Julian Oliver wrote: > to summarise: > > if you're using a CRT you shouldn't be. > > LCD users can dress in white.
ah, but LCDs don't look the same. BTW, this 750 megawatt-hours/year is not actually very much at all. If you convert it to megawatt hours per hour, which is to say, megawatts: 750 / (365 * 24) = 0.0856 you get 85 kW. Heaters, kettles, and vacuum cleaners use in the order of 2kW each. Hot water cylinders and ovens use more. So a power cut in a tiny place like Otira or Ophir, where everyone is sitting in front of their heaters drinking tea, will save more power than blacking out google for the whole world. There are other effects to consider too. In winter the 15 extra watts from a white screen are not entirely wasted. The power ends up as heat, and you're warmer for it (huddle close to your monitor). Another perspective is that an ordinary car engine will generate about 85kW when it is going fast. Nonetheless, before that, Julian also wrote: > i've argued for years that working in a terminal environment with white > text on a black background gives me more battery life on my laptops. > perhaps we'll see 'Carbon Offsetting' in the context of high-traffic > sites in future.. > > this principle could even be extended further to software design: bad > software design can lead to unneccesary loads on the system (redundant > clock-cycles, memory leakage, bloated file formats): an MS Word document > is typically much larger than other document formats of similar features > and so requires more hard-disk useage. this is multiplied when sent over > a network: how many millions of watts would be gain a day if using the > Open Document Format instead? > > similarly user interfaces with excessive eye-candy (animated toolbars, > panels and windows) could be seen to be less environmentally friendly. There is increasingly something in this. In the last few months, even weeks, a lot has been done to the Linux kernel and various parts of the X desktop to save power. For example, this page shows a few patches giving a 25% power saving: http://www.linuxpowertop.org/results.php This works by doing nothing in longer stretches than before, so the CPU can get better sleep. Desktop animations continually wake it up, so your plain desktop *is* friendlier, and it will be more so soon. I think this has partly been spurred on by the OLPC project, whose laptop is supposed to go completely to sleep between keystrokes. douglas _______________________________________________ Ada_list mailing list [email protected] http://aotearoadigitalarts.org.nz/
