[LINK] Climate Savers Computing Org

[rchirgwin at ozemail.com.au]

Stewart Fist wrote:
> Stephen copied:
>   
>> .. A coalition of technology companies and environmental
>> groups led by Google Inc. and the Intel Corp. launched an
>> initiative Tuesday to conserve electricity .... "Currently, the
>> average PC wastes about half of the power it consumes.."
>>     
>
> Surely when the output is information or entertainment, then a computer
> wastes ALL the power it consumes.
>
> Information isn't related to energy in anyway, so the output is energy-less.
>
> This is one of those silly techno-economic statements where the figures you
> reveal rest totally on the assumptions you make.
>   
...I'd love to see a genuine survey of a computer's "duty cycle" (the 
time it's in use) for power waste. If a PC could be relied on to fire up 
as quickly as a TV, people would not resent an idle machine shutting 
down instead of "sleep" cycles.

Not to mention the DSL modems and Ethernet switches that never get shut 
down. A funny story: for a while I was getting e-mails at the office 
from the carrier (not Telstra): "There was an outage on your service 
last night". It took ages on the phone to work out that the carrier's 
system considers it an outage just because we shut down the machines 
overnight ... and tech support didn't quite know what to do about 
someone who intends to keep turning things off!

RC