This amazing bit of information, via the Foreign Policy blog and Treehugger
Microsoft has been touting Vista's new power saving features, saying that upgrading to Vista could easily save consumers and corporations $50 to $75 per computer per year in energy costs. The question, though, is what marvelous new code makes this miracle possible. The answer? They fixed three stupid mistakes that have cost the world billions of dollars and millions of tons of CO2 in the past five years.
the world spends $5 to $7 billion dollars every year powering inactive computers. Shifting 100 million computers into low-power sleep mode for 12 hours per day could easily cut worldwide C02 production by 45 million tons per year. That is equivalent to wiping away a year's worth of CO2 produced by every household and industry in a country the size of Ireland. Dozens of power plants would no longer be needed.
The Treehugger story above provides the 3 basic fixes that Microsoft has procrastinated form doing:
First, Microsoft never put power-saving options high on the list of default specs. In order for XP to run smoothly, with all its bells and whistles going, desktop machines had to run in "high-performance" mode, the equivalent of flooring your Honda at every green light. So the defaults were often set to "High Performance."
(...)
The second mistake was a flaw in the much touted "sleep" mode. (...) Windows XP lets any program override the sleep function. So if you have an anti-virus program running in the background, it might not allow the computer to sleep. This flaw is the cause of countless failed laptop batteries, and the complete avoidance of the sleep function by desktop users.
The third problem was administrative. Systems administrators in offices across the nation find it too confusing or difficult to control power saving functions for all computers on the network. So, instead, they let individual users decide.
This is staggering incompetence. If you use the above figure (made using 100W for the difference between the full-on mode and the sleep mode for both computer and monitor, and 16 hours of sleep hours 'won' per computer, all 100 million of them), you get 6,600 MW as the difference between the full saving mode, and the no savings mode - that's 5 nuclear plants, or 10 big coal-fired plants, or more than twice the total net capacity of all the wind farms in the USA.
See this handy calculator to check how much you or you company could save in power use.
For 3 stupid, easily fixable, bugs.
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In partly unrelated news, Microsoft has meekly folded against the European Commission and has finally agreed to hand over source code to competitors to ensure compatibility of other companies' software. Threatened with a EUR 3 Million fine per day if they did not comply, they gave up their bluster only on the very last day of the deadline. The European Commission, which fined them EUR 500 M in 2004, and then again EUR 280 M last July for not complying with the first ruling, has not given up on regulating the bloated Microsoft monopoly and its power abuses. (Ironically, other US companies will be the primary beneficiaries of that regulatory oversight)
The above example suggests strongly that we're still taking a much too lenient road with Microsoft. They benefit to the max. from network effects (we use their clearly inferior products because everybody else already does, as it would be a mess to deal with compatibility issues, and thus the standard is self-perpetuating), and they are doing very little to improve their goods. Why isn't Microsoft forced to send a patch to all users of existing versions of Windows to correct the energy waste underway?
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In other energy-related news, here are two energy plans for your consideration. I'll try to discuss them later:
Engineer Poet
Monbiot