Re: Minimum specs, "funky" defaults, and old machinery

[Seth Nickell <snickell stanford edu>]

>         First off, let me preface this by saying that I find the
> thumbnails to be always out of sync and hard to see, so I turn them off.

While the current thumbnailing does leave much to be desired (and this
isn't inherent, c.f. enlightenment's rather good thumbnailing which I
did use), it seems that according to Tim some people really like it
(perhaps somebody should gather empirical data on this, I turn it off
for the above reason too). nonetheless...

>         An automatic CPU-found default would be neat.  But try and allow
> for multi-homed users.  eg, have three states "on", "off", and "unset".
> if "unset", check CPU on every startup and draw or not.  If set, honor
> the user's preference.  That way a user gets a gee-whiez default on his
> 2GHz alpha, and nice running issues with his 166 old box.

If this were to appear in the user interface I hope it would have a more
descriptive name than "unset" (I might suggest "automatically detect
based on CPU speed", though I don't like that much either). I think
basing the decision on a machine's MHz is quite reasonable, as this is
only a rough-cut approximation anyway. Its not like we've done some sort
of scientific analysis and computed the CPU speed below which most users
want thumbnailing disabled! :-) Turning it off at or below 300 MHz seems
about right to me (though, as I said, I would be interested in finding
out how many people find it desirable speed issues completely aside).

Another mechanism might be monitoring its CPU load for the first 30
seconds the applet is running, and choosing at that point whether to
start thumbnailing or not (should probably be off by default).
Constantly checking would probably be disruptive, as machines right on
the border might find the applet turning thumbnailing on and off and
random intervals :-)

-Seth