I have only seen one home computer that drew power on the older of a kilowatt.
It was a dual CPU AMD Athlon MP system. It had a peltier cooler on each CPU, and was watercooled. The water cooling setup had two pumps. It had 5 harddrives. And a DVD burner. It had 2 high end, dual head video cards. It had a seperate TV tuner card. It had 4 CRT monitors (1 19" and 3 17"). And a high end speaker set up. So I'm guessing a kilowatt there, easily.
This was when I lived in the dorms, and electricity wasn't metered. The guy left the machine on 24/7, and he did not have power saving features enabled at all (so the monitors ran ~16 hours a day, as he only shut them off when he slept. Harddrives were always spinning). I'm really surprised he never caused any breakers to trip or fuses to blow.
Even gas heaters use a lot of power to run the fan.
Atleast with the heater, the energy the fan uses ends up as heat, so all that really ends up happening is that you spend a little bit of electricity to save some gas. Where I am in in Minnesota, gas heating is only slightly cheaper than electrity, so it doesn't matter much if I end up heating electrically or by gas. Hence, this time of year I can run the computer, lights, etc. for pretty close to "free", since the increase in my electric bill will simply be countered by a decrease in the gas bill.
Air conditioners are the real killer. Especially since it has to run even harder to counteract the energy used by lights, computers, its own fan, etc.
For normal desktop use, the PCI card will be fine. The problem with PCI is going to be the bandwidth between the CPU/main memory and the card on the PCI bus is going to be a fraction of the bandwidth available on the AGP (or PCIe) bus. This means in games, it's going to be hard for the system to push all the textures to the graphics card at a decent rate. You'll want one with a good amount of memory, that way the graphics card should hopefully be able to cache a bunch of the textures. I would get a 256MB PCI card (I've seen them fairly cheap, $60-$70 or so) and hope for the best.
For comparison purposes, in Half-Life 2, an my Athlon XP 2000 1GB ram with an ATI 9600 Pro AGP 128MB ran fairly comfortable at 1600x1200 with the default quality settings (I was quite surprised actually, being that the Athlon XP 2000 is bit below the recommended specs). My roommate had a Athlon XP 1900 1GB ram with a nVidia 5200 PCI 256MB and he struggled to run the game at 800x600. Of course, this was pretty unscientific being that there were various other differences between our systems, but the PCI bus is still slow.
Well, actually the fastest (in clock speed) Intel processor is the P4 3.8Ghz. It's actually been out for quite a while. The fastest dual core chip is now the 3.46Ghz mentioned in the article. Probably the main reason why the dual core chips are lagging a bit in speed is heat and power issues. Two 100W+ cores in the same chip means you need to dump a lot of heat.
Dear God, how the hell can anyone justify selling a single CPU to anything approaching the "PC" market for that much nowadays!?
They can justify the chip if people buy it, of course.
Besides, they are probably only expecting small volumes to sell anyway. Just think of these $1000+ CPUs as test runs for the mainstream chip 2 years from now.
There are lots of technologies available to pilots to assist them in low visibility situations. Glidescope, ADF, Loran, DME, as well as GPS to name a few. Any decent pilot will be able to land the plane just fine if their GPS unit craps out.
Have you ever tried running FireFox on a 1Ghz eMac with 768 megs of memory? Let me tell you, it is no speed demon either. FireFox runs better on my old pc with an AMD AthlonXP 1600 with 512 megs than the eMac...
That's not too surprising, being that an Athlon XP is going to be considerably faster than any G4 based eMac.
Many OEM computers, especially on the lower end, only have PCI expansion slots. I don't know about brand new ones, but I have seen PCI-only OEM computers from a year ago.
Likewise, there are many AGP computers out there, and for people wanting to run multiple monitors and need another video card, PCI is their only option.
How about a Quad core CPU. Two cores of Intel, and two cores of AMD technology all packaged togeather. No matter how your program is written, it will take advantage of the best set of cores for its function.
My guess is that the Intel cores would end up spending most of their time idle.
1) Where the fuck can you buy a 4GB drive nowadays? I don't think any store around here carries anything under 80GB as you only get less space (not enough, that is) for the basically same price - and often they don't even have something that small in stock. I don't think anything smaller is being manufactured anymore either.
Lots of places carry 4GB harddrives. What cave do you live in?
Oh, and the original poster is wrong. a 4GB microdrive is about half the cost of a 4GB compact flash card.
So, in summary, we cannot discuss Nazi Germany in a thoughtful, reasonable manner because it provokes an emotional reaction? I guess that means a lot of other topics are off limits, like abortion, religion, 9/11, the death penalty, the Palestinian/Isreali conflict, SUVs, PETA, Terri Schiavo, and child porn - amongst others.
Like the grandparent, I'm quite sick of Godwin's Law. There is a lot that can be learned from WWII Germany, if the lessons can be heard over the "OMGWTF GODWIN!!11!!1" crowd.
And what's worse is that people think that free speech in America means being able to say racist and ethnic slurs so that no law is created that might on the off chance prevent someone from actually uttering the word "nigger" or "dirty jew" in a sentence that is not meant as a racist slur but in an intelligent adult discussion about the evils of racism.
The point of free speech is not to protect what people want to hear, it's to protect unpopular viewpoints that people don't want to hear. Sure, you don't want to hear all of that racist crap, and I really don't want to hear it either. But as an American, I do respect their right to say it.
And how does this relate to Nazism? That's the whole point. Europe witnessed the horrors of Hitler first hand and up front. The US has these weird rose colored glasses on at times. We agree Hitler was a bad guy, but we preserve our right to free speech because we should be able to say absolutely anything we want at all times. However, maybe if we stopped allowing whites to publically slur other races sooner, we could have ended segregation sooner, prevented Japanese Americans from being sent to internment camps, and prevented our own ethnic crimes from being committed in Tuskeegee.
Do you really think that segregation and systematic racism was just about language, and if we did not have the language to insult other races, the racism would of just melted away? I'm sorry, but anyone that doesn't have their head in the clouds is going to realize that racism is a deeper problem than simply a bunch of words.
To get back on topic a little, one of my problems with the way that Europe censors free speech is that in many ways, it seems like they are trying to forget their own history. Why else ban books like Mien Kampf? Why else restrict the selling of WWII-era Nazi related items on eBay? I really believe that those that forget history are doomed to repeat it.
In all seriousness, for most people with a lot of files, drive compression programs aren't going to help them very much as most of the files people tend to accumulate (movies, mp3, jpegs) are already pretty well compressed. For everyone else, a 40GB drive is probably all the space they will ever need.
For instance, when I'm downloading your latest movie on DVD-R, it's usually packed in RARs, saving a few 100 Mb if that at best.
The reason why they usually come in a bunch of rar files is because that's the best way to distribute files over usenet (where one big file usually doesn't work as well as a whole pile of smaller ones for a bunch of reasons). The RAR format is just a convienent way to split the files up. Then when people make the torrents or whatever out of the files, the RAR compression sometimes just comes along for the ride.
Yeah, I don't understand BTX either. It just seems to be change for the sake of change. Sure, there are some good ideas in BTX, but nothing that I see that couldn't be implemented in ATX while still maintaining compatibility with most of the ATX parts already out there.
What if the computer was on an open wireless network? Being that the default settings in many versions of Windows is to set atleast one default share with write access, it wouldn't be too hard to imagine the neighbor's kid putting stuff on her harddrive.
Bitching about names is dumb. It was the same program, just rebranded.
Huh? Before 2001, it was neither called iTunes, or released by Apple. That makes it different enough to me - especially if you want to compare it to Musicmatch Jukebox, which has always been called Musicmatch Jukebox. Saying that iTunes dates back to 1996 would be like saying Firefox dates back to the early 1990's.
Before the iTunes store, yes. Not before iTunes. iTunes dates back to the mid-1990s.
Wrong. Version 1.0 of iTunes came out in January of 2001. Musicmatch Jukebox goes back far, far before that.
Now granted, iTunes is actually some jukebox program that does go back a while before Apple bought it and then turned the program into iTunes. But it wasn't Apple iTunes until 2001.
It isn't iTunes that prevents me from "buying" from any of the other online music stores. It's the clients required by those stores that prevent me.
I'm sure plenty of stores would love to sell songs to iTunes users using Apple's FairPlay DRM. But Apple won't license the DRM, effectively shutting them out. If they try reverse engineering the DRM, Apple will just shut them out (see: Real). So they mostly turn to Microsoft, who seems to be willing to license their DRM'd Windows Media formats to just about anyone.
Ok, repeat after me: Mutation means nothing. It is an insignifigant force that basically means Jack to evolution. Mutations usually die off, and rarely get to reproduce.
Variance and selection explain a lot of how species change. Why a species of moths may change color over time, or a species of birds gradually get a longer beak. It doesn't explain very well how new species suddenly come about, hence the reason the anti-evolution crowd likes to point out the "gaps" in the fossil record. The gaps are where a species will suddenly appear in the fossil record, which is determined to have derived from an earlier species, yet there are no transitory fossils to be found that are part old species, part new species. You need mutations to bridge this gap (well, unless you believe in the "intelligent design" arguement).
Of course, you are right about most mutations being bad and dying off. But if 99.99% of mutations die off, and there is only a 0.00001% chance of an actual beneficial mutation - just give it a few million generations, it will quite likely happen.
That's not stupid. If I'm troubleshooting someone's non-working dial up connection, and I have a computer with a working internet connection - you can bet I'm going to check out the ISP's webpage and see if there is any suggestions. And then there are always the more clued in users who may check out the page when their connection does work, and thus have an idea where to start if it fails.
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Safari is basically a stock Firefox without extensions. Sure, it does everything that most people need, and has a few interesting features like privacy mode - but overall its sits between crappy and basic browsers on one end (IE, Camino), and more feature filled/customizable ones on the other (Firefox, Opera). In other words, average.
And I don't see how you mean it integrates better with OS X. It acts much like a stand alone application to me, just like Firefox does (unlike IE on Windows/Konquerer in KDE which are tightly integrated). Or do you mean it has brushed metal?
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I have only seen one home computer that drew power on the older of a kilowatt.
It was a dual CPU AMD Athlon MP system. It had a peltier cooler on each CPU, and was watercooled. The water cooling setup had two pumps. It had 5 harddrives. And a DVD burner. It had 2 high end, dual head video cards. It had a seperate TV tuner card. It had 4 CRT monitors (1 19" and 3 17"). And a high end speaker set up. So I'm guessing a kilowatt there, easily.
This was when I lived in the dorms, and electricity wasn't metered. The guy left the machine on 24/7, and he did not have power saving features enabled at all (so the monitors ran ~16 hours a day, as he only shut them off when he slept. Harddrives were always spinning). I'm really surprised he never caused any breakers to trip or fuses to blow.
Even gas heaters use a lot of power to run the fan.
Atleast with the heater, the energy the fan uses ends up as heat, so all that really ends up happening is that you spend a little bit of electricity to save some gas. Where I am in in Minnesota, gas heating is only slightly cheaper than electrity, so it doesn't matter much if I end up heating electrically or by gas. Hence, this time of year I can run the computer, lights, etc. for pretty close to "free", since the increase in my electric bill will simply be countered by a decrease in the gas bill.
Air conditioners are the real killer. Especially since it has to run even harder to counteract the energy used by lights, computers, its own fan, etc.
I think I'll stick with my sub-$100 500W power supplies, or the sub-$50 350W power supplies myself. Sub-$50 500W supplies are asking for trouble.
For normal desktop use, the PCI card will be fine. The problem with PCI is going to be the bandwidth between the CPU/main memory and the card on the PCI bus is going to be a fraction of the bandwidth available on the AGP (or PCIe) bus. This means in games, it's going to be hard for the system to push all the textures to the graphics card at a decent rate. You'll want one with a good amount of memory, that way the graphics card should hopefully be able to cache a bunch of the textures. I would get a 256MB PCI card (I've seen them fairly cheap, $60-$70 or so) and hope for the best.
For comparison purposes, in Half-Life 2, an my Athlon XP 2000 1GB ram with an ATI 9600 Pro AGP 128MB ran fairly comfortable at 1600x1200 with the default quality settings (I was quite surprised actually, being that the Athlon XP 2000 is bit below the recommended specs). My roommate had a Athlon XP 1900 1GB ram with a nVidia 5200 PCI 256MB and he struggled to run the game at 800x600. Of course, this was pretty unscientific being that there were various other differences between our systems, but the PCI bus is still slow.
Well, actually the fastest (in clock speed) Intel processor is the P4 3.8Ghz. It's actually been out for quite a while. The fastest dual core chip is now the 3.46Ghz mentioned in the article. Probably the main reason why the dual core chips are lagging a bit in speed is heat and power issues. Two 100W+ cores in the same chip means you need to dump a lot of heat.
Dear God, how the hell can anyone justify selling a single CPU to anything approaching the "PC" market for that much nowadays!?
They can justify the chip if people buy it, of course.
Besides, they are probably only expecting small volumes to sell anyway. Just think of these $1000+ CPUs as test runs for the mainstream chip 2 years from now.
If you are that close to the office, the real geek solution to move 600MB quickly would be a wireless access point and some Pringles cans.
There are lots of technologies available to pilots to assist them in low visibility situations. Glidescope, ADF, Loran, DME, as well as GPS to name a few. Any decent pilot will be able to land the plane just fine if their GPS unit craps out.
Have you ever tried running FireFox on a 1Ghz eMac with 768 megs of memory? Let me tell you, it is no speed demon either. FireFox runs better on my old pc with an AMD AthlonXP 1600 with 512 megs than the eMac...
That's not too surprising, being that an Athlon XP is going to be considerably faster than any G4 based eMac.
Many OEM computers, especially on the lower end, only have PCI expansion slots. I don't know about brand new ones, but I have seen PCI-only OEM computers from a year ago.
Likewise, there are many AGP computers out there, and for people wanting to run multiple monitors and need another video card, PCI is their only option.
How about a Quad core CPU. Two cores of Intel, and two cores of AMD technology all packaged togeather. No matter how your program is written, it will take advantage of the best set of cores for its function.
My guess is that the Intel cores would end up spending most of their time idle.
1) Where the fuck can you buy a 4GB drive nowadays? I don't think any store around here carries anything under 80GB as you only get less space (not enough, that is) for the basically same price - and often they don't even have something that small in stock. I don't think anything smaller is being manufactured anymore either.
Lots of places carry 4GB harddrives. What cave do you live in?
Oh, and the original poster is wrong. a 4GB microdrive is about half the cost of a 4GB compact flash card.
So, in summary, we cannot discuss Nazi Germany in a thoughtful, reasonable manner because it provokes an emotional reaction? I guess that means a lot of other topics are off limits, like abortion, religion, 9/11, the death penalty, the Palestinian/Isreali conflict, SUVs, PETA, Terri Schiavo, and child porn - amongst others.
Like the grandparent, I'm quite sick of Godwin's Law. There is a lot that can be learned from WWII Germany, if the lessons can be heard over the "OMGWTF GODWIN!!11!!1" crowd.
And what's worse is that people think that free speech in America means being able to say racist and ethnic slurs so that no law is created that might on the off chance prevent someone from actually uttering the word "nigger" or "dirty jew" in a sentence that is not meant as a racist slur but in an intelligent adult discussion about the evils of racism.
The point of free speech is not to protect what people want to hear, it's to protect unpopular viewpoints that people don't want to hear. Sure, you don't want to hear all of that racist crap, and I really don't want to hear it either. But as an American, I do respect their right to say it.
And how does this relate to Nazism? That's the whole point. Europe witnessed the horrors of Hitler first hand and up front. The US has these weird rose colored glasses on at times. We agree Hitler was a bad guy, but we preserve our right to free speech because we should be able to say absolutely anything we want at all times. However, maybe if we stopped allowing whites to publically slur other races sooner, we could have ended segregation sooner, prevented Japanese Americans from being sent to internment camps, and prevented our own ethnic crimes from being committed in Tuskeegee.
Do you really think that segregation and systematic racism was just about language, and if we did not have the language to insult other races, the racism would of just melted away? I'm sorry, but anyone that doesn't have their head in the clouds is going to realize that racism is a deeper problem than simply a bunch of words.
To get back on topic a little, one of my problems with the way that Europe censors free speech is that in many ways, it seems like they are trying to forget their own history. Why else ban books like Mien Kampf? Why else restrict the selling of WWII-era Nazi related items on eBay? I really believe that those that forget history are doomed to repeat it.
In all seriousness, for most people with a lot of files, drive compression programs aren't going to help them very much as most of the files people tend to accumulate (movies, mp3, jpegs) are already pretty well compressed. For everyone else, a 40GB drive is probably all the space they will ever need.
For instance, when I'm downloading your latest movie on DVD-R, it's usually packed in RARs, saving a few 100 Mb if that at best.
The reason why they usually come in a bunch of rar files is because that's the best way to distribute files over usenet (where one big file usually doesn't work as well as a whole pile of smaller ones for a bunch of reasons). The RAR format is just a convienent way to split the files up. Then when people make the torrents or whatever out of the files, the RAR compression sometimes just comes along for the ride.
Yeah, I don't understand BTX either. It just seems to be change for the sake of change. Sure, there are some good ideas in BTX, but nothing that I see that couldn't be implemented in ATX while still maintaining compatibility with most of the ATX parts already out there.
What if the computer was on an open wireless network? Being that the default settings in many versions of Windows is to set atleast one default share with write access, it wouldn't be too hard to imagine the neighbor's kid putting stuff on her harddrive.
Bitching about names is dumb. It was the same program, just rebranded.
Huh? Before 2001, it was neither called iTunes, or released by Apple. That makes it different enough to me - especially if you want to compare it to Musicmatch Jukebox, which has always been called Musicmatch Jukebox. Saying that iTunes dates back to 1996 would be like saying Firefox dates back to the early 1990's.
Before the iTunes store, yes. Not before iTunes. iTunes dates back to the mid-1990s.
Wrong. Version 1.0 of iTunes came out in January of 2001. Musicmatch Jukebox goes back far, far before that.
Now granted, iTunes is actually some jukebox program that does go back a while before Apple bought it and then turned the program into iTunes. But it wasn't Apple iTunes until 2001.
You do realize that Apple bought someone else's jukebox program, and turned that into iTunes rather than coming up with their own program, right?
It isn't iTunes that prevents me from "buying" from any of the other online music stores. It's the clients required by those stores that prevent me.
I'm sure plenty of stores would love to sell songs to iTunes users using Apple's FairPlay DRM. But Apple won't license the DRM, effectively shutting them out. If they try reverse engineering the DRM, Apple will just shut them out (see: Real). So they mostly turn to Microsoft, who seems to be willing to license their DRM'd Windows Media formats to just about anyone.
Ok, repeat after me: Mutation means nothing. It is an insignifigant force that basically means Jack to evolution. Mutations usually die off, and rarely get to reproduce.
Variance and selection explain a lot of how species change. Why a species of moths may change color over time, or a species of birds gradually get a longer beak. It doesn't explain very well how new species suddenly come about, hence the reason the anti-evolution crowd likes to point out the "gaps" in the fossil record. The gaps are where a species will suddenly appear in the fossil record, which is determined to have derived from an earlier species, yet there are no transitory fossils to be found that are part old species, part new species. You need mutations to bridge this gap (well, unless you believe in the "intelligent design" arguement).
Of course, you are right about most mutations being bad and dying off. But if 99.99% of mutations die off, and there is only a 0.00001% chance of an actual beneficial mutation - just give it a few million generations, it will quite likely happen.
That's not stupid. If I'm troubleshooting someone's non-working dial up connection, and I have a computer with a working internet connection - you can bet I'm going to check out the ISP's webpage and see if there is any suggestions. And then there are always the more clued in users who may check out the page when their connection does work, and thus have an idea where to start if it fails.
Safari is basically a stock Firefox without extensions. Sure, it does everything that most people need, and has a few interesting features like privacy mode - but overall its sits between crappy and basic browsers on one end (IE, Camino), and more feature filled/customizable ones on the other (Firefox, Opera). In other words, average.
And I don't see how you mean it integrates better with OS X. It acts much like a stand alone application to me, just like Firefox does (unlike IE on Windows/Konquerer in KDE which are tightly integrated). Or do you mean it has brushed metal?