The future of Power Management - together with Activities

[Scott Kitterman]

On Sunday, October 02, 2011 08:37:58 PM Dario Freddi wrote:
> On Sunday 02 October 2011 20:31:37 Martin Gräßlin wrote:
> > And that's now exactly the point: if you don't have any clue about what
> > is happening your "I want to save power and  not let the computer
> > decide" might be much worse than what the computer would do.
> 
> No matter how many times I will quote this bit, it will never be enough.

Most of the time, as you've said, manual adjustments to power management 
settings are to avoid having the computer try to save power, not to try and to 
a better job.  The only time I think I can do a better job is when I actually 
turn hardware off (like bluetooth and wifi) that I know I'm not going to be 
using.

To pick, what is for me a real life example, when I'm on an airplane, I know I 
don't want bluetooth, I (almost always) don't want wifi, the ethernet port 
could be powered down, etc.  Most of these are things that power management 
doesn't current deal with, but I could envision (sort of) a airplane mode 
activity that would shut these things off, but then I wonder about what I am 
doing on the airplane (what activity I am engaged in) and it could be almost 
anything:

 - watching a movie
 - coding
 - compiling
 - reading/writing email
 - writing other documents
 - etc

So what does how I might want to save power relate to my activity?  I still 
don't understand why having power management things moved from power 
management to this activity thing that I've never found a use for is going to 
help me.  Make it possible to do whatever you want with activities, I think 
makes complete sense.  Making it the only way to do it, I don't understand.  
The concepts are orthogonal.

Scott K