User interface specialists and aesthetes may love Mac chic, but coolness comes at a hot cost: increased power consumption. Before the Mac OS X made hipsters salivate over 3D effects, a typical home or business computer user was well satisfied with plain 2D graphics. Your typical word processor and spreadsheet, after all, is a 2D […]
Sunday’s Doonesbury touched on one of my major ecological concerns: standby power and the LED lights that give them away. Trudeau is usually either earnest or obviously sarcastic in his strips, but this one’s hard to read. The (increasingly-mannish) Alex observes to her roommate, “Isn’t it thrilling? A roomful of technology in standby mode, ready […]
Virtual worlds may one day reduce our fuel consumption by enabling us to substitute virtual for physical meetings, but even then, our virtual travel will not be costless. Computers draw considerable power from the grid, and their thirst for electricity is growing rapidly as CPUs and GPUs crank up. These ghosts present a true menace. […]
