Russell Coker: Low Power - They Just Don t get it
For a while I’ve been reading the Lenovo blog Inside The Box [1], even though I plan to keep my current laptop for a while [2] (and therefore not buy another Thinkpad for a few years) I am interested in the technology for it’s own sake and read the blog.
A recent post concerns a new desktop machine billed as “our greenest desktop ever” [3]. The post has some interesting information on recycling plastic etc, and the fact that the machine in question is physically small (a volume of 4.5L and no PCI expansion slots) means that less petro-chemicals are used in manufacture (and some of the resins used are recycled). However the electricity use is 47W when idle!!!
On my documents blog I have a post about the power use of computers I own(ed) [4] which includes my current Thinkpad (idles at 23W) and an IBM P3 desktop system which idles at 38W. Both machines in question were manufactured before Lenovo bought Thinkpad and IBM’s desktop PC business (so they technically aren’t Lenovo machines) and they weren’t manufactured with recycled resins. But the claim that the new machine is the greenest ever is at best misguided and could be regarded as deceptive.
I think that the machine is quite decent, but it’s obvious that they can do a lot better. There’s no reason that a low-power desktop machine (which uses some laptop technology) should take more than twice the power of what was a high-end laptop a few years ago. Also comparing power use with P3 machines (which are still quite useful now, my IBM P3 desktop runs 24*7 as a server) is quite relevant - and we should keep in mind that before the Pentium was released no system which an individual could afford had anything other than a simple heat-sink to cool it’s CPU.
This is largely a failing of Intel and AMD to make power efficient CPUs and chipsets. It’s also unfortunate that asymmetric multi-processing has not been implemented in recent times. A system with a 64bit CPU core of P3 performance as well as some Opteron class cores that could be suspended independently would be very good for power use with correct OS support. For example when reading documents and email my system will spend most of it’s time idling (apart from when I use Firefox which is a CPU hog) and the CPU use will be minimal for scrolling - a P3 performing core would be more than adequate for that task (which comprises a significant portion of my computer use). Then when I launch a CPU intensive task (composing a blog post in Wordpress or compiling) the more powerful CPU cores could start.
It would be good if Intel would release a Pentium-M CPU (32bit) with the latest technology (smaller tracks on the silicon means less power use as well as higher clock speeds). A Pentium-M running at 2GHz produced with the latest Intel fabrication technology would probably use significantly less power than the 1.7GHz Pentium-M that is in my Thinkpad. Put that in a desktop machine and you would have all the compute power you need for most tasks other than playing games and running vista and you could get an idle power less than 23W.
The new Lenovo machine in question does sound like a nice machine, I wouldn’t mind having one for testing and running demos. But the claims made about it seem poorly justified if you know the history.
It seems like Google broke something in their search.
For example, searching for "iTunes-library-xml Python" (I've just
written a parser which will turn Apple PropertyList Pseudo-XML into a useable
Python object consisting of hashes, arrays, integers etc. btw.) actually gives
me results (at least the one around #4) that don't contain "iTunes" (and I'm
pretty sure also never contained).OUCH:Looking at the cached version of the result when searching for "iTunes
library xml python" contains the notice "The word iTunes is only found
on pages linking to this page". Google knows two pages linking there, neither
contained the word iTunes.This is not what I understand as an "exact phrase match".
* It has been really good (and 
I was almost 1/2 year 
* We had great new year party at office. K and Kavin also enjoyed some moments! The best part was movie 
The year is almost over and a lot has happened. I 
I just came back from Taiwan(went there basically for 
My friend 
I am very saddened by the state of the IT industry. It seems like nearly
everyone who works in or around IT is, to put it bluntly, a cowboy. There
appears to be very little desire for actually helping people;
instead all I see is a very large number of people circling around looking
for the next person they can make a quick buck off. In short, most of the
IT industry is composed of people who are little better than shysters and
conmen.
As a case in point, I recently had contact with someone who is trying to
get an online store running. They've been trying, unsuccessfully so far,
for several months. They've been screwed over by basically every
IT-related person they've had contact with so far. Now, after all of
their suffering, they've finally gotten in contact with me. Most of their
money is gone, and they're deeply behind schedule. So I'm left trying to
pull a miracle job in little time and with little money. Yes, I could
shoo them away, because they're asking for more than they can afford, but
there's a little spark of helpfulness left in me, and I'll try to get them
going as best they can with what they've got.
If they'd found someone competent right at the beginning, they'd have been
fine. They started with sufficient cash and time to produce a good end
result. But chancing upon someone decent doesn't have good odds in IT;
it's a bit like winning the lottery.
This story isn't unique in my personal experience, by any stretch. There
seems to be a near-endless procession of non-technical people who come out
of their encounters with the IT industry battered and bruised, whether it
be on the web, in their business infrastructure, or their personal
computing needs.
While it's easy to blame the customer for not managing themselves and
their computing properly, I don't think it's fair to lay the blame on them
-- to me, that's like blaming the patient for dying on the operating
table, when the responsibility must lie, prima facie, with the surgeon.
It's the surgeon, after all, who is the (presumably) trained and
experienced professional in the relationship, and it is his
responsibility, primarily, to ensure that everything goes smoothly[
Whilst I'm very pleased with my new segmented network setup, and the new machine, I'm extremely annoyed that I cannot get a couple of (graphical) Xen guest desktop guests up and running.
The initial idea was that I would setup a 64-bit installation of Etch and then communicate with it via VNC - xen-tools will do the necessary magic if you create your guest with "--role=gdm". Unfortunately it doesn't work.
When vncserver attempts to start upon an AMD64 host it dies with a segfault - meaning that I cannot create a scratch desktop environment to play with.
All of this works perfectly with a 32-bit guest, and that actually is pretty neat. It lets me create a fully virtualised, restorable, environment for working with flash/java/etc.
The bug was filed over three years ago as 
I just uploaded the Debian packages versioned 1:2.9.9-2 (almost
immediately followed by 1:2.9.9-3, because I forgot to test part of it,
and obviously that part turns out to be broken), containing some
updates: