Today the BBC reported on the environmental impact of microprocessor development. Yea this is actually rather horrible news to someone like me whose life is almost 75% centered around manipulating the electrons that whiz around inside those chips. I'm not really sure where to go with this. I suppose to some extent I'm happy that I don't purchase new video cards every 6 months and a new computer every 2 years. My old computer was with me for 4.5 years before I retired it. However this matter cannot and should not be ignored. Now that I do know I'll surely keep my eyes and ears open and contribute to the cause whenever I should get the chance. In the mean time though there should be an overwhelming demand from the industry to lower power consumption on microprocessors. The Pentium 4 and the Athlons suck 65+ watts on the high end and around 60W in the middle level. This is crazy! Thats a whole lightbulb. Now combine this kind of processor with the upcoming NV30 from Nvidia which is going to have 125M transistors. Allegedly this video card is going to require its own external power supply or it will require extra power via a HD power connector. This is insane. Its like a double fuck. First fuck during manufacturing. Second fuck during the entire usable life of the product. I guess this is sort of like the car industry where the focus is on power when clearly its not actually needed as opposed to a balance between real world processing requirements coupled with reasonable power usage.
While I was at the PML today, I figured studying would be too logical, so I thought I'd check out the wayback machine and went to the CNN website from June 20, 2000. This is during the midst of the huge economic boom. Its stunning to see the way news was reported back then. The news thats on the front page is genuine news. There isn't an ounce of gossip or celebrity bullshit until three quarters of the way down confined appropriately in the Entertainment section. Looking at their page today makes me want to puke all over their server farm. No, actually I feel bad for the servers having to serve that shiznit. They should use that server capacity to serve Linux ISOs or something.
Linkses:
Republican party: Behind the smile.
Are people so sad that they have to live through J. Lo???