07 December 2006

What a Waste of Energy

The official Curmudgeon of Computing, Nick Carr, stirred up a little excitement recently by pointing out that Second Life, for all its virtuality, really does use quite a lot of electricity. But before we start grabbing the digital pitchforks and descending upon Linden Lab for being such an ecological extravagant bunch, it's probably best to put things in context.

That's exactly what this post from KnowProSE.com does. It points out that the problem is not really Second Life's, it's the Internet's - ours, in other words. And it's certainly a big problem.

But it seems to me that the solution is less finding all the energy, than reducing the amount used by computers. It's a bit like cars: it's not really hard making them more fuel efficient, but until there are incentives to do so, you carry on using the old, inefficient technologies. We need to re-engineer our thinking, not just out technologies.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

I screwed up on that one. square meters and square kilometers make a BIG difference.

Glyn Moody said...

Hey - what's a few orders of magnitude between friends?

Anonymous said...

It's aways easy to point to others, blaming them. But remember, if you point to someone three of your fingers will point back to you. :-).

Why does a web surfing station needs to consume 500Watt? Mine uses 25 Watt is perfectly capable of displaying mails and browsing as well as text processing. People vote with their purses, so I agree, looking at reducing energy is the right way to go, and you should start at your places....

Glyn Moody said...

Absolutely: everything I write is a mea culpa....