up the CPU and graphics card every 20ms in order to sync to the vblank; that probably costs a half-watt or so.
On Ubuntu, you click Applications -> Add/Remove. Then you click the Office category and scroll to AbiWord (it happens to be at the top, because the list is alphabetical). Check AbiWord, hit "Apply Changes", type your password, and it'll install. What's more, it'll keep AbiWord up to date automatically.
On Windows, you find it on the internet, download it, double-click it, click through the "You're running a program off the internet" dialogs, type your admin password, and it'll install. But it won't keep the installation up to date. You have to do that yourself.
Of course, if the package isn't in the Ubuntu package system, you have to
Let's compare specs:
Apple iPhone:
Radio: Quad-band + EDGE, 802.11 b/g, Bluetooth.
Display: 480x320.
Touchscreen: multitouch.
Flash: 8GB.
Camera: 2MP.
Sensors: 3-axis accelerometer, proximity, ambient light.
Goodies: Visual voice mail, special maps widget, photo browser, iTunes, stereo headset.
Price: $399
TrollTech Greenphone:
Radio: Tri-band + GPRS.
Display: 320x240.
Flash: 128MB + MiniSD.
Camera: 1.3MP.
Touchscreen: single-touch, requires stylus.
Sensors: None.
Goodies: GPL.
Price: $695.
That GPL goodness had better be worth a lot to you.
On my laptop, the GNOME screen dimmer (widget+hotkey) stuff is pretty fucked up. It was almost unusable a month ago, but it's been improving steadily. Hopefully will be much better in 2.20 final.
And yes, the front end of screen dimming is the DE's problem.
Personally, I like Compiz because it adds Expose, faster rendering, and slightly nicer looking transitions, and I dislike it because it's unstable. That's it. The wobbly windows, the ripple effects, all these are totally useless to me, and I really hope Ubuntu doesn't turn them on by default. But Expose would be a new, useful feature, even with multiple desktops already available.
That's also a large part of why people like OS X's effects: they're part of new, useful features.
In any case, last I checked, the real reason you can't factor RSA keys on quantum computer is that it has to be able to fit the RSA key into quantum memory (probably times a small constant, like 2 or 3), and the record these days is perhaps 16 bits. You'd need to do that to generate a key, too.
There are more serious instances of this too. Some people I interned with would abuse various Windows services to pop up (usually sexually explicit) messages on each other's screens. We were all friends there, and the whole thing was pretty much winked at, but the people involved ought to be answering "yes" here. 50% read confidential or sensitive information without a legitimate reason Everything relating to upcoming products is sensitive and confidential at most companies, but I'm sure engineers look at what other groups are doing even if it has nothing to do with their work.
Plus, I've read some of the Diebold letters, some of those leaked DHS memos, and some of the New York Times articles on leaked government this and that (it's still confidential, guys!). I bet a lot of you did too. I had no reason to look at most of them other than morbid curiosity, and I'm pretty sure that doesn't count as "legitimate". 42% said they had knowingly violated their company's privacy, security or IT policies Only 42%? How many of you have checked your email, a news site, or even (gasp) Slashdot on a work machine? I'll bet you violated your company's IT policies right there. Personally, I've also violated the security policies by installing cygwin, emacs, firefox and perl; by installing the Blaster patch early; and by not always locking the terminal while I go when I went for a coffee.
I've probably even violated my company's privacy policy, if not knowingly. I interned in hospital IT once, and I'll bet some of the scripts I wrote there violated HIPPA in some way, because HIPPA is byzantine. I bet if I'd worked there for more than a summer, I'd have knowingly violated it at some point. It's hard to debug database apps without seeing some rows.
O.J.: Radio interview quote from Marine Corps General Reinwald and a female radio host. He wants to host some boy scouts at the training center for some practise excercises. As follows
FEMALE INTERVIEWER: So, General Reinwald, what things are you going to teach these young boys when they visit your base?
GENERAL REINWALD: We're going to teach them climbing, canoeing, archery, and shooting.
FEMALE INTERVIEWER: Shooting! That's a bit irresponsible, isn't it?
GENERAL REINWALD: I don't see why, they'll be properly supervised on the rifle range.
FEMALE INTERVIEWER: Don't you admit that this is a terribly dangerous activity to be teaching children?
GENERAL REINWALD: I don't see how. We will be teaching them proper rifle discipline before they even touch a firearm.
FEMALE INTERVIEWER: But you're equipping them to become violent killers.
GENERAL REINWALD: Well, you're equipped to be a prostitute, but you're not one, are you?
The radio went silent and the interview ended. You gotta love the Marines!
-- bash.org
If you want it to ask only on conflicts, you can write a wrapper script that runs in batch mode, greps the output for conflicts, and pops up the graphical one if there are any.
As for size, processor power and energy consumption, I looked at Advantech, and it appears that most of their offerings are bigger than the PX (which, you will note, is smaller than a PC/104 board) and have a less powerful Geode LX800 processor (comparable to an 800 MHz C3 by AMD's own numbering scheme, and thus slower than a 1GHz C7). You can get Pentium M boards, though; they have a higher power consumption than the PX, but are probably significantly faster.
Still, thanks for the link; these things look better than a Soekris box if I need to power up an embedded project.
Lenovo knows that XP is just plain better than Vista. That's why on every page of their online store, it's clearly stated that Lenovo recommends Windows Vista® Business for business computing and that Lenovo recommends Windows Vista® Home Premium for personal computing.
What's not to like? To start with, the complexity makes it a total pain in the ass to write kernels, compilers, runtime systems, analyses, debuggers and verifiers for x86. On top of that, it costs lots of engineering time, silicon and power to implement all those microcode crackers and fancy superscalar optimizations; this is why x86 can't hold a candle to ARM in the embedded world.
But maybe you meant missing instructions? No load-linked/store conditional or bus snooping. No double (or even 1.5) compare-and-swap. No hardware transactional memory support. Those three make it pretty hard to write fast concurrent code. And streaming operations are improving, but could be much better; there's a reasonable chance that cache coherency will soon be too expensive for practical use.
Maybe you're interested in single-threaded, native code performance; this is, after all, what x86 traditionally shines at. Here you'll find the lack of 3-register instructions to be a performance problem, even if the chip reduces this burden. There's no shuffle (like Altivec, although something like that is coming in Penryn, I think?), finite-field or bit twiddling operations, or conditional operations (a la ARM).
So yeah. There are a lot of things that the x86 instruction set could do better. I don't expect it to do them all, but there are certainly a lot of reasons to change it.
Soekris boards are indeed pretty good; I have a net4801 myself. But except for the 3 ethernet ports, the Epia PX is probably better. It's smaller, it's almost as cheap (I've heard $280 when released in the US, compared to $260 for the net4801, but add $60 for the Epia's PSU and RAM), it's almost as cool, and it's about 5 times faster. It supports up to 1 (2?) GB RAM, SATA, USB 2.0, VGA, DVI; the only thing it doesn't have is 2x PCI and 3x ethernet.
Still, you gotta be impressed that the net4801 doesn't have a heatsink on the processor, whereas the PX has a heatsink and a fan.
the original mount point, and cannot be changed by passing the -o
option along with --bind/--rbind.
I was trying to buy an out-of-print board game, and prices for the whole game were unreasonable. So I tried to buy two incomplete sets (one missing a few pieces, and one missing half), which should have been cheaper. I won the very incomplete one for almost nothing. The seller didn't ship it for a few weeks, and when I asked what was going on, she gave no reason and refunded my money. I complained to eBay, which did nothing, so I'm now stuck with an incomplete copy.