Ser amigo do ambiente... online

O jornalista Bill Thompson reflecte sobre os custos energéticos da utilização da Internet, seja de uma simples página pessoal ou blogue, seja de um avatar no Second Life.

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The offline cost of an online life

The technology we use is accounting for more and more of the energy we consume, says Bill Thompson. And we need to know just how much.

The next time you want to search for something on the web, try going to www.blackle.com instead of your usual search engine.
The page you get looks remarkably like Google, and queries are fed through to Google, but there's one obvious difference.
Instead of the generous amount of white space which has characterised Google's home page since its 1998 launch, the page is mostly black.
Heap Media, the Australian company behind Blackle, claims black pixels take less power than white and so using its search saves energy. It believes that small things matter when it comes to reducing our energy use, limiting our CO2 output and reducing the likely extent of global warming as a result of human activity.
Whether or not turning off a few million white pixels makes a measurable difference is debatable, and Google has challenged the assumptions behind Blackle, especially when it comes to LCD screens.
It seems to matter for old-style CRT monitors but not for flat screens, according to a paper written in 2002 by Judy Roberson and others which noted: "among the few LCD monitors in the table, the power used to display a white screen is indistinguishable from power used to display the desktop.
"Thus, it appears that display color is a significant determinant of on power for CRTs, but not for LCDs."

in BBC News - Technology