The reasons why windmills wont work...

[dennis]

I agree one PC is far too restrictive. I use several. Looking about I can see 2 Toshiba, 1 HP, 1 Samsung, 1 IBM, and 1 Fujitsu and that is only the laptops. There are some at work too.

[John Rumm]

Not if you are the builder and you can pitch the roof in a day using only semi skilled labour! ;-)

[The Natural Philosopher]

Yup. Pre-made warren trusses use less wood and less energy to make and less labour to erect. The downside comes when you need to use the space for something other than holding up the tiles.;-)

Or your roof is not a standard size!

[Mark]

But you don't necessary need higher clock speeds to get better performance. Improvements in arcitecture has meant clock speeds can been lowered. Take for example the Pentium 4 vs the Core2Duo chips.

M.

[Mark]

Or Windows Vista?

M.

[The Natural Philosopher]

either you need to go twice as fast, or have twice as wide a bus...;-) in crude terms. yes, I know its not that simple..but in essnec you need to use a certain amount of charge at least - which tends to equarte to energy - to flip a bit.

Prigress has been made towards reducing the physical size (and hence charge needed) of the bits to be flipped, but we are approaching the limits of the technology now.

Unless we move away from silicon semiconductors, power and megaflops are pretty much linked. Go much smaller an quantum noise will start flipping the bits all on its own..never mind the problems in making stuff by photolithography that is approaching the wavelength of the light used to do it..

Its an interesting exercise, to calculate how MUCH power we use to essentially run a computerised society. An exercise I wont actually attempt right now tho.

Transport and heating though, are the big areas to tackle.

[The Natural Philosopher]

I'll admit to the picture, but not Vista.

[Rod]

Or Windows Vista and lots of IE windows open displaying animated gifs, flash objects, etc., etc. - mostly (all?) unwanted advertising. I temporarily had a new powerful laptop with Vista a couple of months ago. It was much slower in most respects than my relatively old Windows XP laptop.

[Fevric J Glandules]

I'm sure I first heard that at least a decade ago...

Massive improvements have been made in terms of energy efficiency. Some of it from reducing the voltage, some from reducing the physical size of the doodahs.

[Jules]

To be honest, I think the pointless tasks far outweigh the useful ones most of the time. A lot of people don't *need* a computer except for a bit of WP, reading of email, and maybe a bit of spreadsheet stuff once in a while. The core uses of business computers haven't really changed much in the last 25 years - and I don't think we've really gained much in the way of useful capabilities along the way.

[Jules]

ISTR ARM claiming that there were more of their processors in use than there are people on the planet - which is even more surprising when you consider how much of the world's population don't have any kind of computing device at all.

cheers

Jules

[Tim Ward]

Not sure how many of them there are on my desk just right now - it *might* just still be in single figures. And that's without going round children's bedrooms counting up dead phones ... oh sorry, you said "in use".

[Dave Liquorice]

Thanks for that Peter, they are post the time I dug about the 'net looking for stuff. Looks like some are starting to look properly at "noise" and debunking the idea that "if you can't hear it it can't hurt you" attitude.

[dennis]

In a previous job I had to work out how much power a VoIP network would use if it replaced the UK telephone network using the IP phones of the day.. it is staggering. A normal phone line is very low power and its mainly in the exchange. VoIP needs power in the exchange and power for the phone and the router and other bits. There was something like a thirty times increase in power to deliver the same level of service. BTs 21cn does VoIP on the line cards BTW and doesn't increase the power much.

Everything helps with the current price of energy.. if industry paid >10p kWh then things would be done differently but they pay nowhere near that. Anyone interested in setting up a co-op to buy and sell power to homes at cost price?

[dennis]

I'll admit to both but I bet my notebook is using less power than your machines.

[Roland Perry]

In message , at 20:22:32 on Tue, 11 Mar 2008, Andy Hall remarked:

I don't understand the question. I spent today in an office (within an office complex) where the only computers were my visiting laptop and the room's usual occupant's laptop (along with many people in that office complex, they don't have a conventional PC).

[Roland Perry]

In message , at

09:09:44 on Wed, 12 Mar 2008, Jules remarked:

Probably all-time sales for use in mobile phones and things like Nintendo DS. Many of which aren't "in use" any more in any meaningful sense.

[Roland Perry]

In message , at 21:29:18 on Tue, 11 Mar 2008, Andy Champ remarked:

I just have a plain blue desktop [1].

On the other hand, I was probably one of the first people in the UK to have a version of Windows that supported desktop pictures at all - the folks at Microsoft rushed over to their biggest customer in Europe (for such I was at the time): "look what a neat thing we are experimenting with..."

[1] These days I reserve fashion statements for my browser home page, currently:

[Roland Perry]

In message , at 13:16:05 on Wed, 12 Mar 2008, Rod remarked:

I run Firefox with Flash blocked. Surprising how much stuff I don't see!

[Roland Perry]

In message , at

09:07:16 on Wed, 12 Mar 2008, Jules remarked:

Things like Google Earth have changed the way I plan site visits. It's now possible to avoid the "last hundred yards are the worst" syndrome that previously dominated.