Re:Performance, anyone?
on
Lisp and Ruby
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
True Dat. Between Perl, Python and Ruby. Ruby is the slowest by far. And be careful how you write your code. Sometimes attaching method.method.method is about the worse way you can go, even though they claim it is the Ruby Way. Bah! I'll take perl. At least it has docs.
I recognize the value of eye-candy on email. Especially when making marketing material. But the cost is too high. If you only accepted plain text email then you would have the opportunity to accurately eliminate something like 99.99% of all spam with ease by use of any of a number of spam filtering engines. HTML and IMG tags make it more difficult to trap.
What do you think would be the response from email users if they had a choice between graphically punched up messages with a lot of spam or living with plain emails and hardly any spam at all? I don't know what they would choose. I suspect some would choose the plain text eventually but it's a question of how much spam they are willing to live with. If the admins stopped filtering all spam it might show what the battle it really all about.
I think it's entirely reasonable when you consider the crap that you can download and the damage it would do if it infected your phone running Windows ME.
I would almost agree with you because this would be a perfect time for me to wave my Perl is Better flag. But there is a point to this story but there's also a nasty history to PHP as a language.
There are many choices to which language you want to make a website/webpage in and there is a pretty reasonable opportunity in any of them to horribly insecure things. Given the best language, an idiot can make it insecure. As a corallary even the worse language can be made secure. Even BASH can be done securly but you really have to know your stuff. The key is entry barriers.
Low entry barrier means lots of inexperienced programmers and get-rich-quick programmers start flocking to PHP to make all their blogs and such with dreams of becoming the next uber-prince or uber-princess in their community. So you learn to program quickly with visual results. But there's never any effort to try and actually learn what is going on or what can be done to make things secure because security is of no concern in a results oriented development model.
Contrast this with something I'm familiar with, Perl. It's got a large entry barrier. Anyone who does more than basic CGI in perl is a real programmer first who started making web pages. Security is much easier to enforce even a rudimentary levels. And since you have to learn how to really program first, doing something in a secure or sane manner is much easier to conceptually impliment as you are building your websites.
Because the entry barrier is higher in perl the only people who write in perl are programmers and not the script-kiddie types who only want to learn enough to get a page to render. The quality of the programmers is a direct relationship to how difficult it is to learn the language. Lower the barrier and you get idiot programmers. Make the language insanely popular and you get idiot programmers. There are a number of examples of this that I've experienced in my life.
PHP is too easy to get started on and everyone just assumes everything will work perfectly. It is not a bad language in itself but it allows bad people to write programs.
Java has a great certification program and if you get certified you can get a job. Hence there are a lot of java programmers that don't really understand what Java is doing when they write programs. My company is routinely hit with major system outages becuase the Java someone wrote either has memory leaks, race conditions, fails edge conditions. Any application log will reveal 10,000 or more RUNTIME and NULL POINTER Exceptions in a day.
Perl programs that I've seen tend to be written only by a few people in the company and they know a heck of a lot more than just perl. They have a solid foundation in networking, security, databases, hardware that gives them the knowledge to make really good programs. The interesting thing is that I've been to a variety of conferences and have found the Perl conferences to have a general population of users who are more generally knowledgeable about perl and computers in general than any other group. If you present insecure code at a perl conference you will get tagged in about 5 seconds (seen it). If you present insecure code in Rails conferences and someone tags it (minutes by the way) it's debated if it really matters. Do that at a perl conference and they start forming a circle around you.
PHP could do the same thing, but they need to develop the mentality from experience and time. Being the easiest programming language to use for web pages isn't always a good thing. And I personally think that you will never remove this problem of easy access languages bringing in problems of insecurity and bad coders. The only thing PHP can do is make it harder to program or come up with an even easier language.
That looks pretty neat! It would be great except I think Americans would be to quick to start bitching about the fat neighbor who runs around in skivvies all winter in his house of 90F because he's sucking up someone elses heat.
It appears as if they are sinking most of the heat into a large volume and not worrying about the thermal loss to the earth. I would consider some kind of isolation to better insulate the storage but it might not be worth it.
I think you are absolutely right and to take it the next step. Until there are such standards there can be no security or belief that there is security.
But Locomotive and Dump Trucks use diesel engines which is a far cry better than using a gasoline engine for this type of application. Given the higher efficiency of biodiesel over ethanol and the fact that diesels excel at continuous RPM, it's a natural choice to build diesel electric cars.
NOTE: Before you piss all over my biodiesel to ethanol remark please research the end-to-end effeciency. It takes a LOT more energy to make a gallon of ethanol than it does biodiesel.
Effectively speaking, you can't store heat in the ground. If you could, then heat pumps today wouldn't work. And plumbing in the north would fail every year. The ground temperature much below 3-6 feet stays a relatively constant temparature all year round. I think between February and August it might vary 10F if that.
The point being that if it takes 6 months of weather on the surface to effect a 10F change in the ground, you won't be able to create a heat pump powerful enough to make this project work. The earth has the property of being a massive heat sink with a reasonable thermal conductivity. This allows heat pumps to pull heat out of the ground in winter and push it into your house. They become inefficient at very low temperatures because the heat transfer freons don't work very well, not because the ground runs out of heat.
It might be more possible to do this if you had an insulated/isolated storage of water and used that as the heat source for storage and retrieval. You could also do it with air and stone. But in every case, you have to provide a means of thermal isolation between the earth and the storage facility. Also, it would be far more efficient to store the heat by means of thermal exchange pipes (solar heated pools) than trying to pump the heat into place.
The convection tower concept isn't new. I think someone came up with that in Australia about five years back. But the storage of heat for later retrieval is.
AJAX can be considered a great technology because it's the only thing that provides a ubiquitous framework for asynchronous information transfer. It's a uber-shitty implimentation because Javascript was never intended to do anything like this. But the concept is cool. The implimentation is not.
Back up about a decade and everyone in the world was writing Java Applets. These permitted the same end goal of asynchronous data communication. But Java is a cpu/memory hog and would frequently blow up machines. Therefore everyone came to conclusion that Java Applets pretty much sucked and you rarely see them.
Javascript could be the right tool for what AJAX is demonstrating. But it's going to have to be completely rethought on how Javascript works with the client/server.
Not having RTFA, wouldn't you be able to use HTTPS?
I agree with this assessment. SORBS is one of those spam fanatical groups that should be convinced they need a regime change. They are way too aggressive.
One RBL list that I was using briefly because of false positives still had an interesting approach. They blocked anyone who was reported as delivering spam for 45 minutes and then removed from the list. Problem for me what they blocked my mailing lists that I subscribe too.
They should never report mailing lists as sending spam. The mailing lists are trying to sort their own out and to block them causes a lot of damage.
I don't think he was every in the loop. It's been like this since the first Apple Lisa's came out and before. Material cost and manufacturing costs are far from trivial.
You are a geek. You think differently than the non-geeks do. I have three cases of internet users in my house.
Children: These are technophiles that want to use technology because it provides seconds of entertainment but have absolutely zero desire to actually learn about anything related to technology. They are also blindly driven by their adolescent instinct to socialize and use technology as the means to satiatate the need. They easily can spend hours on IM or MySpace trolling for something that they'll never get. Sooner or later in each night they drop IM and start hitting the phones. The oldest starts heading out of the house to the local coffee shop. All a drive to socialize.
The Wife: She couldn't give a shit about any of this stuff. If it helps her achieve a Real Life need then great. But she doesn't have any desire to have any kind of website or even IM accounts because she just doesn't care. She's about as close to a luddite as you can get and still be considered at least 20th century. She's a great litmus test for any GUI development because you have 10 seconds for her to get it before she's leaving.
The Geek: I am a geek. I also think IM and MySpace is almost as much of a waste of time as many computer/video games. After 4 hours I have not accomplished anything. No new code. Nothing learned. No sex. No chance of sex. And no real friends or human interaction. But I'm a fan of IRC and IM for quick information trading, not social interactions
I think there is a misnomer with the social networking on the internet. Social Networking is a legitimate human need. We are social animals. We crave human interaction. The internet presents sites that try to mimic this through some kind of interface like MySpace but they fail to achieve the real requirement of human to human contact.
But I do expect that social networks will lose some of their luster and remain a niche market with appeal to the same people who by People Magazine and watch E!.
Well, my keyboard will be glad to hear that I'll be giving up internet sex soon.
I don't think there is anything to worry about. I suspect that people actually want to have disparate systems so that they can manage and explore multiple persona's online without anyone making a link between the different personalities. It's like to old story of people making up names when they go to a bar so no one has to worry about a freak traking them down in the morning.
However, each social network has an interest in being able to tie in with the other social networks for their advantage but they don't want to recipricate that level of access. So it's never going to happen but the lawyers will make a bundle in the process.
Have we ever managed to successfully bridge the gap between all the different Instand Messager applications (AIM, MSN...)? That's an indication of the success they will have bridging the gap in social web sites.
I supposed the next step is to have people write a physical letter or make a phone call to you personally. But I wonder how long it will be before electronic speech gets better.
If Qatar get's whacked as a nation I don't really care. It's because of their flagrant disregard for the number one problem on the internet today. SPAM.
And it wasn't Qatar that got whacked. It was their only ISP that got whacked. How is this any different from blocking res.rr.com? Answer: It's not. It just happens that they don't have a lot of other ISP choices out there. Too bad.
I have no sympathies for any nation that tops the list of spam abuse and I have no sympathies for ISP's that have no real controls on spam abuse. It's a huge problem and it will continue as long as companies/nations believe that they can run spam through their doors without ramifications.
While this has little to do with the original post I have a really annoying experience with captchas
I have 20/20 vision and am not color blind. Captchas are becoming so complicated and garbled that I get the code wrong about 40% of the time. Another portion of the time I take to long trying to answer the code question and type in the right characters. I typically get screwed on the number Zero and the letter 'O' and lowercase 'L' and the number 1.
It'b becoming, for me, an entry barrier to signing up and gaining access to websites. It would be much easier to simply use email authentication. What do you do with the people who are color blind? I spent some years dealing with display design and this was a legitimate concern that we addressed at the time for a specialized group of people. In the common population there are a lot more occurrences of people who are color blind.
Are captcha's really worth the effort compared to other more human friendly processes? Is anyone working on what we will be doing next? Considering that there are decades of technology in machine vision technology to pull from I think it will be fairly trivial for the bots to become better at reading captchas than humans.
It might be effective to take the email authentication process and apply everything that mail servers do to authenticate the user. What I mean by this is apply all the mail server rules like FQDN requirements for HELO, fully resolvable email domains, valid email addresses, non-open relays. Much of this would eliminate either the bots or the ISP's who are too stupid to properly configure a mail server. Similarly it might be sufficient to code the HTML/HTTP to expect a properly responding client and not some hacked up bot that can't do most of it right.
Get a virtual host that you can run 24x7 and put your IMAP server on that. Add in AUTH and TLS and you can send from it as well. And it won't care if you are on a desktop, notebook, or crackberry.
This ZDNet guy is an idiot in search of an audience. Move along, there's nothing to see here other than some pathetic dude trying to keep his ad-clicks up.
I didn't have to read more than OpenSolaris. Overtaking Linux? Yeah right. Even if it does happen it sure has heck won't be in 12 months time.
Interestingly enough I happen to walk past my television when I enter the room. There is a button on the front of it that is used to turn it on.
When I was a child my big brother had a remote on the old television. He would punch me in the arm until I got up and changed the channel on the television across the room. It was a nice round dial think that you would turn right and left to get to the right channel.
Considering we are a most overweight nation on the entire planet it probably wouldn't hurt us to actually have to walk over to the television to turn it on. I'm not promoting the little-brother-remote concept publicly, but I do weigh less than my brother.
I recognize that 300mA doesn't seem like a lot of power, until you multiply it out...
Playstation.
VCR
DVD player
Stereo (assume only one)
Television (assume two)
Microwave
Convection Oven (gas/electric)
Radio (assume two)
Computer/Notebook (for me this is 3)
Cordless phone base
Answering machine
And now you have 14 items at 300mA. If you use the 35 watts as an estimate you have 490W or roughly 12KWHr per day. It adds up when you start multiplying that by houses and offices. You quickly get to a steady drain in the MegaWatt range for a give small city.
I tried Ubuntu. I don't like the interface. I am a windowmaker fan and will just stick with Debian. As for stability, I don't think Ubuntu can actually beat Debian-Stable. It might be more a question of "is Unbuntu stable enough?"
Sure they might run instant on feature that takes some current drain 24x7 so they can do a warm start. Or a clock.
Chase down the Off-Grid living web sites and you'll soon find that one of the biggest problems people have when they first try to do off grid is all their appliances that drain just a little power all night long, leaving insufficient power for the morning routines.
I have three digital clocks in my kitchen, two in my entertainment center... I don't own a watch anymore because I realized that there is no place except the bathroom that I can stand in my house and not see a clock face. And I don't own any clocks!
The need for everything to have a digital clock and instant on takes up a lot more power then you think. Turn everything off and go look at your meter. it's still chugging along rather nicely. We could do much better if we dropped the clocks and dropped the instant on. Tube televisions took minutes to warm up. Solid State televisions take a few seconds to warm up. Instant On only saves me 3 seconds at most.
Unbuntu is based on Debian unstable. Not Debian stable. Right now Debian unstable is in a freeze pending release. But once that is done, expect Unstable to live up to it's name and hence take unbuntu (potentially) with it.
No distro flame war. But I really get pissed off when something breaks.
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True Dat. Between Perl, Python and Ruby. Ruby is the slowest by far. And be careful how you write your code. Sometimes attaching method.method.method is about the worse way you can go, even though they claim it is the Ruby Way. Bah! I'll take perl. At least it has docs.
I recognize the value of eye-candy on email. Especially when making marketing material. But the cost is too high. If you only accepted plain text email then you would have the opportunity to accurately eliminate something like 99.99% of all spam with ease by use of any of a number of spam filtering engines. HTML and IMG tags make it more difficult to trap.
What do you think would be the response from email users if they had a choice between graphically punched up messages with a lot of spam or living with plain emails and hardly any spam at all? I don't know what they would choose. I suspect some would choose the plain text eventually but it's a question of how much spam they are willing to live with. If the admins stopped filtering all spam it might show what the battle it really all about.
I think it's entirely reasonable when you consider the crap that you can download and the damage it would do if it infected your phone running Windows ME.
I would almost agree with you because this would be a perfect time for me to wave my Perl is Better flag. But there is a point to this story but there's also a nasty history to PHP as a language.
There are many choices to which language you want to make a website/webpage in and there is a pretty reasonable opportunity in any of them to horribly insecure things. Given the best language, an idiot can make it insecure. As a corallary even the worse language can be made secure. Even BASH can be done securly but you really have to know your stuff. The key is entry barriers.
Low entry barrier means lots of inexperienced programmers and get-rich-quick programmers start flocking to PHP to make all their blogs and such with dreams of becoming the next uber-prince or uber-princess in their community. So you learn to program quickly with visual results. But there's never any effort to try and actually learn what is going on or what can be done to make things secure because security is of no concern in a results oriented development model.
Contrast this with something I'm familiar with, Perl. It's got a large entry barrier. Anyone who does more than basic CGI in perl is a real programmer first who started making web pages. Security is much easier to enforce even a rudimentary levels. And since you have to learn how to really program first, doing something in a secure or sane manner is much easier to conceptually impliment as you are building your websites.
Because the entry barrier is higher in perl the only people who write in perl are programmers and not the script-kiddie types who only want to learn enough to get a page to render. The quality of the programmers is a direct relationship to how difficult it is to learn the language. Lower the barrier and you get idiot programmers. Make the language insanely popular and you get idiot programmers. There are a number of examples of this that I've experienced in my life.
PHP is too easy to get started on and everyone just assumes everything will work perfectly. It is not a bad language in itself but it allows bad people to write programs.
Java has a great certification program and if you get certified you can get a job. Hence there are a lot of java programmers that don't really understand what Java is doing when they write programs. My company is routinely hit with major system outages becuase the Java someone wrote either has memory leaks, race conditions, fails edge conditions. Any application log will reveal 10,000 or more RUNTIME and NULL POINTER Exceptions in a day.
Perl programs that I've seen tend to be written only by a few people in the company and they know a heck of a lot more than just perl. They have a solid foundation in networking, security, databases, hardware that gives them the knowledge to make really good programs. The interesting thing is that I've been to a variety of conferences and have found the Perl conferences to have a general population of users who are more generally knowledgeable about perl and computers in general than any other group. If you present insecure code at a perl conference you will get tagged in about 5 seconds (seen it). If you present insecure code in Rails conferences and someone tags it (minutes by the way) it's debated if it really matters. Do that at a perl conference and they start forming a circle around you.
PHP could do the same thing, but they need to develop the mentality from experience and time. Being the easiest programming language to use for web pages isn't always a good thing. And I personally think that you will never remove this problem of easy access languages bringing in problems of insecurity and bad coders. The only thing PHP can do is make it harder to program or come up with an even easier language.
That looks pretty neat! It would be great except I think Americans would be to quick to start bitching about the fat neighbor who runs around in skivvies all winter in his house of 90F because he's sucking up someone elses heat.
It appears as if they are sinking most of the heat into a large volume and not worrying about the thermal loss to the earth. I would consider some kind of isolation to better insulate the storage but it might not be worth it.
I think you are absolutely right and to take it the next step. Until there are such standards there can be no security or belief that there is security.
But Locomotive and Dump Trucks use diesel engines which is a far cry better than using a gasoline engine for this type of application. Given the higher efficiency of biodiesel over ethanol and the fact that diesels excel at continuous RPM, it's a natural choice to build diesel electric cars.
NOTE: Before you piss all over my biodiesel to ethanol remark please research the end-to-end effeciency. It takes a LOT more energy to make a gallon of ethanol than it does biodiesel.
Effectively speaking, you can't store heat in the ground. If you could, then heat pumps today wouldn't work. And plumbing in the north would fail every year. The ground temperature much below 3-6 feet stays a relatively constant temparature all year round. I think between February and August it might vary 10F if that.
The point being that if it takes 6 months of weather on the surface to effect a 10F change in the ground, you won't be able to create a heat pump powerful enough to make this project work. The earth has the property of being a massive heat sink with a reasonable thermal conductivity. This allows heat pumps to pull heat out of the ground in winter and push it into your house. They become inefficient at very low temperatures because the heat transfer freons don't work very well, not because the ground runs out of heat.
It might be more possible to do this if you had an insulated/isolated storage of water and used that as the heat source for storage and retrieval. You could also do it with air and stone. But in every case, you have to provide a means of thermal isolation between the earth and the storage facility. Also, it would be far more efficient to store the heat by means of thermal exchange pipes (solar heated pools) than trying to pump the heat into place.
The convection tower concept isn't new. I think someone came up with that in Australia about five years back. But the storage of heat for later retrieval is.
Maybe someone will reinvent the FRAMES concept...
AJAX can be considered a great technology because it's the only thing that provides a ubiquitous framework for asynchronous information transfer. It's a uber-shitty implimentation because Javascript was never intended to do anything like this. But the concept is cool. The implimentation is not.
Back up about a decade and everyone in the world was writing Java Applets. These permitted the same end goal of asynchronous data communication. But Java is a cpu/memory hog and would frequently blow up machines. Therefore everyone came to conclusion that Java Applets pretty much sucked and you rarely see them.
Javascript could be the right tool for what AJAX is demonstrating. But it's going to have to be completely rethought on how Javascript works with the client/server.
Not having RTFA, wouldn't you be able to use HTTPS?
I agree with this assessment. SORBS is one of those spam fanatical groups that should be convinced they need a regime change. They are way too aggressive.
One RBL list that I was using briefly because of false positives still had an interesting approach. They blocked anyone who was reported as delivering spam for 45 minutes and then removed from the list. Problem for me what they blocked my mailing lists that I subscribe too.
They should never report mailing lists as sending spam. The mailing lists are trying to sort their own out and to block them causes a lot of damage.
I don't think he was every in the loop. It's been like this since the first Apple Lisa's came out and before. Material cost and manufacturing costs are far from trivial.
Silicon On Insulator or Silicon On Saphire would remove a lot of leakage paths.
You are a geek. You think differently than the non-geeks do. I have three cases of internet users in my house.
Children: These are technophiles that want to use technology because it provides seconds of entertainment but have absolutely zero desire to actually learn about anything related to technology. They are also blindly driven by their adolescent instinct to socialize and use technology as the means to satiatate the need. They easily can spend hours on IM or MySpace trolling for something that they'll never get. Sooner or later in each night they drop IM and start hitting the phones. The oldest starts heading out of the house to the local coffee shop. All a drive to socialize.
The Wife: She couldn't give a shit about any of this stuff. If it helps her achieve a Real Life need then great. But she doesn't have any desire to have any kind of website or even IM accounts because she just doesn't care. She's about as close to a luddite as you can get and still be considered at least 20th century. She's a great litmus test for any GUI development because you have 10 seconds for her to get it before she's leaving.
The Geek: I am a geek. I also think IM and MySpace is almost as much of a waste of time as many computer/video games. After 4 hours I have not accomplished anything. No new code. Nothing learned. No sex. No chance of sex. And no real friends or human interaction. But I'm a fan of IRC and IM for quick information trading, not social interactions
I think there is a misnomer with the social networking on the internet. Social Networking is a legitimate human need. We are social animals. We crave human interaction. The internet presents sites that try to mimic this through some kind of interface like MySpace but they fail to achieve the real requirement of human to human contact.
But I do expect that social networks will lose some of their luster and remain a niche market with appeal to the same people who by People Magazine and watch E!.
Well, my keyboard will be glad to hear that I'll be giving up internet sex soon.
I don't think there is anything to worry about. I suspect that people actually want to have disparate systems so that they can manage and explore multiple persona's online without anyone making a link between the different personalities. It's like to old story of people making up names when they go to a bar so no one has to worry about a freak traking them down in the morning.
However, each social network has an interest in being able to tie in with the other social networks for their advantage but they don't want to recipricate that level of access. So it's never going to happen but the lawyers will make a bundle in the process.
Have we ever managed to successfully bridge the gap between all the different Instand Messager applications (AIM, MSN...)? That's an indication of the success they will have bridging the gap in social web sites.
I supposed the next step is to have people write a physical letter or make a phone call to you personally. But I wonder how long it will be before electronic speech gets better.
If Qatar get's whacked as a nation I don't really care. It's because of their flagrant disregard for the number one problem on the internet today. SPAM.
And it wasn't Qatar that got whacked. It was their only ISP that got whacked. How is this any different from blocking res.rr.com? Answer: It's not. It just happens that they don't have a lot of other ISP choices out there. Too bad.
I have no sympathies for any nation that tops the list of spam abuse and I have no sympathies for ISP's that have no real controls on spam abuse. It's a huge problem and it will continue as long as companies/nations believe that they can run spam through their doors without ramifications.
While this has little to do with the original post I have a really annoying experience with captchas
I have 20/20 vision and am not color blind. Captchas are becoming so complicated and garbled that I get the code wrong about 40% of the time. Another portion of the time I take to long trying to answer the code question and type in the right characters. I typically get screwed on the number Zero and the letter 'O' and lowercase 'L' and the number 1.
It'b becoming, for me, an entry barrier to signing up and gaining access to websites. It would be much easier to simply use email authentication. What do you do with the people who are color blind? I spent some years dealing with display design and this was a legitimate concern that we addressed at the time for a specialized group of people. In the common population there are a lot more occurrences of people who are color blind.
Are captcha's really worth the effort compared to other more human friendly processes? Is anyone working on what we will be doing next? Considering that there are decades of technology in machine vision technology to pull from I think it will be fairly trivial for the bots to become better at reading captchas than humans.
It might be effective to take the email authentication process and apply everything that mail servers do to authenticate the user. What I mean by this is apply all the mail server rules like FQDN requirements for HELO, fully resolvable email domains, valid email addresses, non-open relays. Much of this would eliminate either the bots or the ISP's who are too stupid to properly configure a mail server. Similarly it might be sufficient to code the HTML/HTTP to expect a properly responding client and not some hacked up bot that can't do most of it right.
Get a virtual host that you can run 24x7 and put your IMAP server on that. Add in AUTH and TLS and you can send from it as well. And it won't care if you are on a desktop, notebook, or crackberry.
This ZDNet guy is an idiot in search of an audience. Move along, there's nothing to see here other than some pathetic dude trying to keep his ad-clicks up.
I didn't have to read more than OpenSolaris. Overtaking Linux? Yeah right. Even if it does happen it sure has heck won't be in 12 months time.
Interestingly enough I happen to walk past my television when I enter the room. There is a button on the front of it that is used to turn it on.
When I was a child my big brother had a remote on the old television. He would punch me in the arm until I got up and changed the channel on the television across the room. It was a nice round dial think that you would turn right and left to get to the right channel.
Considering we are a most overweight nation on the entire planet it probably wouldn't hurt us to actually have to walk over to the television to turn it on. I'm not promoting the little-brother-remote concept publicly, but I do weigh less than my brother.
I recognize that 300mA doesn't seem like a lot of power, until you multiply it out...
And now you have 14 items at 300mA. If you use the 35 watts as an estimate you have 490W or roughly 12KWHr per day. It adds up when you start multiplying that by houses and offices. You quickly get to a steady drain in the MegaWatt range for a give small city.
I tried Ubuntu. I don't like the interface. I am a windowmaker fan and will just stick with Debian. As for stability, I don't think Ubuntu can actually beat Debian-Stable. It might be more a question of "is Unbuntu stable enough?"
Sure they might run instant on feature that takes some current drain 24x7 so they can do a warm start. Or a clock.
Chase down the Off-Grid living web sites and you'll soon find that one of the biggest problems people have when they first try to do off grid is all their appliances that drain just a little power all night long, leaving insufficient power for the morning routines.
I have three digital clocks in my kitchen, two in my entertainment center... I don't own a watch anymore because I realized that there is no place except the bathroom that I can stand in my house and not see a clock face. And I don't own any clocks!
The need for everything to have a digital clock and instant on takes up a lot more power then you think. Turn everything off and go look at your meter. it's still chugging along rather nicely. We could do much better if we dropped the clocks and dropped the instant on. Tube televisions took minutes to warm up. Solid State televisions take a few seconds to warm up. Instant On only saves me 3 seconds at most.
Unbuntu is based on Debian unstable. Not Debian stable. Right now Debian unstable is in a freeze pending release. But once that is done, expect Unstable to live up to it's name and hence take unbuntu (potentially) with it.
No distro flame war. But I really get pissed off when something breaks.