Thanks for the hint. I classified that part of the title as punchline and omitted it, since a) I didn't know how HN would react if I would've added it and b) I didn't want to give too much away in the submission title :)
OMG Flash kills the planet too!!! (BTW, wonder what would be the carbon footprint if NYT switches its background to black? All these #ffffff pixels burning bright..)
It depends on the display type. Some displays emit energy based on the intensity of the image (CRT, Plasma).
Others always generate light but then mask out the light with a matrix display which typically has a pretty constant energy usage (LCD, Projection). Still others only require energy only when they change (eInk, future color pigmentation eInk variations).
And of course power variations in each technology, FL LCD v LED LCD. Older Plasma displays vs newer Plasma displays. The size of the display, (your 52" TV v 3" cellphone)
For CRT/Plasma there is also refresh rate to consider...
While it generally isn't true of computer displays, some LCD televisions do have slightly reduced power consumption on black. It's not from the LCD shuttering the light from the backlight, but from control electronics reducing the backlight brightness dynamically. Those "dynamic" contrast specifications on some displays are a little misleading.
One tends to think of a display having a high contrast figure as being more effective at blocking the light when displaying black (less "Bleed-through"), but they cheat by dimming the backlight.
That may result in small bright areas in dark scenes ending up a bit darker than they should be.
With all backlit LCDs, lowering the (backlight) brightness setting conserves more energy than having the content dim the same amount. Using the lowest acceptable brightness setting not only saves energy, but extends display life.
C.R.T.s usually have the greatest change in power consumption with content brightness shifts, particularly in Trinitron tubes.
That was my exact thought. I doubt his numbers are even close to accurate as Flash doesn't stress windows machines like it does linux and osx. And given that most NYT users are probably windows users, I'd bet the real statistic would be way lower.
It's at least a popular belief, if not completely true, that Mac+flash is slow because of apple's uncooperative behavior, and Linux+flash is slow because adobe doesn't care.
According to every dictionary I can find[1], radii is at least as accepted as radiuses. As for Prius, since it is a made up word the plural is essentially whatever the accepted English usage turns out to be. According to Toyota[2] anything customers want to use is fine, however online the general consensus seems to be that Prius is the plural form as well.
I am so tired of comments where people assert their particular view as true without doing any research, especially when trying to correct someone else.
You shouldn’t assume I don’t know what I’m talking about just because I didn’t take the time to include references in my comment. I have a graduate degree in linguistics and one of my concentrations is word formation. While it’s true that radii is definitely a plural form of radius, it’s not really the generally accepted plural anymore. (At least, not where I live in America, and at least in spoken language. I’m not sure about Britain.) Neither are indices, data, corpora, etc. Highly technical people like hackers and engineers continue to use the fossilized plurals, because these forms are part of the prestige dialect that indicates to other people that you have been educated and can remember to use non-standard plurals. But normal people do not use these forms—they simply use the standard English pluralization rules because there is no reason not to. The poster who mentioned the relative density of each term in Google’s indexes (sorry, couldn’t resist) would have to somehow normalize the numbers to account for the fact that technical people are disproportionately more likely to be using these nouns in the first place, and so a simple tally doesn’t show the real picture if we’re talking about how the language is used ‘in general’.
I don’t have the book with me so I can’t find the exact reference, but if you’re truly interested there is an entire chapter in ‘An Introduction to Modern English Word Formation’ by Valerie Adams that talks about how these plural forms arose in English. They were basically made up by scientists and philosophers during the Middle Ages who felt that any English word with a Latinate or Greek root should use the corresponding root language’s plural form, because Latin and Greek were more ‘pure’ languages. (No doubt this attitude contributed to the fact that they continued writing in Latin in general for a thousand years after Rome was no more.) These forms became fossilized in English because the people using them were educated and therefore part of what was considered a prestigious class. That is, using them makes you sound smart, and that’s why they’ve persisted. By my own judgment, though, they certainly sound more out of place to normal English speakers today than the corresponding standard English plural. (I last read this book six years ago, so this summary is from memory—the details may be slightly different but I’m pretty certain that is the general gist of it.)
The reason this irks me in general is because we speak English, not Latin. Unless you speak Latin you probably don’t know how to correctly form Latin plurals, which follow a relatively complicated scheme depending on the class of noun, its grammatical case, person, and number. See http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/000814.h... for a discussion. Japanese doesn’t have a plural form—does that mean we should say in English things like, ‘Hiroki is holding three kimono in his arms’? The only reason it sounds remotely acceptable is because you interpret kimono as a mass noun that doesn’t have a plural form (like rice), but physically speaking kimonos aren’t like rice in that they are actually countable. The sentence ‘Hiroki is holding three kimonos in his arms’ sounds much better.
Modern English has a very simple pluralization rule. There are three allophones of the plural morpheme: the unvoiced allophone –s is suffixed to words ending with an unvoiced phoneme (t, p, k, f, etc.); the voiced allophone –z is added to words ending with a voiced phoneme (d, b, g, m, all vowels, etc.); and the allophone –əz is added to words ending with a phoneme that is similar in articulation features to s and z (s, z, sh, ch, j, etc.). There are exceptions to this rule that show extreme resista...
For what it's worth, as an American—living in the South, even—with English as my first language, I have literally never heard the word "radiuses" used (outside, perhaps, some musings about the plural of the word "radius").
Although my initial reaction was also "look, someone's making another lame Latin plural joke," I quickly saw that it wasn't as inapplicable most other occurrences.
I just went to great length explaining what my claims are based on. Do you have anything to say other than an exclamation of incredulity? I already explained that an anecdotal comparison of Google hits wouldn’t be very meaningful.
I just asked four non-engineer, non-technical, non-mathemetician friends the following fill-in-the-blank question: ‘The radius of a circle is the distance from the center to the edge. If there are two circles, there are correspondingly two ______.’ Three said radiuses. One said radii, however they pronounced it ‘ray-di-eye’. I asked a similar question with corpus and all four said corpuses.
There is also probably at least some effect due to age here. I'm in my late twenties and my social circle is as well. If you're twenty years older than me, where your language is is twenty years behind mine.
And sorry, data was a stupid example, it doesn't really have anything to do with what I was talking about. Data is already the plural form and I banged it out because nobody really uses datum as the singular. But data seems like a mass noun since the way it’s typically used you don’t really have a single ‘data’. We use a counter, as in piece of data in the same way we say grain of rice.
Did you even click on the links I provided from BBC, Cambridge University, Collins dictionary, Oxford dictionary, showing that the plural is usually Radii?
Further, note the prevalence of certain kinds of nonstandard plural
forms. Some of these go back quite a ways; the TMRC Dictionary
includes an entry which implies that the plural of `mouse' is meeces,
and notes that the defined plural of `caboose' is `cabeese'. This
latter has apparently been standard (or at least a standard joke)
among railfans (railroad enthusiasts) for many years
On a similarly Anglo-Saxon note, almost anything ending in `x' may
form plurals in `-xen' (see VAXen and boxen in the main text). Even
words ending in phonetic /k/ alone are sometimes treated this way;
e.g., `soxen' for a bunch of socks. Other funny plurals are the
Hebrew-style `frobbotzim' for the plural of `frobbozz' (see frobnitz)
and `Unices' and `Twenices' (rather than `Unixes' and `Twenexes'; see
Unix, TWENEX in main text). But note that `Twenexen' was never used,
and `Unixen' was not sighted in the wild until the year 2000, thirty
years after it might logically have come into use; it has been
suggested that this is because `-ix' and `-ex' are Latin singular
endings that attract a Latinate plural. Among Perl hackers it is
reported that `comma' and `semicolon' pluralize as `commata' and
`semicola' respectively. Finally, it has been suggested to general
approval that the plural of `mongoose' ought to be `polygoose'.
The pattern here, as with other hackish grammatical quirks, is
generalization of an inflectional rule that in English is either an
import or a fossil (such as the Hebrew plural ending `-im', or the
Anglo-Saxon plural suffix `-en') to cases where it isn't normally
considered to apply.
This is not `poor grammar', as hackers are generally quite well aware
of what they are doing when they distort the language. It is
grammatical creativity, a form of playfulness. It is done not to
impress but to amuse, and never at the expense of clarity.
"The radius of a circle is the distance from the centre of the circle to its edge. The radius of a regular polygon is the distance from the centre of the polygon to any one of its vertices.
The plural of radius is radii."
I think the article is a bit disingenuous. It's actually finding the carbon footprint of animated banner ads (since the only Flash content on the page right now seems to be a lone video player that does not autoplay). A more interesting test would be a comparison between these Flash ads and their equivalent HTML5/Canvas ads.
33 comments
[ 92.4 ms ] story [ 1445 ms ] threadIt's OK to leave that in the title.
And of course power variations in each technology, FL LCD v LED LCD. Older Plasma displays vs newer Plasma displays. The size of the display, (your 52" TV v 3" cellphone)
For CRT/Plasma there is also refresh rate to consider...
etc etc etc.
With all backlit LCDs, lowering the (backlight) brightness setting conserves more energy than having the content dim the same amount. Using the lowest acceptable brightness setting not only saves energy, but extends display life.
C.R.T.s usually have the greatest change in power consumption with content brightness shifts, particularly in Trinitron tubes.
on flat-panel monitors (already estimated to be 75% of the market), displaying black may actually increase energy usage
http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2007/08/is-black-new-green.ht...
It's at least a popular belief, if not completely true, that Mac+flash is slow because of apple's uncooperative behavior, and Linux+flash is slow because adobe doesn't care.
See these discussions: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1075440 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1139393 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1138266 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1100189
edit: Because someone doesn't think Radii is the plural of Radius :/
From maths.org, CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY.
http://thesaurus.maths.org/mmkb/entry.html?action=entryByCon...
From the BBC,
http://www.bbc.co.uk/skillswise/tutors/lessonplans/spelling/...
From the Oxford dictionary,
http://www.askoxford.com:80/concise_oed/radii?view=uk
From the Chambers dictionary,
http://www.chambersharrap.co.uk/chambers/features/chref/chre...
"1 - 10 of about 92,000 for radiuses."
"Results 1 - 10 of about 5,700,000 for radii [definition]."
I am so tired of comments where people assert their particular view as true without doing any research, especially when trying to correct someone else.
[1] See http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/Radius, for examples.
[2] From http://www.greenhybrid.com/wiki/index.php/Interview_with_Ed_... , an interview with a manager at Toyota.
I don’t have the book with me so I can’t find the exact reference, but if you’re truly interested there is an entire chapter in ‘An Introduction to Modern English Word Formation’ by Valerie Adams that talks about how these plural forms arose in English. They were basically made up by scientists and philosophers during the Middle Ages who felt that any English word with a Latinate or Greek root should use the corresponding root language’s plural form, because Latin and Greek were more ‘pure’ languages. (No doubt this attitude contributed to the fact that they continued writing in Latin in general for a thousand years after Rome was no more.) These forms became fossilized in English because the people using them were educated and therefore part of what was considered a prestigious class. That is, using them makes you sound smart, and that’s why they’ve persisted. By my own judgment, though, they certainly sound more out of place to normal English speakers today than the corresponding standard English plural. (I last read this book six years ago, so this summary is from memory—the details may be slightly different but I’m pretty certain that is the general gist of it.)
The reason this irks me in general is because we speak English, not Latin. Unless you speak Latin you probably don’t know how to correctly form Latin plurals, which follow a relatively complicated scheme depending on the class of noun, its grammatical case, person, and number. See http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/000814.h... for a discussion. Japanese doesn’t have a plural form—does that mean we should say in English things like, ‘Hiroki is holding three kimono in his arms’? The only reason it sounds remotely acceptable is because you interpret kimono as a mass noun that doesn’t have a plural form (like rice), but physically speaking kimonos aren’t like rice in that they are actually countable. The sentence ‘Hiroki is holding three kimonos in his arms’ sounds much better.
Modern English has a very simple pluralization rule. There are three allophones of the plural morpheme: the unvoiced allophone –s is suffixed to words ending with an unvoiced phoneme (t, p, k, f, etc.); the voiced allophone –z is added to words ending with a voiced phoneme (d, b, g, m, all vowels, etc.); and the allophone –əz is added to words ending with a phoneme that is similar in articulation features to s and z (s, z, sh, ch, j, etc.). There are exceptions to this rule that show extreme resista...
There's no need for pointless dialect chauvinism; "radii" is the accepted and more common plural in American English as well as the UK version.
Although my initial reaction was also "look, someone's making another lame Latin plural joke," I quickly saw that it wasn't as inapplicable most other occurrences.
Seriously? Just a quick Google suggests otherwise:
36,900,000 for indices vs 29,200,000 for indexes
1,440,000,000 for data vs 11,900,000 for datums (Heck, many people aren't familiar with "datum" to begin with...)
7,710,000 for corpora vs 239,000 for corpuses
Linguistics student or not, do you have anything more than "people you talk to use these unusual forms" to base all this on?
I just asked four non-engineer, non-technical, non-mathemetician friends the following fill-in-the-blank question: ‘The radius of a circle is the distance from the center to the edge. If there are two circles, there are correspondingly two ______.’ Three said radiuses. One said radii, however they pronounced it ‘ray-di-eye’. I asked a similar question with corpus and all four said corpuses.
There is also probably at least some effect due to age here. I'm in my late twenties and my social circle is as well. If you're twenty years older than me, where your language is is twenty years behind mine.
And sorry, data was a stupid example, it doesn't really have anything to do with what I was talking about. Data is already the plural form and I banged it out because nobody really uses datum as the singular. But data seems like a mass noun since the way it’s typically used you don’t really have a single ‘data’. We use a counter, as in piece of data in the same way we say grain of rice.
Which struck me as a lot of unconvincing verbiage to support an absurd claim.
"I just asked four non-engineer, non-technical, non-mathemetician friends"
And you have a problem with Google hits?
I really have no more time for this.
And yes, it's pronounced ray-di-eye.
"The radius of a circle is the distance from the centre of the circle to its edge. The radius of a regular polygon is the distance from the centre of the polygon to any one of its vertices. The plural of radius is radii."
From maths.org, CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY.
http://thesaurus.maths.org/mmkb/entry.html?action=entryByCon...
From the BBC,
http://www.bbc.co.uk/skillswise/tutors/lessonplans/spelling/...
From the Oxford dictionary,
http://www.askoxford.com:80/concise_oed/radii?view=uk
From the Chambers dictionary,
http://www.chambersharrap.co.uk/chambers/features/chref/chre...
I'm sure both are generally accepted. Geniuses, Genii, Radiuses, Radii.
Bear in mind I'm talking about English, not American-English which may be different. I'm certainly not just making this stuff up though ;)
Is it a necessary property of doing what flash does, or is flash implemented inefficiently?