I have refreshed my CPU price-performance analysis, to reflect several months of price drops.
This time Ihave added new data from Xbit-labs, which benchmarked the newest 1333MHz FSB CPUs. I added to that my previous data from the March Xbit-labs benchmarks, which I posted on my previous CPU analysis post. I have included Intel CPUs only, as my current focus is builing n Intel based Hackintosh.
The main interest in the following graph is that is shows the performance of the different CPUs relative to the CPU cost (all costs are from NewEgg, November 24 2007).
Analysis
It is interesting to see that pretty soon after their introduction, the newest 1333MHz FSB CPUs (E6550 and E6750) have made it to the front of price-performance graph, and achieve the same value (performance per dollar) as the previous value champs, the E4400 and E4300.
On the dotted line, all CPUs have the same performance per dollar ratio, so the choice becomes really a matter of optimization on the overall system cost. For a medium cost system ($800 or so), I would choose the E6750, as it costs only $60 more then the E4300, but delivers much higher performance.
Very rarely comes a TV series that is so innovative, intelligent and fresh as The Lost Room, that changes your expectations from what TV should be like.
The Lost Room is a brilliant and intelligent Sci-Fi channel mini-series, with a fantastic and original plot. I don’t want to give even a hint as to what this is about (not to ruin even a minute of it), but this supernatural mystery thriller will hook you from the first minute till the very last.
Complementing the top-notch effects and good acting, the series music was exceptionally touching. This mini-series has a mesmerizing, eerie and melodic score, that made me want to hear more.
We saw it almost straight through, and stopped only to get some sleep. I prefer to think of it as a superb 6-hour movie - it does not have the slowness and fillers of regular TV series (Lost, to mention the obvious, has very little story development per hour, with its 80% flashback fillers). The Lost Room is simply impossible to stop watching, and is one of the best Sci-Fi/Fantasy movies I have ever seen.
This is a first article in the Building My Hackintosh series. This article discusses the choice of CPU in a new PC system, with price-performance analysis and recommendations.
AMD or Intel?
When approaching a new machine build, one of the obvious decisions is the CPU manufactory - AMD or Intel. The brand will affect the motherboard directly, as motherboards are designed for a particular CPU brand and socket type.
Usually, this choice is rather simple, and would be most influenced by taste and cost optimization concerns. In my case, building an OSX86 setup introduces more constraints. Initially, only Intel CPUs were supported by OS-X - but as time passed, unofficial AMD support started to appear.
From a superficial browsing of the hardware compatibility page at the osx 86 project, although the page actually shows support for both AMD and Intel, I decided to reduce the risk and go with Intel - based on the assumption that an Intel-based Hachintosh might have less snags and will be more robust then AMD.
Read the rest of this entry »
I have decided to build a dual-boot Mac OSX86 / Windows machine, AKA Hachintosh.
First of all, I am getting more and more frustrated with the my current machine, which is understandable considering its a 5 year old Pentium 3 box - it is actually amazing I was willing to put up with that for so long.
And if I am already building my own machine, why not try to shoot for the best-in-class productivity OS?
So, for the previous months I immersed myself deeply in analysis, trying to learn both what does it mean building your own machine from scratch, plus getting a sense of putting together an OSX86 system.
Here is the result of my analysis. This represents my point of view and tradeoffs - yours might be different.
My Main Considerations
For this project, I have several requirements in mind.
- Mac OS X Compatibility - The machine must be able to fully support the latest MacOS X, with minimal hassles as possible. I don’t mind fighting it to work, but it would be very dissapointing to eventually not to use a critical feature.
- Modern Gaming Performance - I want to run modern games (under Windows) in an enjoyable framerate, good enough resolution and effects.
- Cost/Value - I am aiming for a good tradeoff between cost and value, trying to find the sweet-spot on the value curve. This is somewhat similar to what [Sharkey Extreme] are doing with their [Value PC Guide], although they place an arbitrary limitation of $1000, whereas I am just trying to minimize costs while getting as much as I can from it.
- Upgradability - One of my key assumptions is that I am not building a system that would be good enough to last for 5 years, but rather a value system that would be goof for now, with the assumption that as prices drop in the coming years, differernt parts can be replaced for incrementaly small costs.
In the following weeks I am going to detail the different aspects of the research. Stay tuned.
Wednesday, Jun 20th, 2007
Categories: Webby
I have moved my blog from Blogger to WordPress - and I am amazed of the richness, flexibility and looks.
The main reason that pushed me from Blogger was my need to have pages - static page structure that allows me to have articles and other static pages, not in a blog concept. There are some things that simply do not fit in a blog.
On the other hand, I got addicted to the ease of posting and management in a server-side platform like Blogger. Its very easy to add a post, no need to deal with HTML, cross-linking, correct URLs, etc. Once you get used to it, its very hard to go back to building a site from scratch.
WordPress is amazing. The themes are gorgeous, infinite plug-ins, rich control - the site is PHP based, and you can add your own functionality.
Here are some of the goodies I am already using.
- QPwilm theme - with some more tweaks
- Search Pages plugin - allows search inside pages, not only posts
- Sticky Menus plugin - allows customizable menus all over the place
- WP-Table plugin - allows creation and management of tables through WP admin
- Exec-PHP plugin - allows pasting PHP code as part of the post, which gets executed on render time.
So far - so good!
As mentioned in Buzz Out Loud… A wacky and hilarious site!
http://www.velociraptors.info/
Its amazing how frustrating Windows can be. No wonder my wife says she does not deal well with “computers”.
Today while my 2 year old played with my laptop (Dell Lattitude 420), she pulled an amazing feat: She succeeded turning the display completely sideways. I am talking about the whole Windows desktop and apps were 90 degrees sideways. Now this leads to 3 frustrations:
- The touch-pad is now physically rotated to the screen; Up on the pad moves the cursor left. Now try to navigate like this!
- I had no clue how the hell she managed to do that.
- I had no clue how the hell I am getting the machine to function back again.
A quick search and I got to this page on //engtech. This was a real sanity saver! Thanks to this Canadian dude. Oh, and the best part in the page design is that the answer is written sideways! You have to check it out. Thats a very clever things to do.
It turns out that there is a stupid hot key combination (ctrl-alt-left / right / up / down) that triggers this behavior on certain graphic cards. This should definitely be turned off, and also be clearly accessible as a main tab on the display control-panel.
Conclusions
- Turn off this silly feature on the OS level. (Yeah, right, like this will ever happen).
- Google is a worthy asset - but you have to know how to search.
- Common bloggers can be your friends
- Take the laptop out of reach of your two year old.
It still beats the hell out of me how she succeeded pressing ctrl-alt-arrow. Kids can be extremely resourceful.
Everyone has an opinion on the new iPhone by Apple. As a long time admirer of Apple (heck, I still have the first PDA ever, Apple’s Newton), I have an opinion as well.
First off, its an amazing device - but marketing it as a phone does not work for me. I would almost say that if you consider it as a phone, it is an overly expensive and fragile piece of hardware (although very cool). Just think about the horror of dropping it accidentally and cracking the display - how many times did you drop your phone to see it bouncing off the floor, sliding face down across the room or just forgetting it somewhere? Try doing that with a $500 phone with a huge LCD.
In addition, I guess I am not so excited about this as a phone also because personally my phone life does not involve browsing the web, or playing music. I am OK with separating my music (iPod 4G, quite old nowadays) from my phone (those get smaller by the day). I just need to be able to call or receive calls.
However…
The most exciting thing about this device is its amazing user interface. I is almost an alien technology: Its so much more advanced then anything on the market today, that it would take years for anyone to duplicate the UI with any degree of success. This is the main reason I am still considering buying this adorable device: To be able to scroll stuff, view photos and resize things all day long.
For me, the killer feature is actually text entry and retrieval. I tried for years all sorts of devices: Starting from the Apple Newton, which was a very ambitious effort, but due to high cost ($800), too slow CPU, imperfect hand-writing recognition software and too big form factor did not make it. It was a huge idea, but they needed hardware that was only appearing years after.
I used Palm V for a year or two - its quite convenient to read and retrieve, but for me the experience of writing using the stylus did not work, handwriting recognition sucks, and portable keyboard is too bulky.
Consider the iPhone, now: Having a device that allows you to write text, send it as email and view it in the best UI ever (which only Apple can deliver) might be the winning solution. It still seems to be proven how easy it is to enter text through the thumb-based interface. Even it is quite expensive as a content writing and retrieval gadget, it might be still a winner.
The next OS?
Which leads me to the revelation: I am predicting that a few months after this gadget hits production, Apple would reveal the new iMac that has the same user interface (UI). Imagine a desktop OS that behaves with the same elegance and flow - dragging windows, arranging images, smart context-sensitive dialogs, tactile scrolling, etc. Apple did the unbelievable and put OS-X on a slim portable gadget - now, once the UI technology matures, the next big thing would be to complete the full loop and bring this innovative UI to the desktop.
Obviously this is not an easy feat: I can think easily of many challenges. How would you “right click” without a mouse? How would you make all buttons and widgets finger friendly? What would you do with all the applications out there? All in all, quite challenging. But Apple had already demonstrated that they can deliver. They can do this again.
Wouldn’t that be something? What do you think?
Monday, Jan 22nd, 2007
Categories: Webby
Wednesday, January 17, 2007
If you want to start an AdSense-based site, and you are wondering which subject it should be about, here are three rules for choosing the site’s subject.
Choose a subject that interests you
You are going to invest tons of hours in building your site. This is going to involve a lot of research, thinking and writing. If this is a subject that you don’t find interesting, you will not have the required energies to put into it.
In addition, if it is interesting to you, that also means that you might know more then other people about this, and that you might be able to contribute original ideas, commentary and opinions about this subject - this is exactly what the readers (and the search engines) are after.
Last, as this is an interesting subject for you, you might be researching and reading about it anyway - this means you just need to put that into your site.
Choose a subject that has enough advertisers
Lets suppose you invested all your energy at your favorite subject, and built a solid and interesting site. Can it be profitable? That depends on lots of things, but surely if there are very few advertisers in this area, or the ads have low value, you will not be able to monetize it.
Obviously, you need to beware of choosing a subject that has fierce competition (most are…). The highest paying keywords are the playground of the pros. If you are just starting, stay away from those.
Choose a subject that is aimed at non-technical people
Ahh, this is the most elusive secret of all: The more technical savvy your users are, and the more web experienced they are, the less likely will they be to see your ads. This is called ad-blindness.
On the other hand, if your site is aimed at low-tech users, the more likely they are to click on your ads.
Here is a short review of my chosen Firefox extensions, which without them my web life would have been extremely miserable. All of them are recommended, and most of them are completely essential.
Ad Blocking
This extension is a must to save you many precious seconds of your life. In essence, in every page that contains a Flash animation, you will find a small (F) instead. Clicking on it will start the original Flash - but most of the time you are not interested in that (Thats because most of them are just ads). You would not believe how faster your pages load with it.
Tabbed Browsing
This small extension allows you to assign keyboard shortcuts to switching tabs. I use ctrl-left and ctrl-right, but you can choose your favorite shortcuts. Essential for speed.
This adds a new preferences tab in your control panel, regarding tab behavior. It adds tons of customizable options to tabbing - and if you are a tabbing freak, like me, it allows you complete control.
A simple and cute add-on, that allows you to shrink the tab header to the icon only (favicon). This helps a lot when you have lots of known tabs open, which you can navigate to using the icon only.
Bookmarks Synchronization
With Foxmarks you can synchronize two PCs to share the same bookmarks. It works like magic.
Download
Now all your downloads appear as small and clean progress bar down on your status bar. Go away the download window!
With this extension, all PDFs that you click on will prompt you as to what you want to do - you can safe directly, or open in Firefox, or other options. As the PDF within Firefox is quite limited in functionality, this is a great helper.
A nice extension to download some types of video to Hard Disk. I started to see more and more sites that this extension is not working for.
Firefox Application
This cute extension adds a splash screen to Firefox, Thunderbird and Sunbird. This makes the application seem so much more professional. Why the Firefox developers did not place this feature (still) officially is beyond me.
A great addition to Firefox - notifies you when your add-ons or Firefox have updates, downloads them for you, and let you decide on when to restart. Complete!
Web-Dev
Adds a small eyedropper icon on the lower-left corner, and allows you to sample the color from any pixel on the current web page - and in addition, has tons of other color-oriented features. Superb tool for web developers!
This advanced add-on allows you to examine forms data before transmission, and change it at will. With it, you can capture what is really going on between a web-application client to its server - weather yours or not…