Most Excellent Person

By Editor

Although it is Friday (woo) it is unfortunately cloudy (boo); so no pub visit for the team today!

To make us all smile, and thanks to an office birthday, we have been cheered up with cake.  

The week has seen everyone get their heads down and work hard, but there was one person who stood out more than others thanks to his impressive creative turnaround, therefore it really was no surprise that this person received the most votes for Most Excellent Person of the week.

Congrats Simon Sturgess: 

Simon turned around awesome graphics super quick, really helping the team, and with no hint of a whinge!

Now the creative lot have had three wins the tech team are seething, and are ready to prove that they can win next week - so, who will pull it out the bag? Only a week until you can find out! 

Wasting energy through your search engine

By Editor

The web page you are using could be wasting energy!

A little known fact for most web users is that web pages using all-white pages expend about 74 watts of energy to display.
GooglePhoto: Google

White space is usually a popular choice for a lot of websites - but if designers knew how much energy they were wasting would they change the choice of white?

So, what is the alternative? Well, using a black web page only uses about 56 watts of energy, which is obviously a lot less than its white counterpart.

EcoIron did a bit of maths, to show the difference between the white page and the black page.

"Take at look at Google, who gets about 200 million queries a day. Let's assume each query is displayed for about 10 seconds; that means Google is running for about 550,000 hours every day on some desktop. Assuming that users run Google in full screen mode, the shift to a black background [on a CRT monitor! mjo] will save a total of 15 (74-59) watts. That turns into a global savings of 8.3 Megawatt-hours per day, or about 3000 Megawatt-hours a year. Now take into account that about 25 percent of the monitors in the world are CRTs, and at 10 cents a kilowatt-hour, that's $75,000, a goodly amount of energy and dollars for changing a few color codes."

This comment is dated 2007, but even taking into account the evolution of monitors, these are pretty outstanding stats! 

BlacklePhoto: Blackle

Blackle was one web search page that took on board the need to save energy.

Blackle saves energy because the screen is predominantly black. "Image displayed is primarily a function of the user's color settings and desktop graphics, as well as the color and size of open application windows; a given monitor requires more power to display a white (or light) screen than a black (or dark) screen." Roberson et al, 2002

Powered by Google it actively encourages users to set the page as their home page and to tell their friends about it.

Next time you start typing in Google or opening Firefox, just remember that by changing the search engine you could be saving energy; it is important to work on the small changes to help power the big ones!