Green
Where is Microsoft’s Green Policy?
Wednesday, November 14th, 2007I was having a read over on Greenmonk, a blog by James Governor following his visit to the Microsoft TechEd IT Forum held at Barcelona this week. James raises a valid point about Microsoft’s policy on environmental issues. Like, where is it?
I recently attended a Microsoft partner event at Reading about Central and Local Government. One of the speakers - sorry I forget his name - was talking about the desktop proposition for Government and the vast opportunity for licensing the new desktop products - Vista, Office 2007 etc. He also mentioned that he could talk for a day on how Vista is the most green Operating System out there and that Mcrosoft is doing mre than the other vendors on green issues. I must admit, I was taken back by this bold statemet, but nonetheless, it would be good to see the stats and the theory behind that.
Whatever your view on the environment and green issues, it is a hot topic in the UK and one that should be seen as an opportunity. The other big vendors, like Sun and IBM are putting out green policies and also setting the framework and forums for helping businesses address green issues. It would be good to see Microsoft make a stand too.
Saving energy, every little helps
Friday, September 14th, 2007I was reading an article this morning while on the library written by Richard Ehrlich in last weeks Saturday times magazine. He was looking at the 3 main ways for cooking sausages:
1. Frying pan 10 -20 minutes
2. Grill 10 - 15 minutes
3. Roasting 20 -40 minutes
These are all ways that we are familiar with for russling up a tasty banger. The problem is, that we get into habits of doing things the same, passed down from parents, habit and lazyness or comfortableness.
His point was that sausages can be cooked in frying pan with a lid on the pan using 3 minutes of cooking time and 2 minutes of residual heat cooking at the end with the stove turned off. Plus pork can be eaten slightly pink nowadays.
So we’re looking at a minum saving of 7 minutes cooking time. Sounds like nothing, but imagine if this caught on and became the new way to cook sausages. Imagine how much electricity would be saved if adopted World over.
You could apply this concept to boiling the kettle - only fill up a mugs worth of water when boiling. Saves water and minimises electricity required to boil less water.
This pricinciple is the same as turning off your production servers when you don’t need them, like at night and over the weekend.
