Are you sure that's saving you power? Sometimes you have to initialize the device in order to activate the power saving features. It happens in Windows as well with wireless cards. The default state is "max power."
I agree generally, like AMD's bulldozer hitting 8GHz on a single core before failing to the limits of physics (even with extreme cooling). I'm assuming nobody will never be able to get more than 1 or 2 cores active (out of 8) while getting to 8GHz on that architecture.
But these days, the chips run in multiple clock domains. I believe the Intel chips are separated by a base clock, L3 Clock, Core clocks, RAM clocks, and bus clocks. The architectures are moving ever toward asynchronous operation in order to pack billion upon billion of transistors on a package without having to synchronize them all the time.
Microsoft is doing the right thing here. They are dropping the antiquated Win32 API and its bloat, in favor of a new universal WinRT API that targets both ARM and X86. Furthermore, it consolidates everything (Silverlight, Win32, WPF,
People have been asking Microsoft to the drop the bloat for some time. The security has been a nightmare because they've had to maintain the old unsecure model for the sake of compatibility. This clean break allows them to fix the permission model so that each App asks and gets only the permissions it needs during the install (like Android).
I like this change. Apps will now have to focus on doing one thing really well (and being able to connect and share with other apps) instead of being one-stop bloatware packages. Have you seen new contract API that facilitates this? It seems to follow the UNIX philosophy of doing a single task and being to pipe that output to anywhere.
Reading the paper, it seems the proposed protocol for key exchange forces a wait time of 17ms, and then hashes the packet to ensure it doesn't get modified (forcing the use of slots and keeping the air open during attack).
The only problem I see is that you could easily use this mechanism to effectively DoS the network by making it wait for the CTS packets constantly while the protocol rejects the bad check-summed packets.
But I guess that's a minor flaw since it's already trivial to DoS wireless networks in general.
Here's to hoping this actually gets widely implemented.
Is there an advantage to a reformat?
You say it creates a recovery partition? But when I run it from an existing Snow Leopard install, my existing Snow leopard partition size remains unchanged. I don't have an extra partition after installing Lion.
As an example, I've loaded a custom build of Tomato firmware onto my WRT54GL router. This router is considered out dated, slow, and lacking in RAM. And yet, I've got a new firmware for it that gives me a 2.6.22 kernel (originally 2.4) and IPv6 support.
Now my ISP (U-Verse) doesn't have any mention of IPv6 support, but the provided gateway does have much more powerful specs. In theory it should be a much more capable box, but their crapware firmware doesn't unlock any of its potential.
Thanks for that informative post!
So basically, we would need the FCC to open up the airway for more frequencies, thus reducing collisions and allowing switching when one channel is in use.
AFAIK, almost every wireless device in my house is around 2.4GHz.
I'm surprised Half-Life wasn't on that list. It was and still is regarded in the gaming industry as one of the best games ever made during that era. I think it, and Half-Life 2 have some of the highest combined scores by reviewers.
It also spawned a whole scene of modding that produced Counter-Strike, among other games, which today is still of the most played games in the world.
The Olympics happened?
http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/03/searching-for-gold-during-games.html
Steam is slightly better than the absolute worst of the DRM systems yes, but it still can take all your games away if you so much as look at it funny. Even SecuROM or StarForce can't do that. If you travel with a laptop, I suggest you buy your games somewhere else. Steam has a tendency to lock accounts that log in from multiple IP addresses. 'Cause, you know, that's a crime.
I call bullshit on that. I regularly use Steam from school, my apartment, and my parents house and on many different machines. My brother also logs into my account to access my game libarary and vice versa.
Really the only ban is for cheating on VAC secured servers and games. Even if you get banned for cheating, it's still possible to play on non VAC secured games and servers.
For a while now Linux has had built in ACPI power governors, and they seem to work across all Pentium and AMD processors. The ondemand governor is default and automatically bursts to 100% Frequency and tries to quickly scale back to the minimum frequency to save power.
Of course you can also control and select the governors (ondemand, conservative, user set frequency, and performance)
I can even patch the kernel to undervolt my cpu per frequency to really squeeze out extra battery life.
AFAIK, ACPI power states are well supported on modern processors (everything ACPI related works on my pentium-m).
But of course all of that functionality is built into Vista and Windows 7. The ASUS utility just provides a different interface for it, and perhaps choses better defaults for their own hardware.
Anandtech has done tests and found using Windows 7's "battery mode" does improve battery life by mostly capping the CPU frequency.
Where Linux falls short is controlling the power of other systems, like wireless, usb, and graphics cards. Most of the power saving features are just not implemented for Linux, yet.
OS X also does a very good job getting extended battery life compared to Windows 7 on the same hardware. Of course apple gets to control all the hardware and make sure the power systems work. Microsoft does really well for how many platforms it support. Linux is getting there.
Serving coffee on aircraft causes turbulence.
