Monday, October 31, 2005

Tips to avoid the common cold: here seem pretty good. Ooh and here are 12 more tips on how to avoid a cold.
I thought this was funny so I thought I'd share :)

Sunday, October 30, 2005

why does this site always generate a big popup to save the pandas?

Thursday, October 27, 2005

IBM has lifted the veil on the chips inside Microsoft's Xbox 360 console.
Under the hood of the game gadget will be 3 processing cores, each running at clock speeds of more than three gigahertz.

Here it says "IBM said the chip features a customized version of IBM's 64-bit PowerPC core. The chip includes three of these cores, each with two simultaneous threads and clock speeds greater than 3GHz."

I say thats I say thats I say thats a lot of processing power...

Saturday, October 22, 2005

Nelson gets exciting

Nelson, Lancashire, celebrates.

The Lancashire town that took its name from Admiral
Lord Nelson is celebrating the 200th anniversary of the end of the
Battle of Trafalgar this weekend.


Residents will be entertained by Bright Fusion Samba Band, Accrington Pipe Band and street entertainers on Saturday.


The Burnley, Pendle and Rossendale Sea Cadets will also be performing their drill and a semaphore display.

Did anyone know there was a Sea Cadets for the area?


Friday, October 21, 2005

Wednesday, October 19, 2005

okay, this is seriously cool. these dudes launch a balloon into space almost (52,000feet) and take photos with a disposable digital camera videos, pics, story here. (found here)

Sunday, October 16, 2005

Interesting articles:
The dwindling attention span - "the myriad ways that people are distracted from their computers in the workplace, and 'how hi-tech devices affect our behavior.'"
Is the Apple Video iPod, "Apple's first bad move"? - they say: why should you have to pay $2 per episode of a program, when you should be able to record straight from TV like you do with a video recorder or PC?
P4 motherboard that can also take AMD or Pentium M CPUS - via a daughterboard. seems like a potentially expensive way of upgrading? motherboards are pretty cheap now-a-days so why not just buy a newer better motherboard when you want to upgrade?

Saturday, October 15, 2005

Monday, October 10, 2005

Stanford wins the grand challenge(1), using a VW Toureg, and 6 Pentium Ms - further showing how great Pentium Ms are :) More details here. 1 - Grand Challenge - they drive a robot controlled car over a certain distance.
America is said to be "The Land of the Free", and people are always going on about "The American Dream" - what is the American Dream anyway? And is America really the land of the free, now that they are now allowed to detain people without charge(1), and the laws are now messed up(2)?

1 - "A federal appeals court yesterday backed the president's power to indefinitely detain a U.S. citizen captured on U.S. soil without any criminal charges." Source.
2 - Laws messed up: details here.

Sunday, October 09, 2005

my website: www.joshwaller.co.uk should be up and running soon, as i've got a new ip address due to my wireless router breaking... hopefully i'll be putting some photos from my holiday on my site soon... ps, here's a website you might find interesting: bangernomics - all about buying and running cheap cars...

Speaking of buying and running cheap cars... we bought a Nissan Sunny to go up to Scotland in for our hols, pictures and further details are on monkeychai.

Wednesday, October 05, 2005

I discovered I had set the FSB jumpers incorrectly on an Athlon XP1600+. The net effect was that it was running 100Mhz fsb and an actual clock speed of 1050. It should have been 1400. In effect it wasnt going much better than the Duron 1100 that was in there before. Windows XP still chearfully reported the cpu to be an XP1600+. So I fixed the fsb.

Comparing the preformance of the Athlon XP1600+ (about 12,000 seconds a unit of seti) with the Sempron 2400+ (about 10,500 seconds a unit of seti). That doesn't sound right does it? The seti is about 15% faster, but the 'clock' numbers are 50% faster. So I thought maybe I've stuffed up the fsb of the Sempron as well?

Nope a quick check revealed a fsb of 333 and multiplier of 10, but hang on I thought the XP2400+ ran at an actual clock of 2000. 166 * 10 = 1666 or there abouts. That doesnt feel like much more than my XP1600+ at 1400. So whats going on there?

A quick search on the web Toms hardware says ".... value systems ... this seemed to be an opportunity to adjust the speed rating according to the clock speed of the competitor, namely Intel Celeron D." And futher that AthlonXP2000+ is the Sempron 2400+

Did I not know this already? I had read the artcilce before. Had I missed that point? Did AMD just magic 400Mhz from marketing?