I was wondering if anyone else has thought about this:
With the huge interest in reducing carbon emissions, could a significant amount of energy be saved if everyone adopted a sort of “green” or “eco” netiquette where you make it a habit or policy to delete redundant text from emails, message board posts, etc.
For instance, lately, when I’m emailing back and forth with people, if the correspondence doesn’t require me to keep the content of my previous emails, then I just delete the superflous text in my replies.
Similarly, when I reply to a message on message boards, I try to quote the specifically relevant sentence, paragraph, etc. when I quote an upthread reply, rather than quote the post in its entirety.
Is this a good idea, and do you think it could save a significant amount of energy if more people adopted it? Or would any energy savings be pretty insignificant?
Can you think of any other online habits that an average person could easily adopt to achieve the same aim (I’m thinking caching, etc.?)
How about turning off your computer at night? Anything you do with data will have no affect whatsoever on energy use. Your computer doesn’t really use any more energy doing work versus just sitting there.
The topic is pretty ridiculous as far as “saving energy” goes. But as a writer I would say eliminating redundancy is a good idea for the sake of clarity of meaning and generally not being annoying.
The same things that apply to laptop power conservation would apply here. Use Standby and Hibernate instead of leaving your computer on all the time. Turn down screen brightness to your minimal acceptable level. Make sure your monitor goes to sleep after a while too – screensavers don’t count, since they still use power. Turn off wireless when you’re not using it. Copy DVDs and CDs to your hard drive instead of letting them spin all the time.
If battery usage is any indicator, my computer absolutely does use more energy when running demanding apps like 3D games. The battery won’t last half as long.
No. Go by a a single hard drive that is large enough to replace the multiple ones in your computer. Buy a less power consuming video card, cpu or memory to save power.
There is however a font that has been developed to save up to 20% ink in printers. It has holes in it. It gives you a lighter toned print. I say just use the draf mode in printing and save even more ink. Printing with less overlays of dots will save you more.
Here’s the deal - The energy used by the Internet is pretty much the same regardless of whether any information is being transferred or not. All those routers, servers, cable modems, repeaters, etc. are just sitting there burning energy, waiting for someone to send you spam. If you really want to save energy, use a low-power computer - like a laptop.
If those machines were up and running and not sending spam, the difference would not be measurable. The point is that the energy to run the physical machine - simply powering the CPU, the fans, the screens, keeping the disks spinning - is several orders of magnitude greater then anything involved with pushing bits of data over the wire.
Eliminating spam so that you can shut down those machines will save energy.
Reducing the number of disks you need to store excess spam will save energy.
No needing dedicated spam filter hardware will save energy.
Once you have bought the hardware and are keeping it running there’s very little you can do.
For crying out loud. Folks, either answer the guy’s question, or report it to a Moderator if you think it doesn’t belong here. These questions:
are actually pretty interesting, even if the answer turns out to be a small number. There is a very long precedent of answering questions that may seem silly at first in GQ. Just asserting it’s “insignificant” with no citations or reference to actual experience, may be the most likely answer, but it doesn’t really answer the question.
Can anyone answer the questions above, in terms of the actual energy involved in the transmission of data on the Internet? If not, then stop picking on the OP. (and no, I don’t know the answer, but at least I admit that) Here is an interesting related technical paper that tries to balance out whether it takes more or less energy to compress data before transmitting it, however, which has some energy values for wireless transmission: http://www.cag.lcs.mit.edu/scale/papers/compression-mobisys2003.pdf
{Checks to see what forum we’re in. Nope, not GQ. Must be some mistake.}
Oh, alright…IMHO {heh}, the amount of energy (human and other) you would expend to delete small quantities of data in a return email would overwhelm the amount of benefit you would get from a smaller data set’s transmission overhead.
A more specific answer than that would require knowledge of how many messages, how much data in each to strip out, how much time/effort each would take, and the cost of sending one byte of data from Washington to Hong Kong, on the average. And the amount of time it would take to compute that isn’t worth the cost.