..on or around Wed, Jul 25, 2007 at 05:10:11PM +1200, Douglas Bagnall said: > 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.
that may be true. i suppose what this points to is the need for a sense of scale where power consumption is concerned. i could certainly do with a big colourful graph pairing objects based on mean power consumption. moreso, perhaps it is far too easy to ignore the T.V in conversations about screens and power consumption: they are still far more ubiquitous and consume around 10w more power than a CRT on average (apparently). > 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). > relatedly, i remember reading that one intended secondary function of the OLPC was as a lightsource in regions with poor electricity distribution. > 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 > hah, i didn't know this was actually going into the mainline kernel so soon. that is great news (even if just selfishly from a laptop user's perspective). > 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. i was fortunate enough to get a close look at one of these machines recently and was really impressed. at US200.00 (coming soon to a developed country near you) i'll be buying one. if camping and hacking should ever find themselves together.. cheers, julian -- http://julianoliver.com http://selectparks.net emails containing HTML will not be read. _______________________________________________ Ada_list mailing list [email protected] http://aotearoadigitalarts.org.nz/
