

Flash Carbon Footprint of NYTimes.com - giu
http://blog.kalio.net/post/400184540/flash-carbon-footprint-of-nytimes-com-100-toyota

======
codyrobbins
Except those blinking ads aren’t useless—they bring in substantial amounts of
ad revenue for the New York Times. So what is OP’s point, exactly?

~~~
Semiapies
Presumably they'd burn even less fossil fuel if they went out of business.

~~~
nir
Or at least shut down their website - and, obviously, their even more wasteful
print edition.

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nir
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..)

~~~
kasterma
I distinctly remember claims that for modern monitors the color does not
change energy use.

~~~
mey
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...

etc etc etc.

~~~
Dbug
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.

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dabeeeenster
Be interested to see the power consumption figures on a windows machine as
opposed to a mac...

~~~
brutimus
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.

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amadiver
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.

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grinich
_= 100 Toyota Prius._

It's OK to leave that in the title.

~~~
giu
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 :)

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dmillar
Would also like to see HTML5/JS data. Or, even animated GIFs.

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kasterma
Anyone any idea how these energy measurements were made?

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mjgoins
Can anyone point to why flash is so processor-intensive?

Is it a necessary property of doing what flash does, or is flash implemented
inefficiently?

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sp332
This article raises a very interesting question: WTH is the plural of Prius?
What _should_ the plural be?

~~~
axod
The plural of radius is radii, so I'd assume Prii? (Pronounced Pree-eye)

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...](http://thesaurus.maths.org/mmkb/entry.html?action=entryByConcept&id=18)

From the BBC,

[http://www.bbc.co.uk/skillswise/tutors/lessonplans/spelling/...](http://www.bbc.co.uk/skillswise/tutors/lessonplans/spelling/rtf/plurals_wsheet.rtf)

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...](http://www.chambersharrap.co.uk/chambers/features/chref/chref.py/main?query=radii&title=21st)

~~~
codyrobbins
The plural of _radius_ is _radiuses_ , and the plural of _Prius_ is _Priuses_.
I am so tired of comments where people make up ‘funny’ pseudo-Latinate
plurals.

~~~
EricBurnett
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.

[1] See <http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/Radius>, for examples.

[2] From
[http://www.greenhybrid.com/wiki/index.php/Interview_with_Ed_...](http://www.greenhybrid.com/wiki/index.php/Interview_with_Ed_LaRocque)
, an interview with a manager at Toyota.

~~~
codyrobbins
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...](http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/000814.html)
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 resistance to degradation (such as _children_ and _teeth_ ),
but in general the exceptions are slowly being replaced by the standard plural
in normal speech. If someone said ‘Look at all those oxes over there,’ most
people wouldn’t blink an eye.

Finally, I wasn’t trying to correct the OP. My point was simply that the jokes
where you make up a funny non-standard plural are lame. As mentioned in the
excerpt from the Jargon File that someone posted above, hackers (and railroad
enthusiasts, among others) have been making these same jokes for decades. A
variation over and over again for fifty years of the same old joke about a
funny fake plural—enough already, ya know? Of course I’m aware that everyone’s
sense of humor is different, so I can’t tell someone something isn’t funny
because it’s a subjective assessment. So I’m just pointing out that these
jokes aren’t funny to me, because the people making them might not realize how
overplayed and unfunny they are to a lot of people.

And please don’t get me started on made-up fanciful names for groups of
animals…

EDIT: See also
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_plural#Irregular_plural...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_plural#Irregular_plurals_from_Latin_and_Greek)
for more discussion.

~~~
Semiapies
_"Neither are indices, data, corpora"_

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?

~~~
codyrobbins
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_.

~~~
Semiapies
_"I just went to great length explaining what my claims are based on"_

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.

