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Revisiting "How Much Power Does My Laptop Really Use"?: A good look at just what uses battery life on your laptop (and your desktop too, I suppose). The author hooked up a Kill A Watt meter, and ran various tests.
The top consumers of your laptop’s power are the CPU, the GPU, the DVD, and WiFi — in that order.
I was surprised about the WiFi — I didn’t expect that to use so much power.
Dial D for Disruption: A good article about Asterisk, the open-source phone system.
Spencer is the inventor of Asterisk, a free software program that establishes phone calls over the Internet and handles voicemail, caller ID, teleconferencing and a host of novel features for the phone. With Asterisk loaded onto a computer, a decent-size company can rip out its traditional phone switch, even some of its newfangled Internet telephone gear, and say good-bye to 80% of its telecom equipment costs.
We use Asterisk at Blend and it’s been a dream. We spent $2,000 (75% of that was on really nice handsets, which you could buy cheaper) and created a 9- or 10-node phone system that companies were trying to sell for ten times that. We run it off a commodity white-box computer with a $400 card in it (and this is only for POTS — if you went pure Internet-phone, you wouldn’t even need this).
We have had virtually no problems with it, and we have all the features of some of the really high-end office phone systems:
While this all may seem very mundane, try paying for it sometime — the costs will surprise you.
We’ve had such a great experience with it that we briefly flirted with the idea of spinning off a company to implement these systems in Sioux Falls. We figured we could mark systems up two or three times our cost and still come in way, way under the larger outfits.
Alas, we quickly realized that phone system support would be a different animal than we were used to. If someone’s phone system goes down, you need to be sure you have a truck, a ladder, and a human to drive over there pronto. The investment of capital and stress was more than we were looking for.
Sony Charges $50 Extra to Sell You Laptop with No Crapware: How nice of Sony to sell you a computer that’s not pre-loaded with crap…for an extra $50.
“System optimization service” is what we’re calling a computer that comes without crapware. And by characterizing hard drive space as “valuable” and memory in need of conservation, Sony is effectively digging its own grave. I mean, do they not see that consumers notice this? If this new $50 feature “maximizes system performance,” then what does that imply of all the Sony laptops sold before it?
What happens when the CPU cooler is removed?: This is old but interesting. Some guys play Quake 3, and, while playing, they pull the heat sinks off the CPU. One of the CPUs actually appears to melt. I’m curious if there’s a time gap in the video, or if these CPUs really blew that quicky after pulling the sink?
A video from 2001 from Tom’s Hardware. They run quake 3 from different mobo/cpu’s that were very common in that era and then take the cpu cooler (heatsink and/or fan) off. Its actually quite interesting to see which ones survive and which ones burn.
Commodore 64 still loved after all these years: CNN has a front page story about the Commodore 64 today.
Like a first love or a first car, a first computer can hold a special place in people’s hearts. For millions of kids who grew up in the 1980s, that first computer was the Commodore 64. Twenty-five years later, that first brush with computer addiction is as strong as ever.
A good day: when your client tells you the server for their new CMS is ready, and you see this in Task Manager.
That’s an 8-way box with 8GB of RAM. To run a single CMS. For a public high school.
This is a MacBook Pro doing an imitation of a paperweight. It has been bricked. It stopped responding during some update process, and even the local Mac dealer here cannot get it working again. It is being paved and reloaded as I write this.
This is a $3,000 machine. It is four months old.
For the record, in all my years of working with Windows, I have never had a machine go so totally non-responsive on me that I had to pave it. I had one once that locked up randomly every few days, and I paved that one, but I’ve never actually bricked a Windows machine.
No real point here, except to say that in my experience, Macs’ supposed superior reliability is a myth. Macs crash too, and based on my experience with all the Macs around me, they crash at about the same frequency as my Windows machine, which is to say rarely, but no better.
Video, interactivity could nab Web users by ‘10: This sounds awesome.
Enjoy your speedy broadband Web access while you can.
The Web will start to seem pokey as early as 2010, as use of interactive and video-intensive services overwhelms local cable, phone and wireless Internet providers, a study by business technology analysts Nemertes Research has found.
“Users will experience a slow, subtle degradation, so it’s back to the bad old days of dial-up,” says Nemertes President Johna Till Johnson. “The cool stuff that you’ll want to do will be such a pain in the rear that you won’t do it.”
SC072 | Products | SiCortex: You think your desktop hardware is fast, buddy? Look what sits inside this little desktop tower, just in case I have to accurately model a hurricane season or something. Note the processor count and RAM numbers.
The SiCortex SC072 “Catapult” is the personal version of the SiCortex family of revolutionary HPC computer systems. The system is a complete 72-processor cluster packaged in a whisper-quiet, low-power desk side cabinet using less than 200 watts of power. Each SC072 has a 48-GByte memory system, 2-gigabit Ethernet ports, and up to three (3) optional PCI Express™ cards, each operating at a peak speed of 2 GBytes/sec. The cabinet has space for up to six (6) industry-standard disk drives.
This is the desktop version of their SC5832 which is a Top500 machine running over 5,000 nodes and 8TB of RAM.
Disclaimer: SiCortex is a Blend client.
Everything’s Coming Up Milhouse: Some great commentary on the state of the Mac. Even though I’m generally a Mac hater, I don’t disgaree with anything written here.
The Mac has never experienced sustained growth at this sort of pace. Breaking this quarterly sales record isn’t a fluke — it’s part of a trend. What we’re seeing now is what Mac enthusiasts have been hoping to see for 20 years: more people deciding to buy a Mac. The question now is how big can this trend get.
I think Microsoft is boned in a big way, I really do. Vista has been a flop, and I don’t just say that off-handedly to try and be like everyone else. We have Vista on one machine here in the office — our conference room — so I use it off and on. I can say without reservation that I see zero reason to upgrade.
What’s sad about Vista is that it isn’t a spectacular flop for me — that might be commendable. My experience is worse: there’s just nothing to get excited about. You can’t even say Microsoft failed trying to do something amazing. To me, Vista is a XP with a different theme that makes me go looking for stuff that I used to be able to find.
So, anyway, hats off to Mac enthusiasts. You held out, kept the faith, and I think the next five years will reward you. And someday the Raiders will win the Superbowl again, and perhaps I’ll know what you feel like right now.
Lenovo Thinkpad Reserve Edition: You have to wade through a fair amount of Flash crap before getting something interesting here, but suffice it to say this is the most “luxury” laptop you’re probably going to find.
From the press release:
Clad in hand-stitched, saddle-grade premium French leather, each Lenovo ThinkPad Reserve Edition notebook is individually numbered and comes with live, round-the-clock executive-class service and support. Each ThinkPad Reserve user is provided access to dedicated, specially-trained Executive Support staff, available at the touch of a button, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week to support every aspect of the ThinkPad Reserve Edition computing experience.
Seriously — the whole laptop is encased in leather. It looks more like a portfolio, just thicker.
Are you sick of talking to a different person every time you call tech support?
The Executive Support staff specialist accompanies the customer throughout the lifecycle of his or her ThinkPad Reserve Edition notebook PC, and handles everything the customer needs to get their PC up and running and to keep it that way.
For ongoing support, each owner is provided concierge phone access to the Executive Support staff, with all calls answered within four rings in the owner’s native language.
[Insert the, “You wouldn’t need that with a Mac…” jokes here.]
First quad-core laptop hits U.S.: Here’s the mother of all laptops for you — quad-core processor, dual video cards, and up to three hard drives.
With no mobile quad-core parts in existence, the Xtreme 917V Accelerator turns to desktop CPUs, giving you a choice between the Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 and the Q6700. Pricing starts at $3,359. Other niceties on this gaming laptop/mobile workstation include: a glossy widescreen 17-inch display (up to 1920x1200 resolution), one or two Nvidia GeForce Go 87000M GT or 7950 GTX graphics cards, and up to three hard drives in RAID 0, 1 or 5 configurations.
Nevermind cooling, how do they physically fit all those parts in a laptop case?
Here’s a side-by-side test I’ll bet you thought you’d never see; a Mac Plus running System 6.0.8 up against a mighty AMD Athlon Dual-Core running Windows XP. (link)
We focussed on running tests that reflect how the user perceives the computing experience. After all, most users don’t know or care whether their computer has a 65nm dual-core CPU or a tiny midget wizard squatting in their cases. All they care about is how it works and how quickly it does the tasks we most often ask it to do.
And guess who won? The Mac Plus, of course.
It’s pretty obvious that the test results reveal less about the hardware used than about how we use the software that runs on that hardware; the hardware isn’t the limiting factor in getting things done on a computer. And the test reinforces what I’ve known to be true for a long time; that putting a desktop with more of everything in front of someone isn’t necessarily going to make them more productive, especially if the user is burdened by poor proficiency with the applications they use and a limited view of how to use the computer you put in front of them.
There are of course some areas of work where this doesn’t necessarily hold true; in my field of work — the print industry — going to slower processors and 20 year old applications would put a huge damper on productivity, because the work we deal with day in & day out involves huge amounts of data. I remember the days when you’d hit print on an 8-page layout to send it to the RIP at 4pm today and you might have film waiting for you by the time you got to work tomorrow. And if you found a mistake, guess what? Nowadays, with G4 & G5 desktops and RIPs with dual 3GHz processors and 4GB of RAM, that same job gets done in a matter of minutes instead of hours. Faster is much, much better.
Add to that the issue of our customers who insist on having the latest version of every software package available, and every new release seems to have increasingly higher hardware requirements. Those customers generate their art files using that latest & greatest software and send it to us; in most cases those files can’t be opened by earlier versions, so we upgrade hardware and software to keep up with our customers. We have no choice in the matter.
But when it comes to the more mundane tasks that happen every day in a typical office environment, all the horsepower, disk space, and memory capacity available on modern hardware is just so much fluff. In my current job, one of my responsibilities is purchasing an maintaining all of the PC desktops. There are times when I just can’t believe what I’m buying, especially when I know that the only things that’ll ever be run on it is Word, Excel and a database client. A faster machine does nothing for users like this.
When it comes to the matter of monitor size as it concerns efficiency, there’s no turning back. I would never ask any of my users (much less Deane) to go back to using a Plus with its miniscule 9 inch grayscale monitor. I remember the days of doing page layout on something similar, and those weren’t good days. It’s pretty much a foregone conclusion that multiple monitors can boost productivity and make it easier to multi-task on a computer; just ask anyone who has more than one monitor on their desk.
The problem is that even though the vast majority of us and the users whose desktops we manage don’t need gee-whiz multi-GHz machines, we buy them anyway. When it comes time to replace broken hardware or add new computers in a business setting, it’s usually more cost effective to buy new from the Dells and Gateways of the computer world than to roll your own or buy used/refurbished gear. (But what about multiple users sharing a single PC? Is that even feasible in a business setting? I’m very tempted to give something like that a shot.)
So in the end, even though we don’t see any productivity increases from buying the newest, hottest machines and software available, we do it anyway because that’s what is available. And since the upgrade cycle is what makes the computer industry go around, there really isn’t any end in sight, is there.
How A Computer Hard Drive Works?: I can’t believe hard drives actually work, and this cutaway video of one in action just makes it even less believable for me. The speed that arm moves at the end of the video — there’s no way it’s actually doing anything at that speed. This is all just a trick.
On the way back from a conference once, I sat next to a guy who developed firmware for Maxtor. He explained to me how it all worked. I thought he was full of crap then, and I still do.
It’s all just magic. There’s actually a little leprechaun down there reading stuff off a scroll.
Mineral Oil Submerged Computer: A neat little project with an accompanying YouTube video. I like the last step in the process.
The mineral oil has considerable specific heat capacity, which means it can absorb lots of heat without having to vent it out to the surrounding air. Because of this, it takes the system quite a while to work up to its equilibrium temperature. Starting at an ambient 29C on the CPU, we found it took about an hour to hit a stable idle temperature of 37C. Not bad!
[…] The system under load was a different story. We started 3DMark06 looping, and watched the temperatures climb. It took a really long time. After an amazing 12 hours, the system topped out with a CPU temperature of 88C.
Corsair Ships “World’s Toughest” USB Flash Drives.: The Toughbook of Flash drives.
[…] Survivor flash drives, which were introduced at CeBIT in March, are water-resistant and can survive at up to 200 meter depth under 20 atmospheres pressure thanks to EPDM (ethylene propylene diene monomer) waterproof seal. Besides, Survivor sports so-called triple-point protection against shock and impact: it is encased in CNC (computer numerical control) milled aluminum as found in aircraft part production; it uses rubber molded collar shielding; and also features outer metal tube with two end caps that provide enforcement to the hollow tube and prevents it from collapsing when abused.
High fidelity takes backseat to portability: Interesting article on the decline of the stereo system as a piece of consumer electronics, and the resulting decline in audio fidelity that no one seems to care about.
With their ability to store vast libraries of music in your pocket, sleek digital music players have replaced bulky home stereo systems as the music gear of choice. But the sound quality of digital audio files is noticeably inferior to that of compact discs and even vinyl.
Cut The Cord - Powercast Technology Transmits Electricity Through the Air: This is interesting because I thought that transmitting power through the air was the Holy Grail of energy. My understanding was that it violated several laws of physics.
A startup called Powercast, along with the more than 100 companies that have inked agreements with it, is about to start finding out. Powercast and its first major partner, electronics giant Philips, are set to launch their first device powered by electricity broadcast through the air.
It may sound futuristic, but Powercast’s platform uses nothing more complex than a radio—and is cheap enough for just about any company to incorporate into a product.
Whenever I’ve read about discussions of this type of technology, it always led to visions of “beaming down” power from satellites to remote villages somewhere. I suppose that’s a few orders of magnitude different than recharging your cell phone.
Thanks Greg.
CineMassive MasterPlex 21T: My eyes have seen the glory.
21.3” Premium Digital Samsung LCD Center with Four 17” Digital Wings in Portrait Mode, $3,799
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As of yesterday afternoon, if you want to buy a Dell computer with Windows XP Pro, you have exactly one choice of model: the Optiplex. Everything else is Vista Business only.
