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Flash Can Rob 2 Hours From MacBook Air's Battery Life
The lack of Flash in the new MacBook Air may annoy some users, but it has a big upside, too. According to Wired's report (citing Ars Technica) passed on by an anonymous reader, "Having Flash installed can cut battery runtime considerably — as much as 33 percent in our testing. With a handful of websites loaded in Safari, Flash-based ads kept the CPU running far more than seemed necessary, and the best time I recorded with Flash installed was just 4 hours. After deleting Flash, however, the MacBook Air ran for 6:02 — with the exact same set of websites reloaded in Safari, and with static ads replacing the CPU-sucking Flash versions."
You're disturbing the distortion field. Stop it.
So running CPU-intensive software reduces battery life. Who knew?
In other news, Apple is disabling playing games or movies on its new MacBook Air line. "People's batteries are suffering," an Apple spokesperson said today. "Clearly, when customers' batteries are being used, the customers are not free. We are now giving customers freedom from programs that trash your battery. Freedom from porn. Yep, freedom."
The spokesperson further hinted that the next addition to the MacBook Air line will not be allowed to be turned on at all. "Our market research shows that people are happiest with an Apple product when it is turned off and on prominent display to their friends. The next MacBook Air will not only give the user freedom from software, but it will have a battery life measured in years."
Wonder how much battery life is wasted by the stupid glowing apple logo on the lid?
Why will you need a "flash blocker"?
When the only apps you can get are from the App Store, the problem will be solved. The "Flash kills the battery" will be one of the excuses for how Apple is only "looking out for its customers" by bringing the walled garden to its laptops and desktops to insure a uniformly excellent "user experience".
Now you can tell me how "that would never, ever happen, not in a million years". And oh, this time I'm going to save the flames from today, so when Jobs makes the announcement you won't be able to say, "Oh, I never, ever said that Apple wasn't going to bring the walled garden to its laptops and desktops. I always knew he would. In fact, I've been demanding a walled garden because I'm tired of having to worry about things like Flash and other Adobe malware and that insidious freeware and shareware and open source which does not have a smooth user experience. I'm actually very happy that the new Apple OS is in a walled garden. Finally, I'll be free from anything but a uniformly smooth user experience. I'm really, really happy."
Yep, that's what you're going to say. But this time I'm going to save your replies about how "Apple would never put it's laptops and desktops behind the wall. The garden of virgins is only for its handheld products. Everyone knows that." And I'm going to keep it for when the announcement is made.
And I don't think I'll have to hold on to it very long, do you?
You are welcome on my lawn.
search the boards, there are a few very common mis-configurations of Windows that cause iTunes to have horrible performance. Often it's a registry key that needs fixed or other program conflicting. On my Acer netbook it happens every 6 months or so.
Yup. While iTunes might not be the most slender program on windows, the architecture of windows is partly to blame for for the poor performance. Storing setting in a monolithic binary tree database is a bad idea. You have to open the database just to get some small settings for one program. OS X handles file type associate on the fly by scanning app packages in the background periodically and storing that in memory instead of a physical file that can become corrupt.
Jesus was a compassionate social conservative who called individuals to sin no more.
Playing H.264 video via QuickTime on Mac OS X is less CPU intensive than Flash because Apple specifically optimizes their OS and hardware around QuickTime. Not surprisingly, they don't do the same for Flash.
No, that's the bullshit argument that Adobe keeps spouting. It does not in any way explain why VLC can play .flv files with about 20% of my CPU that Flash requires 60-80% to play.
It wasn't until a recent OS update that Mac OS X even offered APIs to allow other software access to hardware H.264 acceleration
Also bullshit. You can use QuickTime's H.264 decoder to render to a CoreAnimation layer or an OpenGL texture and get GPU support. They added APIs for people who wanted to ship their own H.264 implementation, but there's really no need to Adobe to ship one with Flash - it increases the attack profile and isn't as good as the Apple one. Their lame justification for doing it was that they also want to do all of the compositing in software (not with CoreAnimation or OpenGL, both of which offload to the GPU), so they can suck even more CPU time / battery life.
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iTunes does not have to use the centralised registry - every application can create its own independent registry hive containing just its data within the users Application Data folder. Hell, iTunes could even use pLists if it damn well chose.
So no, the architecture of Windows is not to blame at all here for iTunes, its all Apple all the way.
Richard, even a system sans iTunes will slow down over time when you add user profiles and/or program settings into the HIVE registry. The larger the HIVE grows, the more memory it takes to search it and the longer it takes to search the registry. FIle and mime type associations in windows are stored in the registry. There is no other option. I am a windows software developer with over a decade of experience in addition to being an OS X user at home. I have used iTunes and a myriad of other programs on windows. iTunes has to use the registry for some settings as it is how things are done on windows.
Any person complaining about iTunes being really slow either has a misconfigured system or is trying to run iTunes on a system that does not even meet the recommended spec for the OS they are running. Windows 7, for example is going to run like a dog on anything less than 2GB of ram.
Jesus was a compassionate social conservative who called individuals to sin no more.