power management experiences with joyride-1572

[Edward Cherlin]

On Jan 24, 2008 5:12 PM, Tomeu Vizoso <tomeu at tomeuvizoso.net> wrote:
> On Fri, 2008-01-25 at 01:45 +0100, Ivan Krstić wrote:
> > On Jan 25, 2008, at 1:31 AM, Frank Ch. Eigler wrote:
> > > if the all brand new XO-focused software doesn't already do this
> >
> > We're building a platform, and have been completely and brutally
> > transparent about our progress. Software built on our platform will
> > keep improving rapidly along a number of axes, power management being
> > one, and even more rapidly if folks jump in and help us with the work.
> > Patches welcome ;)
> >
> > > So you may end up needing a tool that applies heuristics and
> > > overrides the CPU
> > > requests of poor programs.
> >
> > As an anecdote, I spend a non-trivial amount of time working in
> > disconnected environments using battery power on my non-XO laptop, and
> > I've been obtaining noticeable battery life gains by manually
> > SIGSTOPping Firefox when not in use. Now, I usually have about 70-200
> > tabs open -- which may be an edge case, but _shouldn't_ be:
> > programmers need to learn that when I'm not actively using their
> > software, it shouldn't be _doing_ stuff on my machine without a very
> > good reason.
>
> Also, lots of people in the FLOSS world are realizing that their
> software needs to run on small devices (mobile/embedded
> projects/alliances etc.).
>
> Tomeu

As a former market analyst, I have observed that every year, somebody
is complaining about some aspect of Linux not being ready for the
world, and that every year, the community deals with it. At one time
it was said that Unix couldn't support enterprise computing, and in
particular serious databases. IBM and Oracle became excellent
counterexamples. Linux was too hard to install. Many distros worked on
it, and Ubuntu has laid that complaint to rest. Linux wasn't ready for
the desktop, however well it did on servers. Now Dell and others offer
Linux preinstalled. (I get mine from Linux Certified in Sunnyvale.)
This, that, and the other are wrong with XO software. But they soon
won't be.

This is a much more general phenomenon. At one time you couldn't get
compilers to produce relocatable code. (Really) At about that time,
you couldn't get a hard drive for a personal computer. Time marches
on, and so does the state of the art.

The Linux world is discovering time and space bloat. Since the
solutions are shared, they will be taken up at a rate astonishing to
those in the commercial world.

BTW, thanks, Ivan and everybody. I'm sending people your way at every
opportunity.

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-- 
Edward Cherlin
End Poverty at a Profit by teaching children business
http://www.EarthTreasury.org/
"The best way to predict the future is to invent it."--Alan Kay