Archive for the ‘Computers’ Category

Environmental cost of computing equipment

Monday, March 8th, 2004

This article at Wired raises some interesting issues: Wired News: Short-Lived PCs Have Hidden Costs In my mind, it is an argument against a laptop computer purchase. It is much harder to upgrade a laptop than it is a desktop machine. It also is a case against distributed computing projects like Distributed.net, or seti at home that provide an incentive to leave your computer on all the time (to help contribute to the computing effort).

Is broadband set to make power lines sing?

Wednesday, February 25th, 2004

The following article “Is broadband set to make power lines sing? | CNET News.com” provides and interesting glimpse into a possible access method for the internet…

iButtons

Friday, January 30th, 2004

These look pretty darn useful. I’ll have to peruse the site when I have more time.

Robot Birds

Wednesday, January 28th, 2004

This article about robotic bird-like devices is interesting.

More on Cheap PCs

Wednesday, December 10th, 2003

This article at anandtech compares AMD’s and Celerons. Interesting how slow the Celerons are. I have seen similar behavior with the Pentium IV and Rambus ram, when I was doing optimizations. Cache miss related memory operations take a whole lot more time that the majority of the CPU instructions. The processor sits around waiting for data.