Bluescreen | We celebrated World Environment Day responsibly on Thursday by switching off every PC we could find. Then, sadly, the staff had us thrown out of Harvey Norman..
Bluescreen: Alex Kidman satirises the state of the IT industry, crashing more than a few kernels along the way.
The police mentioned something to do with
"disrupting trade" not to mention
"not wearing pants", but thankfully, Bluescreen and the police commissioner are old friends, so you won't be reading about that story anywhere.
In any case, we were starting to become worried. Ever since we last reported on the
green aspirations of IT companies, our PR sources had clammed up shut, refusing to reveal any more titbits. Thankfully, when we had our editor breathing most heavily down our neck (an unpleasant experience, to be sure) for a World Environment Day story, the heavens opened, and IT companies started talking themselves.
First, it was Telstra, talking up the recycling of mobile phones, and its strategy to take cars off the road by
sacking all of its field technicians -- sorry, in the sense that it would save a tonne of CO2 -- 646 Tonnes, according to Telstra -- by
turning all its PC screensavers black. Unless, as one astute APC reader pointed out, they're using LCD screens, in which case they may be burning more power, not less. Whoops.
Then it was Canon, promoting its green credentials by giving away Canon products to worthy environmental causes. Which is good and well in principle, as long as the printers never chew up anything that was ever part of a tree (like, say, paper) and the cameras are never powered up (that nasty CO2 producing electricity, again). Oh, and presuming they're not following the industry standard whereby printers come with enough ink to print the test page and then require a refill that costs more than the printer itself, at which point the printer ends up in landfill. The binoculars should be OK. As long as the glass in them doesn't contain any lead.
Still, Canon has to be applauded for thinking outside of the normal green PR-Spin-Sphere. And with that thought in mind, Bluescreen got to phoning around, checking with the planet's major IT vendors and challenging them to come up with new and innovative ways to save the planet. Sadly, due to our earlier PR leak story, nobody wanted to be named "on the record".
Microsoft's rep -- we'll call him "Mr B" came up with an interesting spin on lowering CPU usage.
"Open source software is a clear drain on the planet's resources." he ranted.
"If every Apache server on the planet were to be switched off, the power savings would be immense. What do you mean, the entire Internet would collapse if they did that? Don't we hold the patent on collapsing computers yet?"
Our Apple insider -- once we'd signed 57 forms promising not to identify him prominently -- suggested that
"tonnes and tonnes of batteries end up landfill every year. By integrating batteries into our music players and laptops that cannot be removed, we're removing some huge sources of pollution."
Mr D, from a prominent Texas-based computer manufacturer, refused to talk to us unless we didn't in fact mention his company.
"We're already saving the planet by selling every bit of computer gear you could ever want, pre-loading it with every application you could ever need -- even if it is crapware -- and throwing a printer in with it."
he said.
"We're even promoting recycling by ensuring that every component lasts precisely three seconds longer than the warranty. At that point you've got large boxes full of plastic, glass, lead and silicon, just waiting for recycling. "
A representative from a prominent Chinese OEM manufacturer was puzzled by the whole green movement, but once we'd pointed out that
"just floating all the crap down the Yangtze" didn't constitute recycling in the traditionally understood sense they got on the defensive.
"Our factory is world-class in its environmentally friendly approach", a spokesman said.
"The factory workers live at their desks, not consuming petrol to go home. During break times, they tend the fields around the factory, making their own food, which we intend to start exporting as soon as we can work out how to strip all the tetrodotoxin out of the rice. In the meantime, they can continue eating it, and at the same time working as test subjects for Global Pharmaceutical Products, inc."
Naturally, the open source community wanted -- nay, demanded to have it say -- and we were inundated with over 600 copies of the same message from Slashdot.org regular
P1ngwinFanBoi,
"If everyone used open source, the power consumption of the IT world would dip by a factor of at least 75%."
he (we're presuming it's a he) claimed.
"If you look at Sourceforge, over 75% of projects are unfinished, unchecked and lacking in documentation. As such, they fail to actually compile and run about 75% of the time. A program that isn't running isn't using power or processing cycles either. The savings are immense. Now, if you'll excuse me, I have to go and work on research for my alternative new power source derived completely from smug self-satisfaction. Whoops. I meant, my GNU power source, obviously."