<div dir="ltr"><div>I've seen the same thing with various utilities. Most of the time what's kicking the cpu usage up is auto-correct, predictive typing, history search, spell or grammar checking, etc. Personally, I don't mind the software doing something *intelligent* in the background when I'm typing. <br>
<br></div>Personally, I'm much less interested in saving every possible watt of electrical usage or every possible penny on my power bill. What I am interested in is getting every possible compute cycle out of my system. It's almost offensive to me to see a computer sit idle when it could be doing something useful, or at least interesting. <br>
<br><br></div><div class="gmail_extra"><br><br><div class="gmail_quote">On Tue, Apr 2, 2013 at 11:34 AM, Michael B. Trausch <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:mbt@naunetcorp.com" target="_blank">mbt@naunetcorp.com</a>></span> wrote:<br>
<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex"><div class="im">On 04/02/2013 11:20 AM, Ron Frazier (ALE) wrote:<br>
> So, if you have a fancy smancy 3d screen saver running on a big<br>
> computer, or several big computers, maybe with multiple monitors, you<br>
> might want to look at how much power it's consuming.<br>
><br>
> Just thought I'd pass this along. Hope it's helpful.<br>
<br>
</div>It makes perfect sense: to display nothing, costs nothing. Plus you<br>
have to consider the cost of keeping the monitor(s) on, vs. having the<br>
screen save shut the monitors themselves down into a low-power mode.<br>
<br>
I use blank for a screen saver, and have my monitors power down 15<br>
minutes after the screen saver comes on. I figure after 15 minutes of<br>
screensaver, I'm probably not at the computer anyway---so what's the point.<br>
<br>
Everything that you do on a computer costs energy. People often don't<br>
think about it though, because it's hard to observe energy being used<br>
for things like processing, unless you actually hear things like your<br>
fans spin up to full, which then make you think about it. Simply typing<br>
in the Thunderbird window that I am typing in right now has Thunderbird<br>
using between 5 and 10% of a single CPU core, just keeping up with my<br>
typing.<br>
<br>
There is also a lot to be said for making software more efficient, which<br>
would solve a lot of that. There's no reason that my typing in a<br>
simple, non-HTML text area should cause the CPU usage to go up to then<br>
percent, except wastefulness. Then again, I've actually seen the code<br>
that goes into the Mozilla software, and a good chunk of it is<br>
JavaScript, not C++ (which is what the kernel for all Mozilla projects<br>
is written in).<br>
<br>
We (the royal "we") programmers have gotten lazy: we have computer<br>
environments that more-or-less resemble, for most applications, an ideal<br>
Turing machine. And that means that programmers have stopped caring<br>
about efficiency of code and power usage, in preference for caring for<br>
the efficiency of use of programmer time. I think that we need to find<br>
a happy medium.<br>
<br>
--- Mike<br>
<span class="HOEnZb"><font color="#888888"><br>
--<br>
Michael B. Trausch, President<br>
Naunet Corporation<br>
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