Linked List: March 3, 2022

Thursday, 3 March 2022

Samsung Caught Excepting Benchmark Apps From Performance Throttling (Again) ★

Hadlee Simons, writing for Android Authority:

Twitter user GaryeonHan and Korean netizens have posted a list of 10,000 apps (accessible here) that are apparently subjected to “performance limits” as part of Samsung’s Game Optimizing Service (GOS). The company’s Korean Community forum is also inundated with pages and pages of complaints from users as a result.

The purported list isn’t limited to games, as we see prominent apps like Instagram, Microsoft’s Office apps, Netflix, Google Keep, and TikTok here. Even Samsung’s own apps and services are listed here, such as Secure Folder, Samsung Cloud, Samsung Pay, Samsung Pass, and the dialer.

It’s no surprise to hear that benchmark apps like 3DMark, Antutu, PCMark, GFXBench, and GeekBench 5 aren’t listed here. This suggests that Samsung isn’t subjecting benchmark apps to throttling. A Korean YouTuber went so far as to change the 3DMark package name to reflect Genshin Impact (which does appear on the list) and ran the benchmark. The renamed package achieved a drastically lower benchmark score and average frame rate.

Crooked as a three-dollar bill.

The ‘Pod’ in ‘Podcast’ ★

Last week I linked to this Statista post on podcast client usage. It contains this weird line:

The term podcast, the name being a merge of the words “play on demand” and “broadcast”, refers to audio or video content in episodic formats that can be streamed or downloaded digitally.

I don’t know where they got “play on demand”, but that’s retcon nonsense. The pod in podcast comes from iPod. There’s no ambiguity or question about it. Here’s a 2006 article about TWiT founder Leo Laporte winning a “podcaster of the year” award and using his keynote speech to endorse changing the name for the format to “netcast”: “Is podcasting the right name, given also Apple’s asserting it owns the word ‘pod’ and is it good for Apple to be a monopoly in this?”

Here’s a section of a long column I wrote in 2005 about Apple’s full-on embrace of podcast listening as a built-in feature for iTunes and iPods:

The other bit of good fortune is the name: podcasting. Good fortune for Apple, at least. Clearly the “pod” in “podcasting” is about the iPod. Apple couldn’t have come up with a better name for this phenomenon if they’d gotten to choose it themselves. If the whole “audio enclosures via RSS” scene were still known as “audioblogging”, as it was when Maciej Ceglowski recorded his seminal “Audioblogging Manifesto”, I seriously wonder whether Apple would have done this now.

If you’re an engineer, you might be tempted to argue that RSS-with-enclosures by any other name is still just RSS-with-enclosures, and that it makes no technical difference whether you call it “podcasting” or “audioblogging” or “noodlepants”.

But names do matter. And what makes this so delicious for Apple is that the more popular “podcasting” becomes as the name for publishing audio via RSS, the less likely it will be that a new name will ever take hold. Which leaves Apple’s competitors — including Microsoft, Sony, and the various other gadget-makers producing Windows Media-based players — in the extremely uncomfortable position of choosing from the following courses of action:

Embracing the word “podcasting”, even though it contains the name of the competitor they’re chasing, and which name subtly implies that podcasting is meant for use with iPods, which implication sort of further implies that every other digital music player is just an iPod knock-off. I mean, can you imagine Apple using a term like “walkmancasting”, “dellcasting”, or “wincasting”? It’s embarrassing.

Devising and using a new term for “podcasting” that doesn’t use “pod”. Good luck with that, considering that everyone — everyone — who is publishing podcasts is already calling them “podcasts”. [UPDATE: According to this story in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, Microsoft employees are pushing “blogcasting” as a “pod”-free alternative. Good luck with that.]

Ignoring the whole podcasting phenomenon.

Pretty prescient, I must say, other than the fact that in a footnote I suggested I wasn’t going to create podcasts myself. What I didn’t foresee in 2005 is that podcasting would have a far longer shelf life for relevance than the term iPod itself.

From the Department of Grading on a Curve ★

From Monica Chin’s review of Dell’s new XPS 15 for The Verge, which she describes as “the closest Windows-running contender [to Apple’s MacBook Pros] that I’ve been able to find”:

Generally, when I review a laptop, even a fairly thin one, I might see an occasional spike above 90 degrees (Celsius) while running heavy loads. Larger laptops with very competent cooling (such as Asus’ ROG Zephyrus G15) are very capable of keeping their CPUs below the 80s. Recent MacBooks basically don’t turn on their fans ever.

But this XPS 15 unit was really ... something. Throughout my various testing, the CPU was consistently around 99-100 degrees. This wasn’t a matter of brief spikes in temp — it was very worryingly hot.

My fellow Americans should keep in mind that water boils at 100°C.

The fans weren’t holding back, either. They were roaring the entire time throughout most of my tests. The XPS could be heard from across the room for the duration of our 4K video export test (which it completed in 3:57 — a respectable but not amazing time). [...] Outside of benchmark testing, while running my comparably lighter load of Chrome tabs, apps, and streaming with occasional Zoom calls overtop, I wasn’t necessarily hearing the fans all the time. But I did hear them occasionally, and more concerningly, I did feel quite a bit of heat. [...]

And, of course, even these mid-range chips come with a fairly substantial downside: battery life. Even with the GPU disabled, this XPS is getting a fraction of the lifespan that a MacBook Pro can get. (I’m sure the high-resolution screen isn’t helping.) I was only averaging three hours and 46 minutes of continuous work with the screen at medium brightness, with occasional downloads running, files copying, and other such tasks.

So it runs very hot and very loud and the battery doesn’t last 4 hours in typical use. The Verge’s score: 8.5/10. The Aristocrats!