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May 15, 2008
EPU or Eeyuew?
Charles writes about the grab by motherboard manufacturers to appear green and energy saving. Now that the global warming concept or least catastrophic option is a done deal in many parts of the world and Oz, lots and lots of tech and non tech companies will jump on the bandwagon, putting all kinds of warm (er, not the right word?) marketing phrases to their products. Even toothpicks and rubber bands could get in the act.
My myopic (well, I wear multi-focals so I'll wear the flak if people call me short sighted) proposals for energy saving?
- Stop the multi-Megabyte framework and cpu cycle eating libraries in Java and .NET framework. Use tight, small, fit libraries like those we used in desktop bound apps (Borland C++ library, Microsoft VBRUN*.dll)
- Stop the everything has to be GUI, everything has to out Mac the Mac deal with Vista Aero Glass and Compiz Fusion requiring energy eating 3D GPU cards to produce "eye candy" (the phrase "candy" says it all") that eat more energy and have more computation power than the first Pentium . Ok, you wanna play 3D DirectX 10 games, that's cool (er, wrong word again?) buddy, just don't take the Microsoft Office crowd with you.
- Bring back enhanced non graphic programs for business work (Paradox/DOS, Lotus 1-2-3/DOS, Microsoft Word/DOS) - Borland and Microsoft had it to such a fine art (no need to write heaps of C declares to say "hello world", you just asked for a Window and your got a Handle). Some end users and plebs couldn't tell me whether they were running Windows GUI or an enhanced DOS app - they did not have sufficient vocabulary or discrimination to describe the screen - that was how good it was.
- Shut off the "More CPU speed is good" philosophy. Transmeta Crusoe, VIA Eden are sluggish on Windows GUI. Well, see how fast they would run on an enhanced DOS App.
Do you know how we started? We ran this 27,520 byte .com file called Visicalc. That's not a typo. That's bytes, not kilo, or mega or giga. It's now available for free here - it will take oh, ages (well, under a second maybe?, that's long isn't it?) to download over your 56k baud POT modem - take it for a drive and convince yourself. It, uh, has no .dll dependencies and does not need a 3D graphic card nor a quad core processor. It will and does fit on my measly 128k flash drive with 128k of space left over for data.
Agree? Evangelise. SAY NO TO GUI NOW!
Now, excuse me while my Microsoft Windows XP PC gets awfully busy whilst it downloads a pending Patch Tuesday bunch of stuff from Redmond - heating up as it goes along, blazing an energy trail that spans the globe as the data is delivered.
Posted by Anandasim at May 15, 2008 12:26 PM
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