25 May, 2008

The Nerdery: s02e10: On power saving

Pop! Now, there's only one person (actually maybe a few.... Hi!) who actually understands why I started this week's column with a Pop instead of a Bang, but for those not gifted with fine mouth control, lets say this article spawns from the event that recently occurred in my flat's kitchen. A light bulb blew. Now instead of simply marching down to the local light bulb dispenser, I used this as an excuse to purchase some 12 compact fluorescent bulbs and proceeded to refit my flat.

I can't help it; everyone eventually becomes all environmentally-conscious these days for one reason or another. Its a great time to be a greenie too, what with electricity prices rising, and a prediction that there's a 5% chance we'll have blackouts. I'm currently pricing up new servers at work, and their electricity usage is a major factor of my decision. Unfortunately, it seems the most-efficient (not to mention the one that gets my inner geek's freak on) solution, a blade server system, adds $15k to that of the exact same setup with rack-mount servers. Not at surprising, the same went for those bulbs; an initially higher cost that will repay itself several times over in the course of its life.

The same goes for modern laptops as well; they're made with less material, use much less power, still provide enough grunt for most users, not to mention are much more convenient, but as they are so much more expensive most people opt for either cheaper, older laptops or big power-sucking desktops, which can use 30w while completely off. Seriously, you're paying ~$30/year just to have your desktop plugged in while you're not using it. Would somebody please think of the environment!

On closing comments, for those of you who prefer your web-based word processor of choice to have a Adobe Lightroom-esque interface, as well as niceties such as proper fonts and a flash-animated pulsating cursor, instead of actual functionality like copy+paste (I'm just sour it doesn't work with my mac), should check out Adobe Labs' buzzword. Before you get your hopes up though, you can't save directly to PDF. Yes, I was also very disappointed and Adobe should be ashamed with themselves. Also, I've decided as I can't come up with actual content for it, I'll be carbon-copy posting these articles on my blog, (hmmm, I think you're here now...) for you to enjoy a day early. Maybe I'll throw in a couple extra words for you die-hards, like Good Night San Diego, and thanks for stopping by.