Wednesday, April 23, 2008

Re: previous post - I'm dumb. It was an April Fool's joke. Good one guys.

My problem with April Fool's is that I never know what day it is exactly. So I'm easily fooled. It's still March!

Friday, April 04, 2008

I was listening to a NPR a couple days ago and it talked about a couple in Arizona getting there Economic Stimulus rebate

I was kind of surprised they got it early (payment schedule) - they should be getting it in May. But for some reason they got it early. You don't want to get it early. In there case they didn't get a check ... or cash....

They got an Fucking air conditioner. Yep, that's right they got there rebate in the form of retail goods at the "value" of the cash. Even funnier, why an air conditioner you might ask? Well apparently the government makes a geographic guess (not sure what else factors in) about what you would "need": these people live in Arizona, it's hot there ... give 'em an air conditioner." Thank you government.

The reason for the air conditioner is obvious - that money has gone into the economy already (the A/C came from somewhere): thus performing it's stimulating functions. The reason why these people got one, allegedly, is that they were calculated by some IRS algorithm as having a good probability to pay off debt (on silly things like car and mortgage payments) and not buy things, like air conditioners.

I better not get a God damn snow blower.

Thursday, April 03, 2008

Power usage of computers. In an attempt to lower my power usage (and to understand my power usage) I been using my Kill-A-Watt to see how much power my computers as well as my monitors use.

For starters, LCD monitors appear to be a lot better. My 20" Samsung (with higher contrast and similar brightness) beat my 19" ViewSonic by almost 2 to 1, ~75W to ~45W, respectively.

As for computers, it's a little suprising. My Dell laptop uses about ~20 Watts at idle (going up to 35W under high load). My AMD64 system, with it's Nvidia video card that is now a couple years old (and wasn't top of the line when I got it) uses a whopping ~132+ on idle. With that in mind here are some more specifics; it has 3 hard disk drives (HDD's), 2 GB's of RAM, a Nvidia 7600GT, Athlon 64 3800+, and a DVD writer.

Still it seems relatively high compared to my PIII 450 Mhz, with 384Mb's ram, one HDD, and a CD-ROM drive which clocked in at about ~50W. I was actually pretty impressed how low that was. This makes me wonder how much power the Nvidia video card uses. This was my old server, which was replaced by my new Koolu.

The Koolu with it's AMD Geode processor (similar to the OLPC) clocks in at ~8W with a standard laptop 30 GB HDD. This computer runs constantly, so it's the most important to have low power usage (and generate less heat - which is good for the summer).

So long story short I was actually hoping my old server used more power. Nonetheless, using a laptop is certainly much more earth friendly than a desktop. By Far (recap: 20W at idle compared to 132W at idle)