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Toys

Favorite eating utensil

Submitted by Frekko
Frekko writes "- fork
- knife
- spoon
- spork
- stick
- cowboy stick?"
The Internet

Poll: Online advertising

Submitted by Frekko
Frekko writes "How often do you buy something on the net through online advertising?
- daily
- weekly
- monthly
- yearly
- over my dead body"
Intel

Intel's PowerTOP extends Linux laptop battery life

Submitted by DuracellFan
DuracellFan writes "Intel recently released its PowerTOP utility, which builds on work done by kernel developers to make the Linux kernel power-efficient. PowerTOP gives a snapshot of what apps are consuming the most power. The PowerTOP website also hosts patches for several Linux apps and the kernel. In the article, which also details PowerTOP, lead-developer, Arjan van de Ven of Intel, says that PowerTOP could soon show which applications keep the disk busy."
Power

Why Linux Sucks (batteries)

Submitted by
An anonymous reader writes "Last July Dave Jones entertained the audience at the Ottawa Linux Symposium with a talk titled Why Userspace Sucks in which he described many hyperactive applications performing needless busywork.

Now Arjan van de Ven has come up with a tool named powertop that points the finger directly at which applications and device drivers are draining your laptop battery by waking the CPU from idle hundreds of times per second.

Low power states on modern processors can save significant amounts of power, but only if the cpu stays in the low power state for long enough to amortize the energy used to get into and out of the low power state. Powertop reports the total number of times the cpu is woken each second, the average time spent in each C-state, and the top ten offenders who wake the CPU from its slumbers.

Keith Packard reported that by using this tool to fix or eliminate the worst offenders he increased his battery life from four hours to almost seven!"
Games

Videogames Turn 40 117

Posted by Zonk
from the oh-man-we're-all-old-now dept.
May 15th marks the 40 year anniversary of the first games hooked up to the television. An article on the 1up site tells the story of Ralph Baer, Bill Harrison, and Bill Rusch working at the Sanders Associates company on a little game called Pong. They go into a great deal of detail on the development of the console, going so far as to include a number of the group's original notes on the project. "Baer kept the tiny lab, a former company library in Sanders' early days, locked at all times. Only two men had keys: Baer and Harrison. The room would remain the base of operations for their controversial video experiments for years to come -- experiments that, had they been known about widely at the time, might have garnered intense ridicule from other employees of the prominent defense contractor. Pursuing them was an utterly audacious move."

So I'm ugly. So what? I never saw anyone hit with his face. -- Yogi Berra

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