LessWatts.org launches
LessWatts is about creating a community around saving power on Linux, bringing developers, users, and sysadmins together to share software, optimizations, and tips and tricks."
Posted Sep 20, 2007 20:30 UTC (Thu)
by boog (subscriber, #30882)
[Link] (10 responses)
Posted Sep 20, 2007 20:50 UTC (Thu)
by mattdm (subscriber, #18)
[Link]
Posted Sep 20, 2007 21:25 UTC (Thu)
by einstein (guest, #2052)
[Link] (7 responses)
Posted Sep 20, 2007 21:30 UTC (Thu)
by sepreece (guest, #19270)
[Link] (3 responses)
Posted Sep 21, 2007 0:25 UTC (Fri)
by ncm (guest, #165)
[Link]
Posted Sep 21, 2007 15:14 UTC (Fri)
by dmarti (subscriber, #11625)
[Link] (1 responses)
Posted Sep 21, 2007 15:52 UTC (Fri)
by jreiser (subscriber, #11027)
[Link]
Posted Sep 21, 2007 1:53 UTC (Fri)
by jreiser (subscriber, #11027)
[Link] (2 responses)
On the right track, but... Power [measured in watts] is free. What matters is ENERGY [measured in watt seconds or kilowatt hours], which is the integral of power with respect to time. Shame on Intel for making such a technical blunder.
It is reasonable to use more power, sporadically and briefly, in order to make better decisions which lower the total energy expended.
Posted Sep 21, 2007 6:59 UTC (Fri)
by tialaramex (subscriber, #21167)
[Link]
For a while the GNOME power stuff got this all upside down, showing remaining energy in watts, and current power use in watt hours, but this seems to have been fixed eventually.
Posted Sep 27, 2007 7:22 UTC (Thu)
by laulau (guest, #4279)
[Link]
sure, but if a given laptop battery contains a certain amount
Posted Sep 21, 2007 16:09 UTC (Fri)
by jengelh (guest, #33263)
[Link]
LesserWatts! (LGPL greets..)
Posted Sep 20, 2007 20:56 UTC (Thu)
by ccyoung (guest, #16340)
[Link]
or is that just bad intel?
Posted Sep 20, 2007 21:32 UTC (Thu)
by sim0nx (guest, #23065)
[Link]
Posted Sep 20, 2007 21:39 UTC (Thu)
by joey (guest, #328)
[Link] (10 responses)
Posted Sep 20, 2007 22:15 UTC (Thu)
by ewan (guest, #5533)
[Link] (9 responses)
Posted Sep 21, 2007 3:57 UTC (Fri)
by joey (guest, #328)
[Link] (8 responses)
I've seen a lot of people replace some overpowered home server with a nslu2 that draws less power than the _fans_ on the system that it replaced.
Limiting the site to intel is just silly, unless it's just about marketing.
Posted Sep 21, 2007 4:04 UTC (Fri)
by arjan (subscriber, #36785)
[Link] (5 responses)
If you have suggestions etc for other systems by all means contribute and I'll add them personally to the website [*]
[*] this assumes they're serious suggestions, and not something like "put 500 Volts over your cpu" :)
Posted Sep 21, 2007 7:00 UTC (Fri)
by davidw (guest, #947)
[Link] (4 responses)
Posted Sep 21, 2007 8:38 UTC (Fri)
by drag (guest, #31333)
[Link] (3 responses)
That's like if they posted:
and you said:
:-)
Posted Sep 21, 2007 8:43 UTC (Fri)
by davidw (guest, #947)
[Link]
Posted Sep 21, 2007 12:40 UTC (Fri)
by arcticwolf (guest, #8341)
[Link] (1 responses)
No matter whether the information on the site itself is biased towards Intel or not, this *is* pretty blatant - and, for me at least, it creates the impression of a site dedicated first and foremost to trying to get me to buy Intel hardware instead of AMD hardware, rather than one dedicated to actually helping me save power.
If I had just come across the site without having read the discussion here already, I likely would've written it off as yet another marketing ploy after seeing the frontpage (and, just to avoid giving the impression that I'm an AMD zealot or something, I don't even *have* a laptop that's not based on Intel hardware).
Posted Sep 21, 2007 13:03 UTC (Fri)
by TxtEdMacs (guest, #5983)
[Link]
It might have been nice to know the site was vendor independent, I might have read the article and visited the site had the headline and summary been more accurate.
Posted Sep 21, 2007 14:50 UTC (Fri)
by man_ls (guest, #15091)
[Link]
Posted Oct 4, 2007 11:52 UTC (Thu)
by endecotp (guest, #36428)
[Link]
As it happens, the processor in the NSLU2 is made by Intel.
Posted Sep 20, 2007 22:39 UTC (Thu)
by JoeBuck (subscriber, #2330)
[Link] (5 responses)
Posted Sep 21, 2007 0:32 UTC (Fri)
by sepreece (guest, #19270)
[Link] (4 responses)
Posted Sep 21, 2007 3:58 UTC (Fri)
by moxfyre (guest, #13847)
[Link] (2 responses)
Heh... well, consider the difficulty of finding a grammatically correct, catchy, and relevant domain name these days!
LessPower.com, .org taken
Posted Sep 21, 2007 14:31 UTC (Fri)
by proski (subscriber, #104)
[Link] (1 responses)
Posted Sep 21, 2007 15:18 UTC (Fri)
by ewan (guest, #5533)
[Link]
Posted Sep 29, 2007 21:20 UTC (Sat)
by mp (subscriber, #5615)
[Link]
Posted Sep 20, 2007 22:50 UTC (Thu)
by ericc72 (guest, #41737)
[Link] (10 responses)
I don't have the numbers to back this up (so I care not to argue about it one way or the other), but I read speculation somewhere that some of the power grid black-out issues (this speculation mostly pointed to California in the 1990s I believe) could be attributed to the rise in PC use in businesses (and homes I suppose too) where every employee was now having there own PC (a very 90s phenomenon, not unlike TV ownership trends in the decade of the 50s). Not only were these PCs being left on 24/7 which required more electricity, but the heat generated by them increased the necessary cooling load as well, which meant more electricity usage via air conditioners and other cooling devices as well.
Given all the issues that our energy consumption (or over consumption) creates, I don't think tackling the problem from both the supply side and demand side hurts at all (in fact I think both sides of the equation need to be addressed). I for one am happy for most task to have an efficient, elegant solution than needing raw horsepower at all costs.
Posted Sep 20, 2007 22:57 UTC (Thu)
by JoeBuck (subscriber, #2330)
[Link] (9 responses)
See, for example, here or here.
Posted Sep 20, 2007 23:48 UTC (Thu)
by allesfresser (guest, #216)
[Link] (8 responses)
Posted Sep 21, 2007 1:02 UTC (Fri)
by dlang (guest, #313)
[Link] (7 responses)
Posted Sep 21, 2007 2:09 UTC (Fri)
by ncm (guest, #165)
[Link] (6 responses)
Running Arnold for governor was another ploy: practically his first act was to approve paying the tens of billions of dollars that had been fraudulently billed.
But this is starting to drift off topic.
Posted Sep 21, 2007 9:30 UTC (Fri)
by drag (guest, #31333)
[Link] (5 responses)
Oh well.
I thank Intel for Powertop.. it's proven very useful.
Before all this effort a very good way to knock a full hour or more off of your battery life was to install Linux over Windows XP.
Now with Vista being such a fat whore of a operating system pretty soon we should start to see power efficiency and battery life as just another reason why Linux is better.
Posted Sep 21, 2007 15:01 UTC (Fri)
by ofeeley (guest, #36105)
[Link] (4 responses)
I remember wondering why it was that Santa Monica (which is so contiguous with L.A. that you need a map and street signs to discern the border) had blackouts while we were doing just fine in downtown. It turned out that C. of L.A. had retained a good, old-fashioned, centralized power-generating capacity to serve the needs of its electorate and inertia into buying into the new job-slashing, union-busting paradigm of deregulated, "free market" power resulted in continuous capacity.
Rock on centralized, state-controlled economies!
Posted Sep 21, 2007 18:35 UTC (Fri)
by drag (guest, #31333)
[Link] (3 responses)
I think your looking at the issue in a very very shallow way.
Who in California put those 'eeeviillll corporations' in a position were they could rape and pillage the state? If the people of the state had a choice between rolling power outages or purchasing their power from somewere else then what would of they done? Why didn't the people in charge of the state go through a different corporation when things started turning to shit?
Looks like the people of Texas (not were I am from) were able to happily sell their excess power supply to California while CA was running out of steam. Also if I remember correctly every other state surrounding CA didn't suffer in the same fasion as CA.
Sounds like a governance issue to me. If LA had their own seperate power utilities and didn't have the same problems then that proves it further. Looks like the corporations, being corporations, are a bit of a scape goat. I expect they could of been greedy pirates a-holes, but it's the government of CA that let them get away with it and were the ones that handed over all that money.
It's the same with the RIAA and other corporate bastardisms. Is it the fault of the corporations for going after grandmas? Or is it the fault of the government for providing the laws and the court system that allowed it in the first place? (hint: both) Which party is more accountable to you and the people politically?
Posted Sep 22, 2007 12:55 UTC (Sat)
by TxtEdMacs (guest, #5983)
[Link]
Had they been part of the Bush clan, they too might have avoided the consequences of their actions and walked off unscathed. But even the younger could not fully protect his "friends" [that he barely knew]. So unlike his brother, a few paid the legal price for their theft but mostly for their investment schemes and not their criminal intervention into the electricity spot market.
Yes, how can we have forgotten so soon the investment wisdom passed unto us by Texas? Moreover, how could we forget that the Texas elite financed the current regime now holding federal power? How could we so easily forget those gifts?
Posted Sep 24, 2007 3:24 UTC (Mon)
by k8to (guest, #15413)
[Link] (1 responses)
When politicized types start yakking up the "efficiency of the private market" as a justification for tinkering with a public utility that has been working fine for decades, ask yourself for whose benefit this change is being sold.
Posted Sep 27, 2007 20:27 UTC (Thu)
by ncm (guest, #165)
[Link]
Posted Sep 21, 2007 7:57 UTC (Fri)
by danieldk (subscriber, #27876)
[Link]
Great work!
FewerWatts?LessWatts.org launches
Oooh, an opportunity for AMD to appeal to the pedantic geek set!LessWatts.org launches
LessWattage LessWatts.org launches
Or "LessPower", but that seems somehow to run counter to what people usually want...LessWatts.org launches
Or, "Cooler". We all like cool, right? Right?RunCooler
You don't want to use less power (watts), you want to use less energy (joules, or kilowatt-hours). Hey, way to get the comments from the pedantic grammar weenies _and_ the pedantic science weenies!LessWatts.org launches
In large part because Intel concentrated on power (increasing CPU clock frequency and maximum instruction issue rate) while AMD concentrated on energy (doing customer work), billions of dollars in sales migrated from Intel to AMD, and thousands of Intel employees lost their jobs. That's not pedantic, that's as practical as one can get."Power vs energy" is not pedantic
LessWattage
LessWatts.org launches
In laptop batteries, where ordinary people would come into contact with the units it's generally watt hours or (since the nominal voltage is fixed with a regulator) just amp hours for a specified voltage.LessWatts.org launches
> What matters is ENERGYLessWatts.org launches
of energy, if you can work with less power, then you can work
longer, right?
LessWatts.org launches
:-)
I thought less was moreconfused
Some nice tips on that site !LessWatts.org launches
Don't want to sound like a winer, but the way this site keeps associating Intel and low power smells of marketing, and kind of takes away from the useful info on the site.LessWatts.org launches
Linux has long been more power hungry than our main competitor and LessWatts.org launches
improvements are well worth reporting. It's not LWN's fault if Intel are
making all the running while /their/ main competitor is still stuck
working on 2D only graphics drivers....
Great, but what if AMD does do something about power consumption? More to the point, what about other, much more low-powered architectures.LessWatts.org launches
The site is by absolutely no means limited to Intel.LessWatts.org launches
If it's not limited to Intel, then putting 'Intel' in the title is a bit misleading, no?LessWatts.org launches
Not if they started it. LessWatts.org launches
> Drag launches LessWatts.org. (etc etc)
"Why are they limiting it to only Drag's stuff?"
Well, they could put a big fat "Sponsored by Intel" somewhere to achieve the same effect, and be less confusing, no?LessWatts.org launches
I think what joey probably meant was the site's title, not the story's title: specifically, the fact that it says "Saving Power with Linux on Intel® Platforms". LessWatts.org launches
I have to agree, since I too had the impression the advice was limited to Intel hardware. Moreover, I tend to use AMD because it was more efficient in terms of processing power per unit cost and later began touting its higher efficiency vis a vis Intel CPUs. Intel's more recent gains have altered the picture with their dual core offerings. LessWatts.org launches
LessWatts.org launches
I've seen a lot of people replace some overpowered home server with a nslu2 that draws less power than the _fans_ on the system that it replaced.
Makes sense, too. A slug (as we happy users tend to call it) draws about 8 W (plus some 10 W for an external hard drive), while a home server will likely draw over 100 W all the time -- and that is while not doing much at all. This means a difference of maybe 80 W, and therefore you save some 60 KWH per month. At 0.10 per KWH you are saving about 6 a month. At 80 the slug pays itself in 13 months.
> nslu2 that draws less power than the _fans_ on the system that it replaced.LessWatts.org launches
It's an Intel IXP425 XScale.
But not x86.
I'm disappointed with the comments above. While it's true that Intel's site promotes its own hardware, this is a very well-written site with a lot of technical meat, clearly presented. Most of it is equally applicable to those who run AMD or PowerPC processors, or who use non-Intel wireless equipment. If only the average Linux HOWTO were written nearly this well.
LessWatts.org launches
Truly, Intel has been a leader on Linux power management and has thrown a lot of resources into improving the situation for all architectures, not only their own. I wish they'd chosen a grammatically correct name, but definitely applaud their efforts!LessWatts.org launches
I wish they'd chosen a grammatically correct name, but definitely applaud their efforts!LessWatts.org launches
LowPower.com, .org, .net taken
LowerPower.com taken
LinuxPower.com, .net, .org taken
Powertop.com, .net taken
etc.
RunCooler.com is available.
LessWatts.org launches
As is fewerwatts.com, and it looks like fewerwatts.org was only LessWatts.org launches
registered yesterday (in response to this discussion?).
LessWatts.org launches
I wish they'd chosen a grammatically correct name
If only grammar was so simple.
I have not had the chance to take an extensive look at the site yet, but I am just glad that people are taking this power issue seriously. I am all for running systems that are lean and efficient; if that means doing more with less, then I say bring it on. This sounds like optimizing ones output per each input, which doesn't seem like a bad idea to me.LessWatts.org launches
California's power troubles were deliberately caused by profiteers who were creating artificial shortages, to make heaps of money. This was possible because of severe flaws in the way California went about deregulating the energy market. A number of firms were prosecuted for their part in this.
Your speculation is ill-informed
While the 2001 shortages were artificially exacerbated by the energy traders, they weren't entirely the cause. There are just a heck of a lot of people in California, and they use a heck of a lot of power. In many areas, the electrical distribution system was designed and installed several decades ago with assumptions about average load that are woefully inadequate now that everyone has air conditioners, big screen TVs (not to mention the additional TVs and other assorted power-consuming gadgetry in each child's room, but that's another topic), multiple computers, etc., etc. In fact, my local power utility company just notified us that they plan to cut our power for several hours in the wee morning time next week, so that they can do upgrades on the distribution equipment for exactly this reason, to keep transformers and such things from going fireworky on hot days when everybody's cranked up the A/C.Your speculation is ill-informed
and California went 10-15 years without approving a single additional generating plant.Your speculation is ill-informed
They didn't need any more. Generating plants were deliberately taken off line (for unnecessary "maintenance") in order to create the shortage. Power usage a few months later was up several percent over the rolling blackout level during the engineered shortage, without anyone "approving additional generating plants".Your speculation is ill-informed
Glad my state doesn't elect fools and crooks to manage the electrical power. Having a private institution manage it is one of the few things we do right around here.. government-wise.Your speculation is ill-informed
Not sure what you mean by a "private institution" but you appear to be counter-posing it to a democratically controlled (i.e. elected) management. If so you should note that while the rest of California was reeling from blackouts the City of Los Angeles suffered no power outages that affected the rest of the state. Your speculation is ill-informed
Hrmmm...Your speculation is ill-informed
Then why is it that I remember a famous (or was it an infamous) Texas company was sending excess power into Nevada when it wasn't asked? It was a means to heighten the spot pricing in CA. Free enterprise? OK, was it just luck that more of that corporation's upper management did not die off or go to prison? Your speculation is ill-informed
It is absolutely a governance issue. The partial privatisation of California power was a disaster. For more-than-70-years that power was a public utility, these problems did not exist.Your speculation is ill-informed
It should be noted, too, that the privatization occurred with former governor Pete Wilson's personal assistance. They waited until his successor was in office to play their stunt, and then when that successor seemed likely not to pay the bill, they replaced him with a shill.Your speculation is ill-informed
While this site may somewhat advertise Intel, it seems to provide useful tips with detailed explanations.LessWatts.org launches