Linked List: September 15, 2011

Thursday, 15 September 2011

Koomey’s Law 

Kate Greene, for MIT Technology Review:

Researchers have, for the first time, shown that the energy efficiency of computers doubles roughly every 18 months.

The conclusion, backed up by six decades of data, mirrors Moore’s law, the observation from Intel founder Gordon Moore that computer processing power doubles about every 18 months. But the power-consumption trend might have even greater relevance than Moore’s law as battery-powered devices — phones, tablets, and sensors — proliferate.

“The idea is that at a fixed computing load, the amount of battery you need will fall by a factor of two every year and a half,” says Jonathan Koomey, consulting professor of civil and environmental engineering at Stanford University and lead author of the study.

Fascinating, really. And I’d say this is what Apple’s been chasing for at least a decade, whilst its competitors remained focused on Moore’s Law. (Thanks to DF reader Aditya Sood.)

Update: Via Kottke, here’s Alexis Madrigal thinking about the implications of this:

Imagine you’ve got a shiny computer that is identical to a Macbook Air, except that it has the energy efficiency of a machine from 20 years ago. That computer would use so much power that you’d get a mere 2.5 seconds of battery life out of the Air’s 50 watt-hour battery instead of the seven hours that the Air actually gets. That is to say, you’d need 10,000 Air batteries to run our hypothetical machine for seven hours. There’s no way you’d fit a beast like that into a slim mailing envelope.

Now think forward 20 years.

Sitting and Standing at Work 

Ergonomic experts at Cornell don’t recommend standing desks, instead:

Sit to do computer work. Sit using a height-adjustable, downward titling keyboard tray for the best work posture, then every 20 minutes stand for 2 minutes AND MOVE. The absolute time isn’t critical but about every 20-30 minutes take a posture break and move for a couple of minutes. Simply standing is insufficient.

(Via Dan Moren.)

Samsung Executive Gave Proprietary Apple Component Info to Financial Analyst 

Patricia Hurtado, reporting for Bloomberg:

An ex-Samsung Electronics Co. manager, testifying at the insider-trader trial of Primary Global Research LLC executive James Fleishman, told jurors he disclosed confidential shipping data for Apple Inc. iPad components.

Suk-Joo Hwang, who worked for 14 years at the U.S. division of Suwon, South Korea-based Samsung, told jurors yesterday in federal court in New York after he was granted immunity from prosecution by U.S. District Judge Jed Rakoff, who’s presiding over the case.

Note that Hwang is an ex-Samsung manager today. When he leaked this information, though, he was working there. If you’ve ever wondered how well it works with, on the one side, Samsung as a major component supplier for Apple, and on the other side, Samsung as a major Apple competitor and lawsuit target in the consumer electronics market — the answer seems to be “not too well”.

RIM Reports Shitty Results 

Anyone with their eyes open has known for at least a year that RIM was heading for trouble like this. It was inevitable.

Let’s look at the bright side though. (Seriously, no use kicking these guys while they’re down.) One, they’re still profitable. Profits are way down, yes, but the company is still in the black. Two, even with their crummy outdated technology, they still sold 10 million phones. That’s an installed base they can start with when their next-gen phones ship.

Andy Ihnatko on Windows 8 

The good:

Metro-based apps can articulate themselves one more way: simply as features that they “lend” to other apps. One of Apple’s publicly-demoed features of the upcoming update to iOS is the ability to share things via Twitter. It exists because Apple hardwired Twitter right into the OS. In Windows 8, that same feature is available to you because you happen to have installed a standalone Twitter client on this machine. The Twitter app’s developer added a few lines of code that allows Windows to offer those core Twitter features system-wide, wherever it’s appropriate, without exiting the original program.

(Agreed; “contracts” look like the best feature of Metro, and iOS is sorely lacking anything similar.)

The bad:

The bad news is that Microsoft has lacked the guts to cut the cord entirely. Every time the classic Windows 7 interface pops up, it looks like a drunken uncle at an otherwise elegant family wedding.

Jason Snell on Windows 8 

Jason Snell:

Would Apple consider truly merging OS X and iOS into a single operating system, like Windows 8? Right now, I can’t see it.

Me neither. Trackpad gestures (Lion) are not touch.

Shocker: Arrington-Backed Startup Wins AOL/TechCrunch Contest 

Second- and third-place companies too.

The Landscape Tablet Landscape 

One of the biggest differences between Apple’s and Microsoft’s tablet strategies.

No Flash Player in Metro IE 

No plugins, period. Microsoft IE lead Dean Hachamovitch:

Running Metro style IE plug-in free improves battery life as well as security, reliability, and privacy for consumers. Plug-ins were important early on in the web’s history. But the web has come a long way since then with HTML5. Providing compatibility with legacy plug-in technologies would detract from, rather than improve, the consumer experience of browsing in the Metro style UI.

There is no room in the future for Flash.

The Talk Show, Episode 59 

This week’s show:

Windows 8, Metro, touch on the desktop, keeping legacy environments around, Windows everywhere vs. iOS everywhere, and the death of Star Wars.

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