Re: The good, the bad, the insane

[Adam Williamson <awilliam redhat com>]

On Thu, 2011-05-26 at 16:43 +0100, Martin Häsler wrote:

> Please let me explain why I care.
> Having only Suspend in the user menu encourages people to waste energy
> and that bothers me greatly.
> And not everyone owns a modern laptop which uses only 1 Watt per hour in 
> standby.
> More common would be laptops using about 10-13 Watt and desktop PC's 
> even more,
> especially considering the external monitor. Let's say you use your PC 
> 50 hours a week.
> That means 118 hours a week in standby mode. And roughly 6200 hours a year.
> That equals 62 kw/h wasted for nothing.
> I care about the environment and I don't see how this is hard to understand.

It's incomplete and partly incorrect, for a start.

Partly incorrect: what does the monitor have to do with anything? On a
desktop, the power state of the monitor is entirely divorced from that
of the computer. You can suspend the machine and turn the monitor off,
and on the other hand, you can power down the machine and leave the
monitor on.

Incomplete: you fail to account for changes in behaviour. Suspending is
a lot more convenient to the user than powering off; suspending and
resuming are both hugely quicker than shutting down and booting up. It
takes my system about three seconds to get to a usable state when I
resume, and that 'usable state' means 'exactly the state it was in when
I "powered off"'. With power off / power on, it takes over a minute, and
the 'usable state' is not exactly the state I was in before powering
off.

So for me, your math is wrong. Why? Because before I could actually
suspend my desktop and had a convenient interface for doing it, I didn't
power it off: I just left it running, so when I stumbled to my desk in
the morning it'd be up and running and in the state I left it
immediately. Now, I can suspend it at night and resume it in the morning
and achieve the same result. For me, working and conveniently-accessed
suspend mode results in me saving power, not using more.
-- 
Adam Williamson
Fedora QA Community Monkey
IRC: adamw | Fedora Talk: adamwill AT fedoraproject DOT org
http://www.happyassassin.net