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Listed below are comments made by techmind between Sunday, 25th May 2008 and Friday, 30th May 2008.

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Blackout Britain? 9:22pm on 30 May 2008 It's not the main story, but it got me thinking. How do they decide which areas to shut off in the event of the need for "emergency load shedding"? I've no-doubt it's done automatically, but does the National Grid maintain a list of places which will be the first-to-go? Is the list randomly populated? Is a new selection picked daily? Or does any one region get put to the back of the pack after having suffered an outage?
Fare's fair? Penalty fares and you 9:16pm on 30 May 2008 A couple of times per month I travel from Gatwick Airport towards London on a Sunday morning. It is not that unusual for there to be long queues at the ticket-machines; a few months ago I queued for over 10 minutes. There's six ticket machines, but normally at least one or two are out of order. The ticket machines offer so many permutations of tickets that even regular travellers have to proceed very carefully. It really confuses the tourists. The list starts with 7-day season tickets, then for day-tickets there's "Southern only" "FCC only" "Not Gatwick express" and a jumble of singles and returns. I'm sure they could sell tickets faster if they simplified the choices. I put this to them once, but the written reply was that they have to list all the tickets to allow fair competition between the rail operators. I think that's crazy.
If you need a more complicated ticket, the queues at the human-facing ticket office seem to be at least 10-15 minutes at most times of the day - even at 9pm on a Friday evening.
The Green Cost of Data 11:41am on 25 May 2008 I believe Google has done quite a lot of work on reducing both the hardware costs and the energy requirements of its data centres. I'm sure you will find more information on the web.

In general, modern computers and processors incorporate power-saving features - when fully activated these shut-down or slow down parts of the processor or system which are not required, millisecond by milisecond. This helps to ensure the overall power consumption is proportional to the actual computational workload. Energy-use can be reduced by writing software in such a way that these power-saving features work effectively.

Furthermore, efficient software which accomplishes the required task with the least computational effort will also go a long way to reducing data-centre power consumption. Energy use is in the hands of those who write the programs and design the data-structures. The exponential increase of computing-power and storage in recent years has not provided much incentive for efficient-coding.

As an aside, an interesting calculation would be how much extra power across the word is used by resource-hogging anti-virus software on all the work and home computers.

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