MPs urge more action on green IT The House of Commons Environmental Audit Committee has said the government should be more ambitious in its strategy for greening the use of information technology. Part of its Greening Government report (pdf) highlights the Greening Government ICT Strategy, launched in July 2009, with a claim that it is time to raise the …
I bet if I wandered round the house of commons at 2am several things would happen
1) I would find a load of PCs left on.
2) I would find a load of PCs left on that don't even have powersave enabled for the monitor, so the wobbly windows logo will be bouncing about on view all night
3) I would be shot.
Maybe our beloved leaders should insist that all future desktop machines they buy are atom based. I have an Acer Revo, which is wonderful, and sips at the electricity. Reviews complain about the 1.6Ghz atom being slow, but with a reasonable OS (i.e. not Vista, or probably W7) it's a perfectly usable desktop system. Come on, we were all perfectly happy to use sub gigahertz machines for word/excel only a few years ago.
Sure it's crap at playing the latest FPS, and it's movie playback is just passable. You wouldn't want to start editing your 12 megapixel Nikon raw files in photoshop either if you are in a hurry, or laying down some funky beats for your top 10 hit, but none of these things should be of any interest to the commons.
It will play movies from Youtube, so they will still be able to watch Gordon attempting to smile and look genuine.
Oh, and even better, it's cheap! £160 without an OS, and I'm sure HM Govt have already sold their souls to M$, so they'll have a nice volume licence install CD, so loads of money left to clear out the moats and install a plasma screen in the duck house.
As the wide works for local gov, mabye they could join the 20th centuary and let the many of the office based staff work from home.
The wife has to drive 30 miles, to fill out some documents on the database, print them out then go to visit a client, because a) they won't issue a laptop & b) they only have limted remote acceses for a handfull of managers.
pathetic.
And they talk about telecommuting where...? <watches tumbleweed roll by>
The thing that could make the biggest difference of course gets nary a mention, because not only might it work, it might actually improve people's quality of life at the same time, and the doomsters can't have that. Besides, the gov't are too spineless to stand up to the likes of the CBI who want to be able to look over their "untrustworthy" staff's collective shoulders all day to make sure they're continuing the illusion of work.
Sigh. In the 15 years since I (very successfully) took part in a home/mobile working programme, it seems we've actually regressed.
And so it'll continue: people remain obliged to do a drive they dislike at a time they hate into an office they don't want to be in and that saps morale and hurts productivity while sanctimonious greenies talk about beating them with a big stick for driving their cars to do the jobs that provide the taxes that subsidise their ludicrously expensive, inefficient and unsustainable sustainable energy.
I concur: I bought a Revo (the £160 quid OS-Free version) and have it stuck to the back of my telly. It's more than enough computer for casual use (like what MP's would use it for) and it is incredibly energy efficient.
I've got Win7 on it, and it seems to do most things alright: plus spotify has just made my 20 years of record collecting irrelevant.
They keyboard and mouse are a load of bing, though, and have been replaced by a wireless set.
I'm currently contemplating changing the work PC buying policy and insisting on Revo's there, as much of our apps are delivered via a browser or citrix. Roll on huge IT savings.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
