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Change Google's Background Color To Save Energy?
i_like_spam writes "Recent commentary at Nature Climate Change describes an on-going debate about the energy savings associated with the background colors used by high-traffic websites such as Google and the NYTimes. A back of the envelope calculation has suggested energy savings of 750 Megawatt hours per year if Google switched their background from white to black. In response, a new version of Google called Blackle was created. However, other calculations by the Wall Street Journal suggest minimal energy savings."
A site that criticizes google for having a light background itself uses a light background.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Change Background Color To Save Energy?
that actually makes cents!
A back of the envelope calculation has suggested energy savings of 750 Megawatt hours per year if Google switched their background from white to black. In response, a new version of Google called Blackle was created.
Once Google has gone Black, they'll never go back. That's what I hear, anyway.
The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
Why is it called "Blackle" instead of "Blaggle" or "Bloogle"? Blackle sounds like the name of a Rice Krispies dude. Snap, Blackle and Pop. I can hear my Google now.
I wonder how much of the 'energy saved' will be consumed by all those machines they use in the hospital for people who get eye problems from staring at white/grey on black text.
Also, You'd think changing your desktop background to solid black would make more of a difference then just changing google. I spent at most 10 minutes a day with the Google page open. And it's not that there's no other site that uses a white background. How much energy do flashing ads consume btw?
text not only sounds racy but is also legitimately, IIRC, easier to read. So, like, thanks Blackle.
TFT backlights are still on even if entire page is white text on black... they only go off when energy savings kick in and turn the display off.
Donald 'Duck' Dunn: We had a band powerful enough to turn goat piss into gasoline.
lcds have a backlight, it only covers the light for black, it won't save any energy.
PLEASE USE BOLD AND UPPERCASE IN YOUR COMMENTS. A +5 COMMENT IN BOLD AND UPPERCASE SAVES 5 DONKEY-FORTHNIGHTS OF THE ENERGY
The vast majority of people run LCD monitors these days. For the most part they run with a backlight of constant brightness - so there is no energy saving with a black screen.
Only if the LCD detects a dark screen, and adaptively lowers the backlight, will there be any energy saving.
As TFT displays seem to be more common than CRT:s nowadays, the energy savings are minimal to non-existent, as the TFT backlight won't get turned off...
Unfortunately I'm using a laptop and so in order to see the weak grey text on the black screen I have to crank up my screen's brightness.
Anyone got a blank bit of envelope so we can do another quick bit of math?
Most computers these days use LCD screens, and most LCD's use flourescent tubes as a backlight, which is what creates whiteness. If you put your ear really close to your screen, it's also what creates a faint hum. Those tubes draw most of the power on a display, and they don't turn off just because the screen goes black.
I don't think changing the colour to white changes the power draw significantly. It just means more of the flourescent tube light is passing through the screen.
Somehow I suspect 116,144.654 is a bit overblown, and the About section amused me because obviously setting Blackle to your homepage only saves energy if you have Google for your homepage in the first place. I actually use mycatholic.com for my homepage, and you can just customize the colors right there. Also, wouldn't a black Google be really hard on low-vision uses? I think I'd get a headache staring at this all day.
All LCD screens get their light from a single backlight. When the display is on, the backlight is on. Always.
The LCD crystals in the screen act as tiny shutters, and can open or close to allow that light through, or keep it out. Although these shutters take a small amount of energy to open and close, it's insignificant compared to the amount of energy it takes to power the backlight.
A commenter in this thread commented that an Apple 17" display attached to a lab supply is measured as drawing 0.6W less when displaying a white screen than when displaying a black one.
CRT screens probably do draw less power when displaying a black screen, but on the whole they still draw considerably more power than an LCD under any circumstance. On the same note, CRT users may find that the white-on-black scheme is easier on their eyes -- I still have a CRT in my cube at work, and setting my editor to the white-on-black scheme is definitely more legible and less stressful on my eyes. (I still find it more legible on LCDs, although eye strain isn't an issue at all)
I don't get it... CowboyNeal should know better than this. Is he intentionally seeding flamebait?
-- If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done? - Uli's moose
It's not like it takes any less power to transfer the bits or anything like that, so they must be talking displays. Ok, fine, maybe (and I do emphasize maybe) this would work if we were all on CRTs but we aren't. LCDs are dominant these days. Well, their backlights are always on. They work by blocking light, not by emitting it. So their power consumption is constant, regardless of what the panel is doing.
To me this jsut sounds like more BS "Get more from less!" crap from people who probably aren't willing to make the simple changes that will actually, really make a difference.
Look, if you want to use less energy have your computer turn off monitor, disks, and suspend sooner, replace incandescent bulbs with CFLs (there are good full spectrum ones out there that give nice light), get a programmable thermostat and add some weatherstripping around doors and windows. It's simple, cheap and will do way more than crap like this.
Most new monitors are LCDS. LCD's are generally backlit and black is achieved by having all the pixels opaque. So wouldn't black cause a higher power usage? or just break even?
"There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy."
Wouldn't the majority of displays be LCDs?
LCDs use more power to display dark than light colours.
The backlight runs at a nearly constant level (because it has relative lag in comparison to the pixels), the LCD matrix blocks light from the backlight. To block the light (dark pixel) you need to apply a higher voltage, then a light pixel. You'd be better off telling everyone to turn down the brightness setting on their LCDs, as most of these are set from the factory far too high.
1) That would maybe work if CRT monitors weren't a minority. Even if an LCD displays displays a screen consisting entirely of black-color pixels, the power consumption is the same as if they were white.
2) This is obvious slashvertisment. He Slashdotted his Google custom search and he gets ~75% of the that the Google AdWords ads displayed next to the search results will earn.
Caesar si viveret, ad remum dareris.
"Blackle" sounds like "Black Hole".
It will provide at least 50% in power savings.
Then again, that extra money might get taken up in seizure meds.
Apple.com
Now take THAT some environmental organization!
or use alternatives like http://live.com/ / http://ixquick.com/ And its abt time to dump evil google anyway
Can I have free advertising for a lame google wrapper too?
Pretty puhleease with candy..
PS: This is news for nerds? Damn, I'm so ashamed to be one in that case.
I guess this could work with future OLED displays that only emit light on each pixel if it is needed, so a black background would require minimal energy. However, my current Samsung TFT monitor draws 40W whether it is on or off which I believe is due to the power transformer that it uses. Even with alternative displays, energy saving might not occur due to these power transformers.
You realise Live has more or less the same amount of white as Google, don't you?
I'll subscribe to Slashdot when I see a month without a dupe, a typo, or an article the "editors" didn't read.
As long as the text is amber I'm cool with that. Maybe if they replaced the Google logo with the old Zenith logo and made it so that you could press ctrl+alt+ins and it would popup with a debugger...
Task Mangler
is wasted characters. This comment was made entirely from characters cut from other documents. You can help the environment by cut and pasting characters rather than deleting and recreating them.
He mentions the fact that it's only CRT monitors in the article, I guess even a short blog entry is too long to read these days. Why do these stories get reported so much? I see them all the time, I think the media just thinks "oo, big numbers, that'll impress people". From 5 minutes of googling, nergy consumption in the US alone is something like 10e19J/year. 750MwHrs is ~3e12J, barely even a rounding error. Why not report on real energy savings? (hope the maths is right, it's early here still)
Tried inverting the default colors in Firefox a while back - black background, white text, dark skins, etc. I wanted to reduce the strain on my eyes from reading the screen with the room lights off. I was somewhat successful - with certain sites. Other sites didn't respond well to my browser alterations, and I eventually gave up. If that computer was a mac I'd've tried Black Light, but, alas...
Black backgrounds are easier to read - white backgrounds emit a lot of photons, whereas black backgrounds with white/gray/yellow text emit photons at a rate orders of magnitude lower.
I like reading the about page on Blackle.com - except for the light grey bars above and below make it a strain. Perhaps I should find that black skin again...
Learn the rules so you know how to break them properly.
www.teslabox.com
How did this money making scam make it to slashdot??? This is just some guy using Google's adsense to provide search results, and probably make a load of cash out of it. The black colour/power saving thing is just a way of getting you to visit; the whole point here is that once you start using this site as your search engine, you'll start clicking the paid ads, and the owner will start making money (and probably a *lot* of money, given how many times I've seen it mentioned), from a site that is basically nothing more than a single, very simple HTML page, with a google search box on it. So, to reiterate: The email that is doing the rounds advertising this site contains several lies: 1) It claims that Google has set the site up to show the power savings; this is not true, it's just some guy with an adsense account. 2) It claims the search result page is the same as normal google; this is not true, it's the same as a normal adsense search results page, but not the same as normal google, because it's laid out differently, and doesn't have links to things like google images. 3) It claims a noticeable power saving from using it; this is not really true either, because it only really applies to CRT monitors, and even then you'd only really notice it with older CRTs, so it's irrelevant for most of us.
and don't use a fancy scrensaver, just a blank screen.
This has been covered before.
LCD panels work by blocking light from the backlight. Dark colors take more power.
CRT monitors would save a bit of power by not needing to fire the electron gun for black pixels.
Seeing that most people use LCD panels nowadays, I'd say that the proposal would do as much harm as good!
It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
TN+Film ones, by far the most common, do. They have to be energised to go black, their no power state is open which is why the pixels fail to white. VA (P-MVA, S-PVA and so on) and IPS (S-IPS and such) don't because their no power state is black and have to be energised to open and thus fail to black.
Regardless the energy used on the panels isn't much in comparison to the backlight. That's why companies toy with reflective displays (like the old Game Boy Advances). It does really well for battery life when there's not a backlight. That's what sucks the energy.
Look, we're all hemming and hawing around the real issue. You want to see what the real agenda of the Blackle is? Everywhere they talk about black and white "backgrounds", think black and white "people".
That's right, the Blackle crew is seeking to replace all white people with black people. It's a well known fact that black people's internal batteries consume less power than those that power white people, and the dark tone of their skin means that they retain more of the sunlight that all humans need to enable the process of photosynthesis. Not only that, but as any student of physics knows, playing basketball and generally being cool by nature decrease the amount of entropy in the universe. That's right, black people violate the laws of thermodynamics via being hip and talking jive.
Also compare the lifestyles of each group. As an attempt to cover up their small penises, white people buy a lot of high tech gadgetry, creating, in essence, a proxy-dong out of cell phones, laptops, PDA's, Italian cars, etc... The preening of white people accounts for 85% of the world's energy consumption. Proven fact. What's the most extravagant black peacock display? Rims? They spin all by themselves! They're fucking perpetual motion machines! Black people have perpetual motion machines on their goddamn impalas. Does your iPhone have a fucking perpetual motion machine? No it doesn't, because Steve Jobs is white, and the knowledge of perpetual motion is forbidden to whites by the god Ogun. So suck it.
Look, mock me if you want, but I've seen this kind of thing before. Sure, you environmentalists are thinking "Well, if eradicating all people of my skin tone is what it takes to save mother earth, then I guess that I'll have to suck it up and take it." Well, to paraphrase Pastor Martin Niemöller, first they came for the whites, and you did nothing. Then they came for the kitties, and you did nothing. Then they came for the sort of caramel colored guys, but not the South Americans, just the kind of half-white/half black guys. Then they came for the old blues guitarist black guys from Alabama. And then they'll come for you. Is it really worth it?
I, for one, will fight against Blackle's attempt to eliminate all white people. It's an injustice,and must be stopped!
White takes less energy than black on TFTs, so Google is already helping TFT owners save energy :) However, even if the CRT energy savings are significant, they would be nothing compared to the high medical costs of people with damaged eyesight from trying to discern little white letters on black background, and from back problems (for bending towards to be able to discern the white letters) :) The est you can do to save energy is to replace all your CRTs with TFTs, which is what I've done as well. TFTs don't consume much power, my 24" TFT takes only 150W and if it was a CRT it would consume much more. However, I think the main offender in this regard are businesses that continue giving their employees old CRTs and allow office lights and PCs to be on when not needed. The average corporation is orders of magnitude more energy inefficient than the average consumer, so I think that environmental advice should be primarily targeted towards companies. Actually most energy inefficient office environments do have an environmental policy but never implement it. I switch off devices when I don't need them, but I see banks, offices, and other businesses leaving their lights, computers, and screens on even during the night. It makes one wonder whether they enjoy paying high electricity bills.
-1, Evil
Just once more confirming that if the article's title ends with a "?", it's purified bullshit streaming down your internet connection.
:(
And that wastes so much energy
Yeah, but setting blackle.com as your homepage earns blackle.com a whole lot of money from Google Custom Search.
Think about how much energy we would have saved if we all didn't read this spamvertising.
My lynx already displays a black background on google. So now I'm not only saving energy, but my eyes too!
Which is great except, y'know most web designers are retards. The w3C CSS validator will even tell you that if you set one, you must set both background and foreground color. What generally happens is that designers set the background to white and assume text color is set to black, which is a stupid assumption.
This is all covered in the opening chapters of any good CSS (or even HTML) reference text, anybody working in the field should already know this stuff.
Back on topic; if you set your theme to white on black to save your eyes or energy, then the only way you'll be reading many sites (hello Apple) is by highlighting the text. Thank you to all the incompetent web devs out there, I wouldn't pay you 1/10th of what you earn now; you clueless fucking monkeys. Pfft!
I'd bet that not hosting that site in the first place, wastes a lot more energy than every slashdotter with a CRT looking at Google all day.
$ whois www.blackle.com
OrgName: GoDaddy.com, Inc.
OrgID: GODAD
Address: 14455 N Hayden Road
Address: Suite 226
City: Scottsdale
StateProv: AZ
PostalCode: 85260
Country: US
$ whois www.google.com
OrgName: Google Inc.
OrgID: GOGL
Address: 1600 Amphitheatre Parkway
City: Mountain View
StateProv: CA
PostalCode: 94043
Country: US
Article is basically B.S., but a small change in the computer realm that definitely would save energy is eliminating DRM.
Ron
Correct me if I'm wrong, but wouldn't OLEDs use less power with less white? I think those are supposed to spit out light directly from the pixels, which I assume means black would not be powered at all. In a decade or two, those will actually replace LCDs.
I think it would reduce power in plasma screens too. But, those aren't used much for computers.
www.UtterBlackle.se it uses black text aswell for even more savings.
I must say I find the idea of white on black much better for screen time than black on white. I know CRTs are steadily being replaced by LCDs but a lot of people (including myself) still work with CRTs and there was a time that everyone worked with a CRT.
I always found this obsession with black on white configurations strange, it really is bad for the eyes and can cause several other problems (headaches and difficulty getting to sleep at night for instance) this is one of the reasons, or so I heard, that CRTs are being replaced in the workplace.
When you have a CRT turn off the lights and set your browser to google or start a wordprocessor, the room will be lit up entirely. Imagine yourself staring at that thing hours on end, it's like staring at a light bulb for hours. Nobody would stare at a light bulb for that long, but nobody seems to see a problem in staring at a white screen all day. I had headache problems myself with my CRT before I configured my desktop and applications to be as dark as possible, this really helped and I slept better at night.
Probably all of this has more to do with the light intensity of a CRT compared to a LCD (I remember seeing game images when closing my eyes after a long game session on a CRT as if they where burned on my retinas) than with white backgrounds. But I do find that even on an LCD I prefer black and dark colors on my desktop, since it seems to put less strain on my eyes. And because I (and I guess most people using this site) get about 10 hours or more of screen time each day, it really does matter in the long run.
As for the energy saving thing, well energy saving is so hyped right now that everyone seems to want a piece of the action. As pointed out here, I'm also not convinced this black google thing actually saves that much energy. Anyway, I did put the black google as my new start page, just because I like black backgrounds
In Soviet Russia elephant rides you!
Yeah, I actually prefer light text on dark backgrounds too.
Actually, more precisely, I don't like staring into light bulbs much, and similarly, I don't like staring at screens that are outputting a similar quantity of lumens at me. IIRC, my old 19 inch CRT produced about as much light as a 100 watt light bulb, and it sat about two feet from my face for hours on end.
Yes, I did try messing with color schemes in Windows several years ago, but inevitably legibility issues show up with some random application or another. The whole system is based on the assumption of black text on white backgrounds now.
I'm largely guessing here, but I think we can blame Apple for this. Back when I was in elementary school and DOS was the only thing out there, white text on black was the standard. But bright screens are eye-catching -- just the thing to give a brand spanking new Mac OS GUI an extra marketing edge.
Sorry, it's really late/early...I just couldn't resist.
POWER saving of the darkside...
Skywalker: pardon?!
Even if it did save 750MWh a year, so what? If you assume that on average a home uses 1kW an hour (which when you consider all of the slashdolt readers' computers being left on all the time seems like an underestimate) then that's 8.7MWh a year, or just over 1% of that 750MWh, so you're saving at most the energy output of just 100 homes. That miniscule saving comes at the expense of making the pages *much* harder to read. If you want to save energy, then how about making US cars to the same efficiency standards as European cars.
..save the planet!!!!!!
The guy has two figures that he's bandying about with no sources at all. A couple of people have actually tested the idea, and found that it makes at best a tiny difference whether the screen is white or black. My 19" Trinitron draws 65W regardless of screen colour.
Bet his blog ads are doing well, though.
Thankyou.
The only reason this has been posted is because the editor knows that people will read the headline and think "That's retarded. I must post something to say so." Do the editors have any standards at all? This isn't just retarded, it's a scam.
using text console instead of gui saves a lot more energy than some color fiddling .... just think of the energy saved by the graphics card and the bus transfer alone
Fro an LCD, there weill be exactly no savings at all. The backlight is on, whether the pixels are or not. The rest of the LCD does not consume a significant amount of power.
For old-fashiones CRTs, there might be a tiny bit of savings, but one look at the datasheed to the final amplifier for the erelctron beams shows that the total electron beam power is relatively small. Less then 10W. Switching the CRT to an LCD saves much, much more power.
Incidentially, your grapgics card does not care about what pixels it renders.
My conclusion is that this idea was dreamed up by people that have zero clue about how technology works.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
The only way that calculation remains correct is if monitors were still all CRTs. In an LCD setup the backlight is always on (and usually highly efficient) and the LCD "blocks" light. Thus, a black background just causes more light to be blocked and thus heating up the monitor more rather than letting the light out. (Again, with CFL or LED backlights this is relatively minor)
So, I would say that over the next few years that this will correct itself anyway.
The best use for Beryl I've found is the 'invert screen colour' command. It's the only feature I use Beryl for. I'd been looking for something that did this for years! Not in particular for the environment, just for the sake of my eyesight on pages like... even this one! For those using MS Office, you can get the same effect by putting a screen dump into MS Word and selecting it... though you lose functionality somewhat...
Linux konsoles are generally black and saves energy. Windows system are energy inefficient :P
1. What about the number of people who will be in a daze for minutes, if not hours, staring at a new Google website once it goes black? How much electricity will that waste?
2. As someone else pointed out, will it make a difference on LCDs?
3. Is it more difficult to read lettering on a black screen? What about the confort issue?
4. 750 megawatt hours per year. Do you have any idea of what that is representative? Don't people tend to use about 10 megawatt hours per year for an individual household? That is 75 households worth of electricity per year. But wait a second! This is amongst what, millions and millions of people?
As much as I think we need to conserve energy for the sake of conservation, we also need to factor in comfort and whether something is really necessary or not.
Umm, yeah... if you use Visual Studio, you need all the help you can get (even if it does involve inverting the colour scheme).
But still having a black background with bright letters is a rest for the eyes. I read a lot of PDFs in the computer and the average PC usage is 10 hours a day. After I switched to a dark background-light foreground screen my eyes have really appreciated that.
Just try it by yourself, open in a tab the black google page advertised here and in another the normal google page, and cycle through them to see how the black background feels easier for the eyes...
Ubuntu is an African word meaning 'I can't configure Debian'
I don't get it. The backlight on my LCD is always full on, even if the screen is black. So how does having a black screen save energy?
http://michaelsmith.id.au
welcome our new Black overlords
Blatant Racism!
-- Lattyware (www.lattyware.co.uk)
Change MS Windows default background color to grey will same more, a LOT more.
Perhaps you could design a Blackdot?
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
Better yet, why not black on black? The ultimate in savings for those with CRT monitors, and a good test of your physic abilities to understand the search results. So, who is "feeling lucky" today?
sig? what sig? i didn't see any sig...
thanks, this brought back memories ...
http://web.archive.org/web/20010516023935/http://w ww.technicalabuse.com/
If Google provided a darker iGoogle page I would switch to it.
At least with gmail - my laptop gets quite warm just sitting there polling home (probably because I have chat enabled).
Google used to be proud of being lightweight - now it is getting bloated with CPU hungry widgets.
The walls of the swaying cabin were also black, the ceiling was black, the seats were black, the control panel was black, the instruments were black, the little screws that held them in place were black, the thin tufted nylon floor covering was black, and when they had lifted up a corner of it they had discovered that the foam underlay also was black.
Has anybody mentioned the differences between CRT's and LCD's? How about the backlight? Man, I can't believe no one in this whole thread has thought of that yet. What a bunch of losers. You all aren't smart enough to be nerds, you are just dorks. [/sarcasm]
One last thing: Sometimes I wonder; "Is that someone's signature? Or do they type that at the end of each post?"
Its not the crud like version 3 was dude. Its quite good ok.
Yes ive used eclispe and liked it too, but some projects have to use VS.
Id rather curse their Document Helper v8, thats a piece of shit, v6/7 was nicer.
Why is MS's new help worse, it looks more computer generated than human made, getting to be as bad as the gtk docs.
If I view a class , i want to see immediate links/combo popups/shortcuts to all members/funcs/parents/samples, i dont want to click through 5 links to get to the needed info.
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
Exactly what I was thinking! (The way LCD's produce black is to energize all the pixels that need to be black, "illuminating" them, which makes them opaque, and "get in the way" of the backlight, which is always on.) So, this would effectively *increase* the power consumption of LCD monitors, which are more prevalent everyday, and probably the majority of monitor sales these days.
You're just jealous because proper spelling is beyond you. You can't spell "aluminium" properly, either, can you?
Heck,you probably also write "To give the man his do".
Many people have mentioned that the colour doesn't really have any effect.
But what about page size? It would be interesting to know how much energy an average bit takes to transmit across the internet, and whether something like a 50% decrease in the byte size of Google's main page would have a measurable effect.
Doesn't really matter.. with more and more people shifting to LCDs, the power savings may not be as much as projected. Because the backlight is always on in LCD panels, whether they display white or black.
Start using Goatse.cx image as background for your webpages. Or even better, CowboyNeal. I would turn off my monitor immediately and run to the woods.
GeoKone.NET
http://www.thebestpageintheuniverse.net/c.cgi?u=fa q
"I've chosen a black background for most of my text because it's easier on the eyes than staring at a white screen. Think about it: your monitor is not a piece of paper, no matter how hard you try to make it one. Staring at a white background while you read is like staring at a light bulb (don't believe me? Try turning off the lights next time you use a word processor). Would you stare at a light bulb for hours at a time? Not if you want to keep your vision."
-2B
i_like_spam writes
"Recent commentary at Nature Climate Change describes an on-going debate about the energy savings associated with the reading of their latest NCC article. A back of the envelope calculation has suggested energy savings of 750 Megawatt hours per year if people would not read this article. In response, this endless discussion was created. However, other calculations by the Wall Street Journal suggest minimal energy savings."
--- I am known for the ones who want to find me on the net. Is that a privacy risk or a privilege? One might wonder..
Think recycling glass bottles is eco-friendly? Think again; it actually puts more carbon in the atmosphere (uses more energy) than tossing them in the dump and buying new. The same goes for plastic and paper products. Most recycling is just feel-good about yourself. Reducing consumption is where it's at.
My Samsung 170MP 17" LCD: Full black: 49.7W Full white: 49.2W
RCA 27" TV (Only CRT I've got): Full black: 132.3W Full white: 132.4W
I've just tested this on a Sony 15" LCD monitor (M51?).
Google.com: 18.5 watts
Blackle.com: 19.5 watts
Slashdot: 19 watts
so it would seem that using blackle is using about 5% more power.
Exactly, this is the reason that my Windows Mobile Pocket PC Phone runs with a "white" theme I created (plus it increases readability in sunny locations).
However, there are new LCD's coming out with a matrix of LED's acting as the backlight. For those, running black would probably give you a net power saving. However, that would be offset by the cost of the things, they are not cheap.
I am NaN
This reminds me of a legislation passed in India back in 2003 which required all private vehicles (old or new), to have their license plates painted with black text on white background. Earlier, the color scheme used to be just the opposite; i.e. white text on black background. The reason given was that black on white would be more visible during night.
That logic, as it has turned out now, is incorrect . White text on black background definitely causes lesser strain on eyes. Not sure whether this would be true in case of illuminated (computer) screens too.
Oh god no! Don't they know how hard it is for may people to read websites with a black background? Especially with grey, red or blue text????? Black backgrounds might save energy, but they're a usability nightmare! IMO.
Surely someone has already commented (but I can't see it) that this is a blatent slashvertisement. Google custom search is an revenue-generating system whereby anyone can make a page, put up a google search bar, then get ad money off of the search results.
I believe that a considerable energy saving could be made if the guys who write scripts for popular websites would make them a little snappier. This is based on the assumption that every second wasted executing some lame script could otherwise be spent by the processor having an environmentally correct snooze.
IME banks are particularly bad offenders.
A CRT works by firing electrons from the back of the screen to the front... from memory most of the energy is used just keeping the electron gun warm enough to fire electrons. I don't think it matters whether they are actually firing or not.
If that's true, then by not firing the electron gun (black) you are actually keeping it warm for nothing. So a black page is actually wasting energy!!!
We already have Ninja.com... what's the point of Blackle, then?
blackmail?
Are they taking into account LCD monitors where the pixels block light rather than emit it? The back light is on no matter what color is displayed and pixels that are “off” appear as white. What am I missing?
Why bother.
Good luck with such a radical change... I tried to get my company to stop wasting money in our documentation by using semicolons instead of full colons but no one would listen. [yeah... I got that from Dilbert].
This is very unprofessional for Energystar to release such a claim without mentioning that these energy figures only applies to CRT and Plasma. In the case of LCD panels, there is no significant different between the energy used to display white or black, in fact, on LCD, to make black actually use a little bit more energy than white because one need to apply an electric field to change the polarization of the liquid crystal such that the back light will not get through.
Given the fact that recent trends of rapid decline of CRT market and the huge increase on the LCD market, I doubt changing one's web site to all black would actually make any difference in energy consumption.
Where do you think the light goes that escapes? It travels until it hits something, whereupon it turns into heat.
What do you think happens to the light that doesn't escape? It hits the LCD layer, is absorbed, and turns into heat.
In both cases, the same amount of energy is being used to generate the light, and exactly 100% of that light gets turned into heat when it gets absorbed (assuming the monitor's not pointing into outer space, of course). The only possible difference between whether the pixel is black or white is whether the heat is generated in the monitor or in some random wall.
So the black background might make your monitor warm up, but it won't use any additional energy.
When I found out about Blackle a few months ago, it made me really angry. Finding ways to save electricity is not hard, getting people to change their behavior is. Blackle wants you to change your default website and put up with gray-on-black search results. Using their purported energy saving at the time, and assuming something like 300 million regular Google users, the energy saving was less than $0.01/year per person (at any reasonable kWh like $0.10).
This is for changing someone's behavior for an entire year. Instead, that energy saving could be had by turning off a lightbulb for less than an hour. Better yet, replace any single incandescent with a CFL. Bike to work one day of the year instead of drive a car. Pushing for any of these would have dramatically more impact in terms of energy savings.
Look at blackle's homepage - 116,481.368 watt hours saved right now. At a high energy cost of $0.10/kwh, that's just $12. $12 can be saved in a month by turning down the AC or heat a bit.
The bottom line is, if you're going to push for energy conservation, pick ways that deliver a high level of energy savings for how much behavior you have to change. Blackle fails miserably on both counts.
"The universe seems neither benign nor hostile, merely indifferent." --Carl Sagan
I like the black look, that's how I type in a terminal or a word processor (well blue background anyway). And I like the look allot, but LCD displays offer no energy savings in this configuration. Because you need to be applying a voltage to the LC cell in order to get black, black actually uses MORE power than white with LCDs, although not very much. A real power savings does occur with CRTs, plasma monitors, and OLEDs. But since LCDs make up the majority of new monitors, I wonder if this would make any difference at all?
A large screen plasma tv is often the largest energy hog in the home, even execeeding the consumption of the refigerator - the former champ. And these tvs are selling like mad. I heard a our state utiligy official note that much of the growth in electrical consumption was due to new electronic devices.
Large screen projection and LCD are not as big energy hogs.
this "news" is months old and it only holds true for CRT monitors.. and the power saving doesn't happen with lcd displays, which are replacing most desks..
how come no one has pointed that out?
The problem is that pages such as blackle are harder to read. This is due to antialiasing (when activated - and Linux has it activated even below 14pt, unlike Windows XP).
Anyway - why don't you people turn down your CRT brightness/contrast?
So the black background might make your monitor warm up, but it won't use any additional energy.
Of course it will. It takes power to twist the liquid crystals to make black, power that is not applied to make white. The backlighting isn't the issue. Even the original poster mentioned that the backlight is on constantly.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
That link shows exactly how it can be done and still look clean and polished. I don't say this often, but mod parent up!
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
please wear light clothing so that the earth will cool, and Al Gore will not punch you in the face. oh, and change the background color of your web page.
It's only a model.
Who needs Blackle when there's userContent.css? Google's been white-on-black on my machines for years. Same with /. It's just easier on the eyes.
.t { .p, a { .w, a.w:link, q:visited, q.link, q:active, .q {g );
@-moz-document url-prefix(http://google.com), url-prefix(http://www.google.com) {
body,
background: black !important;
}
body {
color: white !important;
}
body, td, div,
font-family: fixed-width !important;
}
a:link,
color: #3366cc !important;
}
a:visited,
span.a,
span.a:link {
color: #888 !important;
}
div, td {
color: white !important;
}
table.histTable td {
color: black !important;
}
div#navbar div,
table,
td,
div
{
background: black !important;
}
input[title=Search] {
background: black !important;
border: 1px solid #888 !important;
padding: 0 3px !important;
}
input[title='Google Search'] {
background: black !important;
border: 1px solid #888 !important;
padding: 0 3px !important;
margin-bottom: 20px !important;
}
img[src='/intl/en_ALL/images/logo.gif'] {
padding-top: 110px;
height: 0px !important;
overflow: hidden !important;
background: url(http://*************/google-black-276x110.jp
}
a#logo span {
background-image: url(http://*************/google-black-150x78.jpg) !important;
}
img[src='/images/google_sm.gif'] {
background-image: url(http://*************/google-black-150x78.jpg) !important;
padding-top: 78px;
height: 0px !important;
overflow: hidden !important;
}
div#gbarl {
display: none !important;
}
}
The obvious problem with this little calculation is that it is CRT-biased. The energystar page that all of the calculations came from doesn't mention what type of monitor it is talking about, but I'm pretty sure they're not talking about LCDs: an LCD's light is always on at the same brightness, and you have to use power to shut off the pixel in order to create black. So an LCD monitor would use just a tiny bit more power to display a black page than a white page. Now, go count how many CRTs your local pile of computers has, and then count it again in a year. Think it will all work?
Posted from the wireless couch.
2000 work hours per year times 100 watts energy savings = 200 kilowatt-hours. At 8 cents/KwH, the electricity savings come to 16 bucks a year per monitor. A new LCD monitor will not "pay for itself" in energy costs over its lifetime. If you're buying a new monitor anyway, it makes sense to replace it with LCD, but you're shooting yourself in the foot to throw out a working CRT.
If all you care about is energy savings and cost is no object, I higly doubt trashing a bunch of perfectly good CRTs and replacing them with LCDs (which took energy to make) is a net energy gain either, but I don't have data to back that up.
Is this like Black Jesus or Black Santa? Blacula, perhaps?
--
So who is hotter? Ali or Ali's sister?
mod parent up, a lot.
The article references a DOE article from decades ago - and clearly before the predominance of LCDs - and another article full of comments about how the tests didn't bear this out on LCDs.
And if you REALLY want to save money on your CRTs, this is small potatoes compared to having a power strip for you monitor so you can cut all power to it at night - modern CRTs have a very substantial residual drain to keep the heater warm.
And you can set your machine to monitor-off earlier than sleeping - and since it wakes up from this fast, there aren't a lot of downsides. (This helps CRTs and LCDs...)
Finally, in many LCDs you can simply turn down the backlight - this is generally the largest power component in an LCD.
Looking for freelance Actionscript (Flash/Flex) or ColdFusion work and/or freelance developers. Email me, put Slashdot
But I'll have to wait until iBlackle comes out. I need my widgets.
If this is true, and assuming that heat is what wears out electronics, then I suppose a white background will prolong the life of your monitor. Too bad, because I prefer black.
Being one of those who can't stand light text on dark backgrounds, the first thing I was inspired to search for on Blackle was "awful background color". And the first hit returned was one discussing Blackle.
Angry Fruit Salad.
Welcome to the Panopticon. Used to be a prison, now it's your home.
From what I remember reading in some research
That's not "research", that's someone's opinion or personal preference.
a light grey text on a black background actually produces one of the best readable displays for your eyes.
"Light grey on black" may have more contrast than "white on black" on a different monitor. So, saying that "light grey text" is more readable is meaningless.
There is an optimal contrast for the human eye for readability; I suspect it's pretty high. But some people prefer low contrast displays, probably because of some visual processing issues.
http://userstyles.org/ has a bunch dark google styles (and for other sites)
While my 17" HP1740 specs say 40-60W, the transformer says the draw is ~100W.
/setactive "Minimal Power Management" /hibernate off /change "Minimal Power Management" /standby-timeout-ac 0 /change "Minimal Power Management" /standby-timeout-dc 0 /change "Minimal Power Management" /disk-timeout-ac 0 /change "Minimal Power Management" /disk-timeout-dc 0 /change "Minimal Power Management" /hibernate-timeout-dc 0 /change "Minimal Power Management" /hibernate-timeout-ac 0 /change "Minimal Power Management" /monitor-timeout-dc 5 /change "Minimal Power Management" /monitor-timeout-ac 60 /change "Minimal Power Management" /processor-throttle-ac adaptive /change "Minimal Power Management" /processor-throttle-dc degrade
.ini file and use regini to load it using the system account (SOON, AT, SMS, Zen, et al);
I guess since now I have three 17" monitors versus two 19" monitors, I'm still not drawing as much power.
I think we could benefit more if we had everyone turn on power management on the systems. While I am against "power off hard drive" due to the crashes I've seen, I favor turning off the monitor after a set idle period. I've pushed a script to do just this on 500 machines. I also turn the AMD's into cool & quiet mode (sans the quiet qFan option) to save power that way.
The batch file to do this is below. You can run this on XP. Switching to "Minimal Power Management" mode is what prompts AMD & some INTEL processors to use the power savings mode on the CPU. If you turn on hibernate, you can save even more power. But that doesn't work well for those of use that are 24/7.
powercfg
powercfg
powercfg
powercfg
powercfg
powercfg
powercfg
powercfg
powercfg
powercfg
powercfg
powercfg
Users must have rights to do this. If you run it in a AD login script, they should have elevated rights to do this. If not, then put the following into an
\Registry\Machine
software
Microsoft
Windows
CurrentVersion
Controls Folder
PowerCfg [1 7 17 21]
The difference was very noticeable last winter. I came in on a weekend and went into a department that is not 24/7 to do work. It was much cooler than previously. This department still had CRTs at the time. I turned them all on to warm up the department while I was there. 30 CRT's pumping 250W generates some heat.
I recently bought a Watts-Up Pro Power Analyzer/Power Meter from SMARTHOME and have been going through my house and office, measuring the consumption of various devices. What I found, was surprising.
First and foremost, my 21" Hitachi CRT from about 9 years ago, draws 70W-75W while powered on and displaying white pixels or any varied background.
I compared that with my 24" Gateway FPD2485W, and it is consuming 90W with any setting, even on the lowest brightness setting. Yes, my LCD draws 20W MORE than my CRT.
My dehumidifier consumes 600W when its on full tilt.
My toaster oven consumes 1300W while cooking 2 slices on the toast setting.
My office fan consumes 140W on speed setting 3.
My entire office, including all chargers, devices, an AMD64/4600+ machine, Palm, flatbed scanner, speakers, iPod, etc. draws 282W total. 90W of that is the 24" LCD.
This myth that using black pixels is going to save money is simply not true... and definitely not true on LCD screens, which consume more watts than similarly-sized CRTs.
I highly recommend picking up a Watts-Up Pro (over the Kill-A-Watt, because the Kill-a-Watt can't work with devices using inverters or generators), and look at your power consumption. My monthly power bill is $180 here, and I'm looking to reduce that as much as I can. I've already replaced every bulb in the house and office with CFLs, which dropped the cost quite a bit. Then the town decided to increase the cost of power, which negated the whole CFL push. Sigh.
Watts-Up can show me exactly what my devices are using, graphed over time, and it can display the actual cost of each watt I consume, in real-time. Definitely worth the purchase price.
What happens when a lot of people print their results or something - you know some will have 'print background colors' giving them a big ass black page that's wasting a lot of ink?
and the children! what about the children!!!
is constant. The energy use is rather minimal too. So, well, duh...
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
How much energy does Window's blue screens save?
lol: You see no door there!
-1 Flamebait
I guess now we'll have to buy carbon offset credits now so that we can continue to use Google without pissing off some stupid asswipe hippies.
By my "back of the paper" calculations, Al Gore burns the equivalent of 927 megawatts of energy in fuel every time they fly somewhere to preach to the rest of us why we should be driving some POS econobox hybrid to save the earth from global warming. (Boeing 767 fuel capacity = 23980 US gallons. Kerosene (aka jet fuel) has a BTU capacity of 132000 per gallon. 132000 X 23980 = 3165360000 or 927.35 megawatts.
Let's not forget those Google guys flying around the world in their 767 "company jet", then driving a Prius to somehow help the environment. WTF?
Hypocritical self-righteous bastards. Leave us all the fuck alone!
Out of order? Fuck! Even in the future nothing works! - Dark Helmet (Rick Moranis) "Spaceballs"
I've been using a firefox extension known as Stylish to alter the backgrounds for many sites, i've got black Google, black Gmail, black Youtube, black Slashdot, etc. I did it largely because I found it easier on the eyes, but it massively improved the appearance of many sites as well, watching videos on youtube is a lot more natural with a black background for videos.
You can save huge amounts of energy by making 100'se little changes a year. If you do it in a away that takes no effort from the consumer, it's that much better.
No single one is worth a damn, but a lot of little ones can make a huge difference.
Did you even consider the saving if this concept spreads to more web sites?
Your logic about Blackle failing is just plain wrong.
I more proper formula would be (Energy savings/Effort) . Now you have a way to eyeball the value of your changes. So if everyone had to spend 20 hours to configure their computer to get the savings that blackle provide, then it would be a complete waste. But since the effort os close to zero, it is well worth the change.
now, on with the show:
"Instead, that energy saving could be had by turning off a lightbulb for less than an hour. Better yet, replace any single incandescent with a CFL.
why not do that AND this?
and this gem:
"Bike to work one day of the year instead of drive a car. "
did you take into account the energy used by the ambulance when they have to save people having medical issues from this? Thats what will happen if someone suddenly does that. It's horrible idea.
Plus, it's not practical for a lot of people.
"The bottom line is, if you're going to push for energy conservation, pick ways that deliver a high level of energy savings for how much behavior you have to change.
If you believe that. then you should like Blackle. It does deliver high energy savings when compared to the amount of behaviors that needs to be changes.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Seriously, WHO TF CARES? What a waste of time and energy. Slashdot needs to wake up and quit putting this crap out. And for all you that responded, GET A LIFE.
Why don't we should all wear lightly colored clothes since our darker colored clothes trap more heat on the earth, which is contributing to global warming? Save the earth from wardrobe eco-terrorism!
The Rapture is NOT an exit strategy.
I could be mistaken, but I believe turning on the LCD pixel implies an applied *voltage*, but no current flows through the pixel. Therefore, no actual power consumption. (Obviously it's not quite perfect, but I imagine changing state is a large power draw in comparison.) I expect the actual power difference to be microscopic. As the WSJ said, it was within the error margin of their (informal) test setup.
actually agree on the numbers (at least the numbers they mention). The dude claiming 750 MW-hours per year gets that number by assuming a 20% difference ((74W- 59W)/74W = 0.203 ) between white and black screens and only counts CRT monitors. He never claims that this savings is true for LCD. What he does do is assume that CRTs account for 25% of all monitors.
The WSJ blogger asked the Energy Star folks who asked the Cadmus Group to do a quick test. They found between 5% and 20% power difference between black and white on CRTs and no difference on LCDs. This doesn't really contradict the first article's numbers. He even confirms the 25% of monitors being CRT number, or rather, he states that 3/4 are LCD.
The real point here is that 750 MW-hours per year is (in more simple units) 8.6 x 10^4 Watts which is the equivalent of roughly 1500 60 Watt light bulbs. So Google switching to black background is the approximate equivalent of turning off 1500 light bulbs worldwide. That's a very, very, very small number compared to the total number of 60 Watt bulbs in use all over the world. Furthermore, nearly 100% of all monitors will eventually (probably very soon) be LCD, rendering those 1500 light bulbs moot. Oh well.
Ok. Time to get back to work.
This won't matter until monitor actually shut off pixels that are black.
As many people pointed out, the backlight on LCDs is always lit regardless of color.
Just turn off your monitors! I mean actually power them off, not let them turn themsleves off.
They still consume some power as long as that little status light by the power button is lit, according to my load meter on the UPS.
Shameless plug alert: Game server control panel
Having a white background might well decrease power consumption, because it makes you more likely to turn the backlight down. Sitting in ambient settings as I am at the moment, with the relatively white /. background, my eyes feel strained if I don't turn the backlight down. I can look at gray sites with a full backlight with just about any lighting conditions.
"If only everyone just did *insert insignificant thing* we could save *insert large number* *insert something that's environmentally damaging to produce* per year"
// MD_Update(&m,buf,j);
ftfa:
The Wall Street Journal did some of their own calculations, which challenge the energy-saving claims of Blackle. In a blog post from May, they point out that the "savings are most likely to accrue from older CRT (cathode-ray tube) monitors, rather than the more modern, energy-efficient LCD (liquid crystal display) screens that dominate the market (representing three quarters of all monitors world-wide as of last year, by some estimates)." They did some tests using Blackle, Google and the New York Times on a CTD and LCD monitor and found the difference "so slight as to be within the margin of error for the power meter"
given that:
1. the majority of monitors in the market today are LCDs
2. that their backlight is always on when there is anything to display
3. the default state of the screen is transparent(so you can see the white reflector behind the glass)
4. in order to change the pixels to opaque you have to pass current through them
isn't it possible that the savings you get from the 1/4 of the CRTs in the entire market viewing google would be at least offset by the additional power required by the 3/4 lcds (which I would guess are more likely to have internet access than the CRT monitors)?
BBBS
an applied *voltage*, but no current flows
Then there's no voltage either. Why?
E = I * R. If I = 0, E = 0, and R could be anything and still not make a difference. Voltage requires current.
I expect the actual power difference to be microscopic.
Multiply by 1,310,720 (1280x1024) for the actual amount of juice used by a whole, single display. Now multiply by the number of displays in use (good luck with that one). Using multipliers of these magnitudes is guaranteed to raise even the tiniest, insignificant amount to something substantial.
I don't read but... If you have a black background won't you need to have white text? I think the real solution to this is to have no visual image of the website, but require all websites to be fully 508 compliant.
Everyone here is carrying on about the calculations. The real calculation I'd like to see is how much google for search revenue the owner of backle will rake in for the 10 seconds it took to create the sight, and 5 minutes it took him to cause a chain of hysteria.
It's possible that what follows will be accompanied by the sound of sarcasm rushing over my head, but I'll write it anyway just in case it might actually be helpful:
I noticed you wrote "Kw/hr." FYI, that's not correct; it's not a ratio of units, but a product -- really, "kilowatts TIMES hours" -- and it's generally written "Kw-hr." It doesn't mean "kilowatts per hour," but rather "the amount of energy consumed in one hour if you're drawing it at a rate of one kilowatt."
I wish the power companies (et. al.) wouldn't use "Kw-hr" as a unit. It'd be like measuring distance in "knot-minutes" or something (the distance traveled during one minute if you're going at a speed of one nautical mile per hour). Dumb and confusing.
(I feel like getting self-explanatory units of energy and power into the language would go a long way to educating the public, implicitly, about energy -- which is an important public issue. When people don't even understand that the "Watt" label on their lightbulb measures the same thing as the "horsepower" figure for their car, I feel like something's not exactly right.)
EOF.
The discussion on whether google should have a white or black background is a bit of a grey area
I wish, so very much, that projectors were available whose light bulbs didn't cost a fortune and need frequent replacement.
My vote goes for a trio of lasers -- red, blue, and green -- that would scan quickly across your wall. I feel like such a thing has got to be possible, and has the potential to be pretty efficient.
This is why we need to get OLED screens on the market. By havinging emissive optical elements for each pixel, there is a direct correlation between the color of the screen and the power used that is far more significant than the on-off states of lcd pixels.
On an OLED screen, black consumes significantly less power.
I wouldn't consider the mad hatter mad. Just reality impaired. He sure can make a mean cup of tea.
Tone down the lighting at gas stations and car lots. Seriously, there are many of these that are so excessively bright that it's literally painful to drive by them at night. While we're at it, get rid of all the billboards shooting kilowatts of light straight into the sky all night. Save power and bring back some of the stars too...
I am going to drive my SUV to the mailbox everyday to get my mail instead of walking.
OK - I looked at your site and while it's easy on the eyes... the front page spelling and grammar errors are appalling. /. - "If you life serverly altered by this my a suggest a path that would be a little more productive like anything."
This hit me so hard I had to post it to
My head almost exploded after trying to read that sentence.
I know you said your page is almost always under construction, I ask that you reconstruct that sentence or construct a new one.
Just follow the instructions on this page. ;)
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
R for an insulator can be very, very high. There's a layer of glass in between the electrodes in question. It would not surprise me at all if the current flow is under a nanoamp per pixel. That would leave a power consumption per screen on the order of milliwatts or less (voltages in question are low). It's hard to imagine that milliwatts per screen is a number worth worrying about.
Ummm... Wow. You must have failed high school physics.
See... In this 'problem' you're told there's an applied voltage. It is given.
So E = I * R
E != 0
I ~= 0
So you have 2 knowns and 1 unknown. This means we find that the resistance is very high, not that it doesn't matter.
LCD crystals use almost no electricity to rotate, which is why it is said (by grandparent for instance) that almost no current runs.
As for the second half of your argument. A large number does not automatically imply large power consumption. Yes, you can treat all 1,310,720 pixels as tiny heating elements. But all of those combined are still negligible as compared to energy used in the backlight.
I can't mod parent up, but it should be. We've been off the grid since about '79, therefore not needing "billions of research on alternative energy", but rather simply putting our money where our mouth was & is. On our 4 building campus, we don't have fridge one, but simply use the top loading freezer to freeze a few 2 liter bottles of water to put into coolers in buildings we occupy and cook in -- and that freezer is in a very shady unheated space for further, significant, savings. We went to LCD monitors when they cost thousands, as the additional power generating capacity (Solarex panels) cost more yet. Cooling (refrigeration) is the big one. Followed by running a computer business with a network, where people expect to come and work, get paid, etc, no matter the weather -- some days we need to run a gas generator to power up the 12 or so machines. When the employees are of the enlightened sort (the kind I have in general), we use those days to scribble on the whiteboards and do design w/o using much power. All our lighting is CCFL, except, duh, windows -- not the one from redmond either. Savings? NO power bill other than sometimes gas for the generator, which is only run when we're making (collectively) a few hundred bucks an hour. Freedom? Can't be shut off. Can't mess up my credit rating if I don't pay the non existing bills. It's good mostly, though of course there's a reaction to our "camping out" from people who are jealous of how well we're doing. Yeah, I have to plan to take a shower -- not just anytime. But I take them. And so forth. I put my money in the bank/stock market -- the whiners are in debt and that says it all.
This debate started, and ended, some time ago when the 'Darken' bookmarklet came out. It saves virtually NO energy on an LCD. It's two reasons for existence are CRTs and making a page easier on the eyes. That's it. But, as is the norm, the techno-pundits (and /.) are slow to catch on, and the argument that is already settled will be slow to be resolved.
Whatever
Several years ago some marketing goob where I worked decided that if you set your printer drivers to the lowest possible resolution you would save toner since you were using "less dots". He sent this out to the entire company. Happily our IT guy publicly ripped him to pieces and told him to stop playing l337 Netwurk Dood.
For LCD's it's all the same, the backlight is always on and it's fixed current. The light or dark is from polarization of liquid crystals and this just absorb the light.
There a very few plasma screen and OLED screen users that this would hold true for.
I would expect with CRT's it takes more power to make black!
Yes, the reason is the electron guns power consumption and output are fixed. But to reduct the output of the electron gun you has to send high voltage to produce a field to block the beam and make that part of the screen dark, so If I cut the RGB lines into the back of the CRT tube itself you should get a full white image.
The Cathode drive is negative, e.g. +130V = black, +30V = white.
So I would expect white to uses less power.
Has anyone really done measurements of this? A reputable group testing on several monitors?
I am always doing that which I can not do, in order that I may learn how to do it. - Pablo Picasso
Isn't that a CRT thing, mostly? I seem to recall that LCDs use the same amount of power (or very close) no matter what they display.
My blog: http://www.seebs.net/log/ --- My iPhone/iPad app: http://www.seebs.net/seebsfrac/
When its white versus black, the niggers always loose. Lynch those apes!
http://www.gizoogle.com/ at least lets you pretend to have a black background...
I played around with raw LCD displays in high school - like the ones in watches and calculators. If you applied a DC voltage to them, the segments (or pixels in the case of a monitor panel) became black, but then quickly faded away. In order to keep the crystals twisted, you had to apply a rapidly switching voltage, or an AC voltage. It's not just a simple change of state.
The wikipedia article on LCDs bears this out.
It's true that very little current is used, but it seems to me that because it requires electricity to stay turned on because the electricity creates a torque on the liquid crystal, an LCD pixel must be using some tiny amount of power all the time it is "on" - therefore a white screen on an LCD monitor will use less power than a black screen. It is microscopic, but that's not the same thing as "no actual power consumption" - and I'd have to think that keeping all the pixels on my 30" widescreen monitor black would be a small but measurable increase in power consumption.
Putting moderation advice in your
You've described the current law for resistive loads. You've neglected capacitance and inductance. In particular, for a capacitor (which an LCD basically is), V = Q/C. Thus, you can have a voltage without a current, as long as you have a static charge.
If they do this for GMail, are they going to call it BlackMail? Maybe just BMail for short? I have a bad feeling about that...
~Eien no Inori wo Sasagete~ Searching for my Hatsumi...
.. the eyeglass industry saw a 50% jump in revenues as computer users in record numbers started needing eye exams and glasses due to eyestrain from white on black websites. A class action suit against google has been filed. Rumors spread of Google acquiring Lenscrafters to actually profit from black google...
A computer user stuck in the late 70's said "I've been urging the use of green monochrome monitors for years now, so whats the big deal about this?"
-- Senior Software Engineer, Attorney appearance services, locallawyerapp.com.
Thanks for contributing something useful to this thread. That should dispel all denying spurred forth in this discussion.
However, while it may be interesting to measure power usage of your display constantly (if you're into that kind of stuff anyway), I am pretty sure that your power meter also uses a small amount of power to do its job.
Of course, this depends (a little) on the display used, for instance, the original GBA's (and perhaps a variety of other handhelds' displays) default state was an ugly yellow (therefore suggesting that a lighter color would use less energy on those displays).
With the popularity of Gmail, I wonder if they'd do the same thing....
..Blackmail....
Wow.
Menus: Linux=function, Windows=vendor, OS X=as little as possible. Makes a statement, don't you think?
This is irrelevant for LCDs, because different LCDs use different twist states for white and black. The polarizers are what ultimately determines if light comes out or not. Thus, even assuming the state of the liquid crystal causes a non-negligible difference in power consumption, what state uses more power would depend on the make and model of the panel. About half of the LCDs I've come across are default-white, and the other half are default-black.
If you're so inclined, take the back cover off of your LCD and unplug the LVDS cable between the TFT panel and the processing board, then turn it on. Whatever color shows up is the color that probably uses the least amount of energy.
On old fashioned CRTs, theoretically black uses less power than white.
On increasingly popular and cheaper LCDs, not so much.
Plasma... I dunno, maybe?
Terrorists can attack freedom, but only Congress can destroy it.
Someone a little further into the discussion posted contradicting measurements. The GP probably owns a special kind of display.
I found that porn sites use mostly black backgrounds with light (usually pink) text. I've committed this research for over thirteen years, and I consider myself something of an expert on the subject...
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
I'm sorry, but your units of measurement are quite strange to me. Can you convert to one of the following less ambiguous units? Thanks!
*Burning library's of congress
*Shuttle fuel tanks
Fact: Everything I say is fiction.
I agree completely with the lightbulb argument. I believe one important reason behind black-on-white is the desire to mimick print media, which makes particular sense with the whole WYSIWYG desktop publishing hype. However, paper is much more tolerable because the white is a diffuse reflector, not a full frontal light source. White-on-black on paper looks terrible, if only for the glare of most black inks.
This has lead me to the conclusion that the best background may be be the 'passive' color of the medium, e.g. white for paper, and black for a CRT. LCDs are harder to judge this way, since white is arguably less active than the white-with-shutters black, but the white is still an active light source.
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
It's been a while since I've been impressed by a scam, but this one does it for me.
The owners of blackle.com created a simple rip-off of Google's Homepage in black. It's so basic that it's probably not something that Google could complain about, so they're ok there.
It's a tiny page, and it's static. All it contains is a basic Google Co-op form that serves back Google's results directly. When users click on the AdWords ads there, Blackle gets a revenue share of the ads. (Nothing too clever yet)
What's amazing is that they got in the NyTimes, the Wall Street Journal, and on Slashdot! They are making a killing!
Perhaps more irritating, Slashdot's editors allowed this statement: "In response, a new version of Google called Blackle was created," to make it through, implying that Google was involved in the creation of Blackle.
In fact, I'm so impressed that I'm going to steal his idea, and create my own!
If you really think this will save energy, feel free to use: SearchForHearts.com which has a dark background and gives 100% of its revenue to support kids with congenital heart defects
... It's the new Green.
I think a much better idea would be to modify the popular browsers to stop running animations on windows that are not visible to the user. Comnputers really do use more power when they have more to do, and running animations that nobody can see anyway is just a waste of power.
Whenever a window is completely obscured or minimized, the browser should pause all animated gifs, flash animations and even javascripts running in that window. This will save energy *and* make the user's system more responsive.
Also, older versions of netscape would halt animations if the user pressed the "Stop" button. Why did they take that feature away?
What? Are you claiming that there is no voltage between hot and ground on a power receptacle when nothing is plugged into it?
As resistance approaches infinity, the current approaches zero.
In any case, flow of electrons is definitely NOT required for two items to have a difference in potential.
On my 19" Sony Trinitron: (measured by my Kill-A-Watt)
Google: 132 wattsBlackle: 106 watts
Of course, I don't spend hours looking at Google. I look at Google's page for about 30 seconds and then go on to the page I'm searching for. So I'd say the energy savings by changing just Google are still overstated. And no, I'm not getting an LCD. I got this at work for free. LCD's suck. When OLED is out I might change my mind...
And BTW, please stop saying LCD display!
I'd like to see lightbulbs rated in horespower. I wouldn't buy them, but I'd like to see them.
The real problem is that 1h = 3.6ks, which is far too imperial a conversion factor to make it reasonable to extend metric second-scale units into (for daily life) more useful hour-scale units.
What sound do people on rollercoasters make? Hint: it's not Xbox 360.
If google wants to save power for real they should re-write their python, java, and C code in assembly for performance. Conservatively they could save 2x the power on C, 5-10x the power on Java, and 100x the power on python since the assembly would run faster. Of course that would require one part of the company to know what another was doing, which isn't very likely over there...
This is old news, John Carmack has been preserving loads of energy with his release of Doom 3 ;-)
What a great way to nitpick a problem that has nothing to do with humans.
If it's wintertime, and there is a furnace of some sort keeping the space warm, than any waste heat from your electronics is going to -help- heat the airspace and reduce the amount of energy consumed by the furnace. Even if your machine was only 2% efficient, it would still be an effective heater... LOL.
The point being that energy consumption by electronics in colder weather does not have a very large impact on energy in your home, when compared to the hot weather situation. Where the energy loss is two-fold:
Your electronics consume energy and produce -unwanted- heat.
Your HVAC system consumes energy to move the unwanted heat outside.
That's not a small point.
From a physical perspective you can have a voltage without a current (e.g. a charged body whose charge remains constant will have a voltage with respect to another object) and current without voltage (e.g. a freely streaming charged particle). Once a resistance is present however, Ohm's law is in force and defines the relationship between current and voltage. In most real world situations (like liquid crystals) there is a finite resistance and so Ohm's law applies.
Ceci n'est pas une sig.
Wow. Just... wow
I believe in the coming years OLED (and other LED techs) will become the dominant types of display. ;P
Black is when there is no light, and this is where displays have most to gain when saving energy. There's no point in lighting up a pixel and then (attempting to) hide it.
If and when we all use a good quality *LED, the power usage will typically be around 95% less with a black background than white.
It somewhat disturbs me that they don't even have a privacy policy posted.
I mean, I am aware that them saying "we won't track you for evil purposes." doesn't actually constitute legal contract or prevent that happening, but it makes me suspicious when they don't even put in the effort to look benign.
if the answer isn't violence, neither is your silence / freedom of expression doesn't make it alright
Use stylish plugin with firefox, choose an all white theme and invert all colors with graphic card drievers: Save energy, the world and your eyes in those looooong coding nights.
Black is the new Green!
Thread modders are a dyeing breed.
Your post is freaking king, though. (please stop freaking him. he has heart trouble)
Please stop stalking me, bro.
On our 4 building campus, we don't have fridge one, but simply use the top loading freezer to freeze a few 2 liter bottles of water to put into coolers in buildings we occupy and cook in -- and that freezer is in a very shady unheated space for further, significant, savings.
Get yourself a shovel and dig a big hole and put your freezer in that.
Back in the days before refrigeration, people used to store things underground so they'd keep longer.
some days we need to run a gas generator to power up the 12 or so machines.
Why don't you just install more solar panels? Or maybe a windmill if you have enough wind in your location.
All our lighting is CCFL, except, duh, windows -- not the one from redmond either.
Skylights are also very efficient forms of lighting. They have some now which collect the light on the roof with a sort of circular lens, pipe it into the house with a big pipe that's reflective on the inside, and disperse it inside with another circular lens thing.
It's good mostly, though of course there's a reaction to our "camping out" from people who are jealous of how well we're doing.
What kind of "reaction" could you possibly get from jealous people? Picketing in front of your campus with signs complaining that you aren't wasteful enough? I'm a little confused about this one.
The problem with black backgrounds is that it is considered unprofessional because it is most often used by sites trying to look cool. It remains the best background color because it is way easier on your eyes. I avoid using a white background unless my clients demand it.
Non-geeks remain horrified when they see how much green text on black I use in my personal desktop choices. It makes a dramatic difference at lowering eye strain though. Luckily, thanks to personal stylesheets, you can recolor just about any website to be a lovely shade of green on black. Or, for the less talented, you can get a vintage 1980's monitor to achieve the same effect.
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
If you compare the energy consumption of CRTs and LCDs in everyday use, you'll find astounding results. Or perhaps not so astounding, as the CRT is sucking 150W or more, while your LCD consumes less than 40W - or 60W if you've got a larger screen. Have You ever measured the power consumption on CRT or LCD/TFT? An average 19" CRT uses less than 100W even with bright white screen. LCD/TFT are better as they use generally 40% less power that the CRT of the same size. CCFL http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cold-cathode_fluores
Now you know wh..
Most dec..
- the fridge. There are mod..
- lighting: use CFLs wherever convenient and LED replacements where there's not enough room for CFLs or switching cycles are important I agree.
Use the CFLs everywhere, avoid choke ballasts with fluorescent lamps because choke ballasts are inefficient. The best way is to try to find electronic ballast http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electrical_ballasts#
Nothing personal man. This is
How does causing your LCD screen to use more power help save power? LCD screens produce black by twisting LCD molecules to *block* the white light from behind. AFAIK their most energy-efficient mode is white, unless you turn the backlight off.
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
Additionally scrolling light text on a dark background shows up the worst in LCD refresh times if you're unfortunate enough to have an "8ms" or higher claimed pixel response rate. Try smooth-scrolling www.hackaday.com to see what I mean.
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
Comment removed based on user account deletion
How bout Blackdot ?
Dan's Data has posted some thoughts on the subject:
r -the-environment/
http://dansdata.blogsome.com/2007/07/27/000000-fo
"I've never been able to figure out how it is that these sorts of aimless fabrications get tacked onto much-forwarded messages. Somebody somewhere along the line had to make up the "Google created" factoid all by himself and add it to the text... but why?
Snopes is full of stuff like this. Sometimes it's obviously someone just making up a story to go with a funny picture because it entertains them to start a hoax or they want to reverse the political slant of a forward they just received, but just as often there's not even that much justification."
I don't know if it's substantial when compared to older TV sets from the 60's and 70's, but I just pulled out my Kilowatt meter and tried a couple of monitors. 2 older Sony 15" CRTs pulled ~3W and ~2W each when they were off, while a slightly newer 17" Gateway monitor was reported to pull 0W when off. Since the 2 15" CRTs aren't used that much, they are now unplugged for the time being. I'm guessing that the Sony's with what appears to be a soft-off switch likes to keep some things powered on all the time, while the monitors with the hard-off switches with the physical contacts that give that nice clicking sound actually do power everything off.
I can see why Sony might do that though. I have another 17" Trinitron that does seem to have the physical hard-off style of switch, and it takes forever to come up from a cold start.
I've always preferred looking at white text on black background consoles as opposed to the 'white on black' displays we have now for almost everything in the gui world. I find my eyes get tired faster with a white background & I'm pretty sure I have reasoned out why.
Think about what you're looking at. What our eyes see is light. If my letters are black & the background is white I have to try and *ignore* the white area to focus on the smaller black letters. Naturally, of course, it's easier to see the white because it is actual light on my retinas.
I've tried to understand why people like the black on white aspect of current guis to the point where it is ubiquitous & the only thing I could come up with is that it resembles reading paper. With paper we're used to black letters on a white background. But paper is a completely different medium - with paper the light source isn't the paper but is instead bounced off of the paper from another source.
Although I would have to say that black paper with white writing would probably be easier too. We just don't have that because it's too expensive.
One of the reasons I prefer a linux console to the gui is because I can work at it longer without my eyes getting as tired.
"and I'd have to think that keeping all the pixels on my 30" widescreen monitor black would be a small but measurable increase in power consumption."
And Aristotle thought that a feather tied to a hammer would measurably slow the fall of the hammer.
Unless displaying black web pages changes the brightness of the backlight (and, you know what? It doesn't.) the energy savings will, indeed, be immeasurably trivial.
Just like the writers of the article found.
Why yes, I AM a rocket scientist!
Save your eyes with darker backgrounds. I keep my monitor at 75% brightness at least, often down to 50. I can barely take the full-on glow lately, although I do have to do it for looking at badly-lit pictures and while in shadowy games. Cranking it up just hurts and tires your eyes out even more than normal (at least, from my experience).
98% of America's teens drink alcohol, smoke, and have sex. Put this in your sig if you like bagels.
i like the light background of google, saves lot of browsing time for me on dialup :)
Best Regards, Eliena Andrews
WTF. They stole the idea from http://www.toscy.com/ Its been running from there since mid 2006.....
Will become... BLACKMAIL!