RFC: Disabling blinking cursor by default

Dimi Paun dimi at lattica.com
Sat Feb 7 15:07:27 UTC 2009


On Sat, 2009-02-07 at 00:46 -0600, Callum Lerwick wrote:
> No, it's because someone directly measured a reduction in power usage.
> Quite scientific, really.

Having some savings is not in and of itself an argument,
if not correctly quantified (1). 

Engineering is all about balancing costs/benefits, and
it's arguably bad engineering to affect functionality
for savings that are probably way too small to measure.

And if you adopt the stance that any power saving is good,
why don't we do other things that  are as simple to
implement and can easily save  an order of magnitude more power:
  - replace the background picture with just black
  - default to a inverted color scheme (predominantly black)
  - disable pulseaudio

The list can go on and on, but where would we end up?

These sort of things may make sense for some users,
but not by sneaking them in as changes in default
behavior. Prompt them at first-boot, let them opt in.

Come on folks, it is the reasonable thing to do.

1. The floated value of 2W is probably overstated by 
   at least an order of magnitude, most likely two.

-- 
Dimi Paun <dimi at lattica.com>
Lattica, Inc.




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