I admit, mother earth probably doesn’t have the warmest feelings for me (pardon the pun), but I do beleive that green technologies hold the promise of ushering in an era of ecological and economical salvation for humankind.  Why am I only”as green as I wanna be” you ask?  In most cases, being green just isn’t practical for gadget lovers and technologists.  I am not saying that being green isn’t important, but until being green becomes highly practical, not a headache to technology users, and performs as well or better than non-green stuff, the practice is not going to be adopted widely enough to make a noticeable difference. If a gadget can bio-degrade in a friendly way and be within the targeted price point, then I’m all for it, but where are these products?

Let me give you an example.  How many corporate workstation users deliberately leave their workstations on so that when system updates are pushed out overnight, they are already installed when they get to work the next day?  So, leaving my laptop on at work on while I am sleeping in bed (with it being set to hibernate) uses less electricity than the lamppost outside my door (with a 60 watt light bulb)—you know the one my homeowner’s association says I must have.  The laptop is putting my employer back less than 10 cents per day that I leave my laptop on outside of business hours. To the typical stressed out office worker, the 5 to 10 minutes it may take to boot up their workstation is worth much more than 10 cents, with carbon emissions a nascent thought. 

On a positive note, PC makers are using greener materials and I am all for that as long as it doesn’t affect my user experience in a negative way.  I mean, after all, we have been working hard to keep Moore’s Law going strong and Moore definitely isn’t helping on the power consumption front.  More transistors equate to higher performance and, with today’s semiconductor technology, more energy consumption.  Areas where performance has been increased without increasing energy consumption are in the use of mult-core processors. The same rules apply to the transistor counts in a core, but adding more cores improves the megaflops per watt consumed by a typical CPU.  While a little questionable in its reasoning, Wikipedia lists the MHz-to-watts  ([loosely]speed- to-power) ratios of all the main line consumer CPUs.  The wikipedia article demonstrates a point—if you note the Celeron line, typically used in mobiles, versus the Core 2 Duo processors, typically used in desktops, the speed to power ratio is much lower with the mobile CPUs.  Good for the green minded, bad for the performance minded.  

Some may be tempted to make the analogy between sports cars and the need for the extra power that typically doesn’t ever get used in commuter driving (so why would anyone want a sports car then?). Sports cars waist energy just idling at the stop light.  This analogy CANNOT be used with computer processors. Higher performing processors DO mean better application performance (assuming RAM and video are up to par).  An application user gets the opportunity to utilize the full power of the CPU much more so than a commuter with a tricked-out ‘vette.