Low Power Programming

Posted February 24, 2008 in Programming

The December 2007 issue of Computer talks about “green computing”, which includes power awareness. The November/December ACM Queue has an article about the OLPC which emphasis low power consumption and an article about Power Management tips that’s quite Linux specific.

I remember how in 2001 at Symbian, low-power programming idioms (e.g., avoiding polling) where already ingrained as part of the company culture since battery life is a key performance factor in mobile

phones. As a matter of fact, it was already part of the culture before I arrived, when Symbian was still Psion Software and the Symbian OS was still known as EPOC.

How many times does this particular type of “Nothing New Under the Sun” happen? How many times do we just relearn what is already common knowledge in some niche programming group? How many things that where already part of the culture in old mainframes with CICS/DB2 have we reinvented on the PC?

Is web+java like a broken telnet+cobol?

I think I’m getting old.