I’m alerted by a correspondent to a new and wonderful way in which our tax money is to be spent, the Green Shift Programme. This is a vital and important attempt to cut the CO2 emissions from the nation’s home computers.
No, really, it’s both vital and important. Seriously.
IT equipment is thought to generate 35m tonnes of harmful CO2 gas each year.
Out of 24 billion tonnes of anthropogenic emissions. Or if we’re only worrying about the UK, 550 million tonnes. So PCs account for 6% of emissions.
Ooooh, yes, got to spend money to limit that. So, indeed, they are doing:
The public-private taskforce will be led by Manchester City Council.
It has drawn up a list of proposals – called the Green Shift programme – which includes an environmentally-friendly PC service.
PC functions, such as Microsoft Office, internet
browsing and e-mail, are hosted in a network of "green" data centres
rather than on individual PCs and delivered to users through a
broadband connection.
The data centres will use concentrated energy efficiency
measures such as non-fossil fuel power and will remove the need for an
energy-hungry PC in each household.
Users will be able to access the service through a small desktop box.
It is claimed the PCs will use 75% fewer resources in production than standard PCs and last three times as long.
Local Government Minister Phil Woolas said:
"Cyber-warming is a massive issue and that is why we have taken
decisive action with the appointment of the taskforce.
"The new taskforce is the first of its kind in the world and is a sign of how serious the UK is about tackling this issue."
Can’t you feel Gaia sighing with relief as The Guardian and the Daily Star (what on earth is this story doing there?) reprint the same press release?
However, for those who don’t know their computing, this is actually a return to an earlier model. Instead of having all the processing power on your desktop, that all sits off somewhere else, on the main server, and you have a dumb box, just able to handle the graphics and the internet connection.
Earlier types (without the graphics nor the internet) were the DEC PDP 11 for example, from the 1970s. The maker of which once famously asked why anyone would want to have a computer in their home? There’ve been more recent attempts to revive this type of architecture, Sun tried it along with Oracle (server/client computing, X-Windows, dumb terminals, mini-PCs and so on, all to try and beat Microsoft).
So, the basic idea is to take a retrograde step in terms of computer architecture. Might even be a good idea but I doubt that Phil Woolas would have come up with it himself. Being President of the National Union of Students isn’t known to equip you for original thought.
And of course it isn’t his idea, nor is it the idea of the UK government. It actually comes from the European Union. Here’s the basic description of the project. Here’s the structure behind it.
The objective of ICT research under the EU’s Seventh Framework Programme (FP7) is to improve the competitiveness of European industry – as well as to enable Europe to master and shape the future developments of these technologies so that the demands of its society and economy are met. Download
4-page overview of ICT in FP7 (172KB)
The EU Member States have earmarked a total of € 9.1 billion for funding ICT over the duration of FP7; making it the largest research theme in the Cooperation programme, which is itself the largest specific programme of FP7 (with 64% of the total budget).
FP7 research activities will strengthen Europe’s scientific and technology base and ensure its global leadership in ICT, help drive and stimulate product, service and process innovation and creativity
through ICT use and ensure that ICT progress is rapidly transformed into benefits for Europe’s
citizens, businesses, industry and governments.
Nine billion of the European smackeroonies are being spent on this sort of thing, (about £6 billion in real money).
Again, this really could be money well spent. It might be that there’s a gap in private investment in such things, could really be true that we need to give such investigations and research a boost of public money. There are, after all, possible externalities, possible benefits to the world at large which a purely free market system is not bringing us.
So, to reiterate, what they’re going to design is a system of dumb terminals. Data and programs reside centrally upon the servers, you only call them up over your broadband connection when you need them. This means that you can have a much simpler, cheaper, longer lasting and less energy consuming machine sitting on your desk.
Excellent. Despite the fact that this has been tried a number of times before and always rejected in favour of the current system, it might really be true that this time it will work. So, our only final question is whether we need tax money to be spent finding out or not? Has there really been a market failure here?
So your email sits on someone else’s servers (Gmail?) Internet browsing….err, that’s the way internet browsing works now actually. Microsoft Office? You mean wordprocessing (Google Documents?), spreadsheets (Google Documents?)…anyone ever do anything else with Office?
Right. So, at present, there’s a free to use system that does all of this, entirely designed and funded by some rapacious capitalists.
Can someone please tell me why we’re going to spend £6 billion quid on doing all of this again? Using a City Council (clearly, one of the most efficient organizations in the world) as project leader?
Does, err, Phil Woolas actually know of the existence of Google? Anyone?
I’ll email him (using Gmail, that system that resides on someone else’s servers, reducing the power demands of my own machine) and tell you what, if anything, he says.
Oh. Phil Woolas does not have an email address. Nope. Aha!
And I get an instant response!
Thank you for sending an email to Phil Woolas, Member of Parliament for Oldham East and Saddleworth.
This
office receives many hundreds of email messages every week and we
therefore regret that we are no longer able to accept any queries via
email.
If your query is urgent, please telephone our constituency office on 0161 624 4248.
Alternatively, you can write to Phil at Lord Chambers, 11 Church Lane, Oldham, OL1 3AN or House of Commons, London, SW1A 0AA.
With all best wishes and many thanks for your understanding in this matter.
PHIL WOOLAS MP
Oldham East and Saddleworth
Yes, it really is true! The man spending your money on a new way for you to get email does not use email himself!
Truly, it is wondrous the way we are ruled today!
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