Caught up today with Rob Bernard, Microsoft’s smartie-pants green dude, who elaborated on CEO Steve Ballmer’s TOP-SECRET memo to his 90K employees laying out the company’s ambitions on energy and climate change. The memo contains juicy nuggets like: “Our goal is to reduce our carbon emissions per unit of revenue by at least 30 percent compared with 2007 levels by 2012.” (Kinda hard to unpack what that means, I know.)
Microsoft has been criticized by some as behind the times on green, compared to, say, a Google, but Bernard, who has been on the job about a year and a half, says his work has buy-in from head honchos and the company is in it for the long haul. Microsoft’s sustainabilty focus is three-pronged: using IT to improve energy efficiency; providing the technological backbone and savvy for scientific breakthroughs; and reducing its own environmental impact (e.g., see the attractive quote above).
Question: What do Gristers think are the most effective ways for Microsoft to pitch in on the climate crisis?
Gore on the Daily Show: extended dance remix
The must-read solutions book by Al Gore
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sindark Posted 9:16 am
17 Apr 2009
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sindark Posted 9:19 am
17 Apr 2009
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sindark Posted 9:29 am
17 Apr 2009
It's absurd that Word on a 2GHz system runs about as quickly as it used to on a 300MHz system or even a 486. With leaner code, much less powerful machines would be required to do the same things, and they would not need to be replaced as often.
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objective7 Posted 3:51 pm
20 Apr 2009
@page { margin: 0.79in }
P { margin-bottom: 0.08in }
-->Recently Grist has elected to refresh
its web site design so that its form and function follows the
prevailing mode of rolling out more complex layouts laden with
feature-rich multimedia support. Certainly Grist is aware that this
practice is resource-intense for each supporting node, in that it
requires more storage and router capacity due to the larger bandwidth
demands, and more operational overhead, which has real ecological and
financial costs. The question is, what real-world environmental cost
calculations has Grist made? One cost borne by the present
incarnation of its service pertains to the embedded print option. For
example, click on the "Print" icon and a print dialog box
appears with no "text only" print option. Many articles
could easily be formatted to fit onto one 8.5x11" page with
margins set to .75", but Grist.beta fails to make the inclusion
of this important option a priority, at a time when many people
viewing web pages from computers still print out articles, however
short their length on paper which is probably 30 percent PCW at most.
This unimplemented measure requires far more print space and ink on
average, which adds real costs for everyone, upstream and downstream.
While it is true that there are products like greenprint, smartprint,
etc., some of these programs are still limited in their operational
effectiveness and platform support, and many people will never use
them due to their cost or other requirements.
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erinrichie Posted 5:40 pm
20 Apr 2009
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