Slashdot Mirror
Power-Saving Web Pages: Real Or Myth?
An anonymous reader writes "Are dark webdesigns an energy saving alternative to a snow white Google? The theory is websites with black backgrounds save energy, based on the assumption that a monitor requires more power to display a white screen than black. Is this a blatant green washing ploy by Blackle.com, or an earnest energy saving tweak for a search tool we use every day? To find out, PCSTATS hooked up an Extech Power Analyzer to a 19" CRT and a 19" LCD and measured power draw — turns out there is a not insignificant difference ..."
Did anyone here actually believe this? The big power draw is from the backlight, which is still running even with black pixels.
If you can't convince them, convict them.
Can I do an image search or a news search right from the home page? I am not sure if Google Custom Search supports these features beyond a simple web search.
There Can Be Only One...
"turns out there is a not insignificant difference "
Double negatives are not not bad.
I am interested in black background websites because they look prettier on OLED displays (Old Samsung Galaxy here as a reserve phone) . Readability should be driving the decision on the colours, not some % power saving.
If you wait a few seconds, your watts will turn into joules.
buy an LCD (or LED) screen. That will save much more electricity than changing the colors you use on it. I can never figure out why so many energy saving tips focus on such small things (e.g., turn off the water when you brush your teeth) but ignore the big issues (like my neighbors who water all afternoon in 100 degree heat and have a stream of water running directly into the sewer).
Oh god. I was wondering why my screen randomly seems to increase/decrease in brightness.
I hate this feature. It makes me think someone slipped me some acid, and then I'm disappointed, because no, it's just bad attempts at saving power.
The idea is valid for all of the smartphones running OLED displays. OLED's take no power (or very little) to display a black pixel. It takes full power to display white.
Power is more of a concern on mobile devices and mostly dark/black displays will allow AMOLEDs to turn off some pixels to save power and extend battery life.
"Are not dark webdesigns an energy unsaving alternative to a snow white Google? The theory is that websites with black backgrounds don't save energy, based not on the assumption that a monitor requires more power to display a white screen than black. Is not this not a earnest endeavor by Blackle.com, or a not earnest not green not washing not not not not not ploy by not Blackle.com? To find out, PCSTATS didnt't not hook up an Extech Power Analyzer to a 19" CRT and a 19" LCD and measured power draw — turns out there is a significant difference ..."
Mine would have been shot down for being too readable though.
Support the EFF and Creative Commons. The war is coming, and they're supporting you...
There is a not insignificant parsing complexity.
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
This.
It is obvious that black is good for the earth and white is bad.
Why do you think we have climate change? Because of white, of course. No one has even heard of climate change before white messed everything up.
Not only is white bad, white is unhip. What do you want at your disco? White lights? No, black lights produce the right mood.
Let's fight the white and save the world!
Even when Google first did this, they had a disclaimer that said that black web pages don't really save power. It's just an awareness campaign. This is not news.
That is ontopic. You try to read that page, then turn off the computer and leave internet for a few days. That is really power saving
Maybe PCstats should apply their own power-saving strategies to themselves (less CPU-intensive flash crap).
Anyway it appears only the CRT has a significant savings with White google versus Black blackle.com. LCDs gain almost nothing.
My AC stalker: " I personally agree with your posts most of the time, but that won't keep me from modding you troll"
I'm not really double checking my #'s here....
1 billion queries per day in 2011 (quick online search)... lets say that 1 user makes 100 queries/day (so 10 million users) and each query takes about 10 seconds to complete. 100 million seconds burning 4 watts yields 400 megawatts per day. If we average that out per hour, then we're burning 16 megawatts per hour 24/7. Each day, enough to power 8-16 households (1000-2000kwh) for a month... so over a month: 240-480 households with pretty wasteful practices.
SO, yes, 4 Watts isn't much to an individual household - but aggregated, 4 watts is a lot.
meh
Yay! My Black Sabbath fan site is one of the most environmentally-friendly sites on the internet!!
What political party do you join when you don't like Bible-thumpers *or* hippies?
I've been running MessageBase with a black background because of this exact reason since the late 1990s. Everyone told me it was a stupid idea and the power savings were negligable.
Think of all the power I've saved people! I've done my part.
turns out there is a not insignificant difference ...
Very clear...
In the "Black & White" table they list white at 38.4 W, then in the "Greyscales" table list 0% grey (white) at 40.0W and 60% grey at 38.5W -- all for the same 19" LCD Samsung 192MP monitor showing a full-screen solid color. For fluorescent back-lights, I can't imagine the power usage to be that different for just toggling the LCD cells, but can for an LED back-light, where there are grids of LEDs that may be powered down/off for a more true "black".
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
Anyone else notice that (further down in the article) they measured 6 different levels of grey between 'white' and 'black', and 4 of the levels of grey actually measured MORE of a power draw than pure white on the LCD monitor?
Unix is user friendly, it's just selective about who its friends are.
The real power-saving web pages are simple and clean ones that that use the least CPU time to load, without bloated Web 2.0 javascript mashups of dozens of irrelevant sites and web bugs that keep track of you. TFA doesn't seem to mention that.
Watt is a unit of power, energy is the integral of power over time. A common unit for energy is the Joule. Measuring power is a complex task (both the mathematical and figurative use of complex).
Think of electricity as waves crashing against the beach. Amps are how tall they are, volts how many are arriving in a frame of time or frequency. Watts is a measurement that gives a volumetric answer to power usage. It's a perfectly valid way to measure since we pay based on wattage per hour.
Firstly, I'm extremely skeptical of one of the conclusions - 'flash will make a CRT monitor use more power' - which I just don't believe - it will use an amount of power dependent on the average screen brightness - which may be an increase over black.
LCDs are different - the panel does actually take some energy to change state, and the lag compensation circuitry will use more in motion.
Secondly - a huge part has been missed out of this.
Power consumption of the computer.
Flash, or javascript, even in the background, can considerably increase power.
For example, I just closed all of the flash/animated things in the background on other tabs in firefox, and the CPU usage is now bouncing around 2%, with the computer using 17W.
If I start up a new tab with some flash, and gif animations, it goes up to 25W. (+8W)
Even switching away from the tab only takes it to 23W or so. (+5W)
It would be interesting to work out the total electricity wasted by common flash ads.
With recent changes in browser specs to allow for monitoring of battery levels, I've really taken an interest in this debate. Consider a web based application which has a critical function to complete, yet the battery is dying. Said application could switch it's color scheme to something darker in order to conserve battery and allow that function to complete before draining the battery. It's an edge case scenario, but mobile apps offering a "low power" mode would be a great way to promote usage.
Where genius and insanity become confused true wisdom is found
I don't really see the problem with "not insignificant".
Just because something is "not insignificant" doesn't make it "significant".
Say I give you a papercut. You'll be in a "not insignificant" amount of pain.. in fact, you'll probably curse me all day long.
But it's not exactly a "significant" amount of pain either.. it's not like you're curled up on the floor begging for somebody, anybody, to put you out of your misery or at least give you an OTC painkiller.
Perhaps a completely alternative term could have been used - suggestions?
( I used 'measurable' in another post - but while 0.01% might be measurable, it but would be insignificant. )
the difference is just 17.7W and 3.8W for CRT and LCD respectively. What that adds up to over the course of a year, for every second you spend doing a search on Google is anyone's guess.
That was my favorite part. I'm guessing they just hooked up a some kind of Kill-A-Watt given that:
PCSTATS has an electronic power meter which can actually measure the amount of energy it takes a monitor (LCD and CRT) to display any given website, we've actually got a valid set of criteria to look at.
Never mind the nomenclature, there is cost forecasting on those devices, and given a few basic parameters you could figure out the cost per year searching Blackle rather than Google on the back of a napkin, so its not "anyone's guess".
price_per_killowatt_hour: $0.10
hours_searching_google_per_day: 2 hrs
watts_saved: 17.7
hours_searching_google_per_year = hours_searching_google_per_day * 365
kilowatthours_saved_per_year = hours_searching_google_per_year * (watts_saved / 1000)
price_saved_per_year = kilowatthours_saved_per_year * price_per_killowatt_hour
Which comes out a little over a buck twenty five for a CRT and more than a quarter per year on an LCD using those parameters for one person.
A libertarian shat on my carpet once. Claimed the free market would sort it out. -Ford Prefect(8777)
if you cross the Atlantic, your Joules will turn into ergs
CRTs per se may not be useful much anymore but plasma certainly is!
Brian Fundakowski Feldman
Watts is a unit of power. Multiplying voltage by current gives you power. Multiplying time by power gets you energy. More precisely integrating power over time gets you energy because power might not necessarily be constant over the duration of time.
It works for light bulbs because you assume a lot of things. If we were a more scientifically inclined society then light bulbs would be measured in Watt-hours and not watts. Light bulbs are mostly linear regarding their power usage which is why a 60 watt light bulb that runs for an hour uses less energy than a 120 watt light bulb ran for an hour.
[FUCK BETA 2.6.2014]
AC speaks the truth. I had to read the last line again to make sure I had the proper negations in place.
-g
It would have been interesting to include the whole computer in the power measurement. How much more electricity is drawn by a javascript infested site than one that is just static HTML and images ? How much more is drawn if there are 100 components to build the page instead of 20 (don't forget to include the consumption of your broadband modem, etc, ...) ? How much more electricity does flash use ? How much more through heavy use of AJAX ?
The biggest difference that they showed was that the use of a glass monitor was about double that of a LCD. With an LCD the CPU/... consumption would be a bigger fraction of the whole thing.
I can't imagine with current LCD's that this would even matter.
A 11% difference between full white and full back is more or less insignificant to me.
3.8 Watt * 12 hours / 1000 (watt per kw) * 30.5 days/mo * $0.13 /kWh = $0.18/mo
Yippie. Where can I spend this enormous bounty?
I am more likely to say 'non-trivial' than 'not insignificant.' Based on the simple scale of "undetectable trivial minor light moderate serious" which works well enough for 4 series of D&D spells. There's another step above serious, but it always has a distinct term, and uses a slightly different mechanic than the more fundamental spells. (Haha! I will cast my level 1 spell: Mass Cause Trivial Wounds! *Rolls 1d20, gets 19* ok, you feel slightly uncomfortable, no combat effect)
times 300 million.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
People still have CRTs?
How ridiculous.
Ability to display perfect black color;
Ability to display more than one resolution correctly (useful for games, old video card = new games at reduced resolution);
Ultrafast response time, no input lag;
Reliable and have long life (people saying things like "My LCD started acting weird, but it's 3 years old, time for a new one", while my 12 year old CRT works great), but can also be repaired if necessary (well, other than the failure of the tube obviously);
More affordable than a 24" LCD that can display 2304x1440 (if such a thing even exists);
Great image quality.
The only advantages of LCDs are size, weight and power consumption - all of these are not primary features of a monitor, at least for me (the same way that I don't buy a car based solely on the fuel consumption, or a computer based on its power consumption and size - I look for performance and cost first).
Some phones have OLED screens that consume less power when displaying dark colors.
Another reason is nighttime usability on a smartphone. Too much light is blinding after your pupils have dilated to accommodate the dark.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jury_nullification
Meh... What I'd want to know is, by how much do you decrease a site's power consumption when you strip out:
1. Needlessly complex HTML. (sidebars, header, footer, occasionally content...)
2. Scripts, CSS files and cookies from all over the place (I'm looking at you, ads)
Or to put it another way: Give me what Safari Reader gives me, plus a few nav links, and I'll be happy.
>> Voltage mutiplied by current in Amps equals Watts.
NO. For God's sake will people stop making this mistake.
Voltage multiplied by current in Amps equals VA, not Watts. If you want watts, you have to multiply Voltage in Volts, Current in Amps, and the cosine of the angle between them (which is more commonly known as the power factor.
VA = V*A
Watts = V*A*PF
But the characters are black, so each one represents energy saved.
Amps are how tall they are, volts how many are arriving in a frame of time or frequency.
Not that it affects the product (charge/energy), but amps measure transfer of charge over time, and volts measure electrical potential energy, so volts should be the height of the waves (gravitational potential energy) and amps the rate of arrival (in terms of volume of water per unit time, not waves per unit time).
It's a perfectly valid way to measure since we pay based on wattage per hour.
I don't know about where you're from, but around here we pay for energy in watt-hours (1 W*h = 3600 J), not watts per hour.
"The state is that great fiction by which everyone tries to live at the expense of everyone else." - Bastiat
Isn't 'waste' heat from electrical devices helping heat the room? So this is only a waste in places that are too hot and use fans or a/c to compensate.
I'm not saying whether it is a worthy consideration or not, I just had a problem with their "It's anyone's guess". All things being equal, you can certainly calculate it at scale too, but if you're in the "it's worthy thing to do" camp you also have to be honest about all things being equal (time spent reading web pages, time spent on computers making web pages conform to usability/marketing/business and energy guidelines, etc...).
A libertarian shat on my carpet once. Claimed the free market would sort it out. -Ford Prefect(8777)
Manufacturing glasses and medical treatments for all those poor saps looking at black screens is going to more than eat any short term monitor energy savings.
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
Matthew 7:3-5 is the part about splinter in one eye/beam in another. Not just a failed little/big distinction, but also hypocrisy: criticizing someone else's little problem while ignoring one's own big problem.
I knew the proverb, but hadn't known the chapter and verse, I put 2 and 2 together based on the context of your post.
I listen to both RIAA and non-RIAA stuff if I like the music, tangential business/politics nonwithstanding.
Funny, but it brings up the issue of reading speed. The researchers did not test if people read Blackle at a different rate than Google. For me, white text on a black screen is a slower read, so google wins.
Measurable is certainly a better term that could have been used. "Not insignificant" itself should be reserved for unmeasurable topics. Pain is a good topic for the discussion of "not insignificant" because pain can be ambiguous and related contextually in the "of the moment" kind of way. We can talk about how a pain can be intrusive, however in degree of displeasure it is minor. An intrusive pain would be not insignificant when the pain is reoccuring, much like the papercut reference. In the case of something that can be measured in mathematically relevant terms we should say "marginal" or talk about the average battery savings across the board.
Anyway, we're getting off topic the article states "although the difference is just 17.7W and 3.8W for CRT and LCD respectively" and we can see that's a significant amount of power. Particularly for the CRT monitor, 17.7W we're talking about quite a few watts. CRT monitors are almost certainly reserved for desktop environment rather than laptop, however power savings come in the form of money alone, rather than battery life. I would be interested in laptop measurements as the article is only related to desktop monitors. I imagine the 3.8W is much closer measurement towards what a laptop would give us. Laptops can run on 60W without much trouble and I could see 3.8W being important.
How about 'small'.
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
I see you have not been introduced to the marvelous invention called "a shower".
Ezekiel 23:20
Of course, for the public, an even more common unit of energy is the kilowatt-hour (kWh). Scientists, and some engineers use Joules, but it's not common outside certain fields.
make imaginary.friends COUNT=100 VISIBLE=false
The only advantages of LCDs are size, weight and power consumption - all of these are not primary features of a monitor, at least for me (the same way that I don't buy a car based solely on the fuel consumption, or a computer based on its power consumption and size - I look for performance and cost first).
The LCD advantage that I prefer? Not irradiating remaining eye.
I feel fantastic, and I'm still alive.
Quick back-of-the-envelope calculations: Blackle saves roughly 18W over Google; my electricity costs about $0.12/kWh; so Blackle would save me roughly a penny for every five hours that I'm on the Google website!
I think that may be subject to the intended audience.
Looking at what various definitions make of 'significant'.. ..its use in the article, and my use, seem appropriate.
https://www.google.com/search?q=significant&tbs=dfn:1
What muddies the waters is, of course, that they did actually collect statistics.
But I would imagine that the article wasn't written for statisticians, but rather for the layman. In which case, I know exactly what I'm talking about ;)
But if you want to debate further, here's a few other words... theory (layman: hypothesis, science: no no no!), piracy (off the coast of Somalia vs copyright infringement), hardness (materials science).
turns out there is a not insignificant difference ...
Did some one seriously write this? Or did slashdot's queue automatically translate it from English to stupid?
That's fair. The more appropriate Slashdottism would be "non-zero".
My main frustration with CRTs are the lack of current manufacturers. If you want a CRT that has good refresh rate, good resolution, and good contrast you're somewhat out of luck. You're talking about a peice of hardware that's now reserved for a niche economy where demand is low and prices are high.
My first question after reading the synopsis was, "Does anyone really fucking CARE about this?"
I mean..this is minutiae.....
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
I can see the opposite of this being true with LED backlighting (where a portion of the backlight is turned off to make blacker blacks) or OLED where the individual pixel is not being turned on. For standard LCD screens with a CFL backlight (where the backlight is always on), I don't see this being true at all. If anything, for standard LCDs, screens with motion banner ads would consume more display energy as the LCD pixels would need energy to be constantly flipping to update the animation on the screen (so running an ad blocker could make you greener!)
...you can't just set your foreground and background colors appropoeriately?
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
Completely agree. At least there are some nice used ones - I recently bought a Sony GDM-FW900, while it has some scratches on the plastic case, the screen is unscratched and the tube seems not worn (as the monitor is not too bright - my other monitor (Dell P1130) was way too bright, I had to use special software to reduce the G2 voltage, the monitor is still too bright ~15 minutes after turning on until the tube warms up; now that I replaced it I'll be able to properly configure it, hopefully, the "too bright while cold" problem is a compensation circuit going out of alignment with the tube (cold tube is darker, so the circuit increases the brightness, but in my case it overdoes it).
--Politics and The English Language
Anyone remember this article that was posted a not insignificant period of time ago?
Smart meters reveal what you're watching
Set your background to black, and all your text so it only displays half the time.
I eat only the real part of complex carbohydrates.
CRTs have big geometry problems, uneven quality of the pixels (the ones in the corners will always be of a lesser quality) that a flat matrix panel simply does not have by definition. CRTs also take up so much space that is ridiculous.
if you weren't a complete wanker you would probably just say "it hurts a bit"
Just 2 obsolete technologies being tested? OLED is the future in Picture quality and energy saving, so where is this technology represented there? there are 15" OLED LG's TV's and there will be 55" from Samsung and LG later this year. Plasma also have best picture quality for big TV's at the moment. I'm sure Plasma, OLED and CRT (all emissive technologies with better Picture quality) can save a big part of energy when showing large dark screen areas. I'm tired of white backgrounds for everything in computers trying to replicate the paper. But unlike paper, computer monitors emit light and we keep hours staring at them :(
I think that was what they intended to say. They are implying that it is midly significant without going so far as to say it is significant. It is awkwardly written but it is by no means ungrammatical.
lol "s/not"... yeah i'm tired
i'm pretty sure black uses more energy in lcds than white, because the power is used to mask light, not generate it, so a completely white screen might save more power in modern screens than black, though i don't know about more modern technologies like tft. new led screens are probably also opposite, so any power-saving web page would have to detect the type of screen (lcd or led)
And how about green text and a blinking cursor?
Have gnu, will travel.
Who cares.
I do, I have more than one PC and some of them cannot output 1920x1200 or 2304x1440, non-native resolutions look awful on fixed pixel displays. As for games, yea, I do not want to buy a really expensive video card and then replace it every year or so just so that I could play new games at the native resolution.
WTF no. Enjoy your bizarro land resolution that no one targets.
2304x1440 is a normal 16:10 resolution (2304/16 = 1440/10). It also results in larger desktop space than 1920x1200. The good thing about CRTs is that I can use 1920x1200 for, say, watching movies and then switch to 2304x1440 if I need more space on the desktop because of all the windows etc.
I bet you listen to vinyl records too. Fucking hipsters.
Vinyl, shellac, tape, basically any form of media - why should I restrict myself to one or two formats? I like older music, I can usually find cheap records that contain the music I like, why should I not buy them? In some cases there is no digital equivalent available - if there are CDs released that contain the songs, they are usually remade or at least remastered to make them sound more "modern", but I prefer the original.
I always thought ergs were a unit of frustration. For example, doing energy based calculations in Imperial/US customary units is a ton of ergs.
Knowledge Brings Fear
CRTs also take up so much space that is ridiculous.
Yea, because I always thought "If only my monitor didn''t take up so much space, I could put so many things behind it" :).
CRTs have big geometry problems, uneven quality of the pixels (the ones in the corners will always be of a lesser quality) that a flat matrix panel simply does not have by definition.
My current monitor does not have geometry problems (noticeable, anyway, I did not use a ruler to see if the lines are straight). It is possible to fix the geometry issues by using WinDAS - it divides the screen into small sections and you adjust the geometry/convergence in each of them (unlike using the on-screen menu that only allows changes over the entire screen).
When my monitor displays "black" it looks like it is turned off.
I already did this a long while back. Not only the color displayed on the screen matters for power, but even contrast and brightness settings also make difference. Higher brightness setting of the monitor result in more power consumption.
The results are posted here.
http://kedarsoman.wordpress.com/2006/11/21/saving-energy-one-monitor-at-a-time/
Boss to Dilbert: My laptop is too heavy.
Dilbert to boss: Try deleting some files to make it lighter...
The web pages on my screen are already dark, because I use a plugin for the Firefox browser which has this to say in the description field:
"Changes color combination for energy saving on CRT monitors"
And no, I'm not using a CRT and neither do I care how much power does my display drain to display a web page. It's just that I find green text on black easier on the eyes.
Sent this to the Author:
:-)
Just read "Blackle vs. Google Monitor Power Consumption Tested".
Compared the worst and best (for LCD - who still used CRT??) is about 4w of difference. Compared that to a user (such as a office worker who uses a PC
and internet all day at work) and can work in nearly total screen blackness to achieve this saving. Averages 8 hours of PC screen time a day. There is 365 days a year (not counting weekend or holidays-he may work at home or watch PC based TV - Who knows!!) Thus 4w 'saving' (which is per hour) X 8
hours per day X 365 Days = 11680 watt hour or 'wh' worth of power 'saving'.
Now consider electrical companies charger per 1000 w or by kw.... so that is 11.68kwh of saving.
National average charged is $0.1099/kwh (as per http://www.eia.doe.gov/cneaf/electricity/epm/table5_6_a.html) so that is
$1.28 savings (PER YEAR!). That is if you can read a nearly all black screen.
My coffee to keep my bugged eyes open enough to view that screen is more than that per day. Not to mention the DAMAGE to my eyes from squinting
trying to read or watch the PC.
Better yet - use a power setting to turn off that 34.8w to 38.4w LCD Screen after lets say 5 mins - will save nearly 10 time the power than when you view a Dark gloomy hard to view website. BOTH option will give you a BLACK screen to view!!! LOL! Good WORK!
And he responded:
I still use a (good) CRT for photo editing... it has better colour than an
LCD can display.
Thanks for the comments, I don't disagree with anything you say. We were more interested in testing the claims Blackle was making... while there is a
mathmatical difference, how relevant that figure is an entirely different question.
Cheers,
Max
NOW who wants to "save" UP to $1.28 per year on power - but end a life squinting at a dark screen only
Speak for yourself, buddy.
Yea, because I always thought "If only my monitor didn''t take up so much space, I could put so many things behind it" :).
As a counter argument, if everyone in my office had CRTs the same size of our LCDs, we'd have to significantly rearrange the office; at home, my current desk just flat out wouldn't work. In both cases it's because the monitors are far back. In the office the extra depth would mean that, to maintain a comfortable distance from the screens and still have the keyboard at a good location, we'd have to move the desks away from the wall -- but I'm sitting almost back-to-back with someone, and the office is too narrow for us to both do that. (A keyboard tray would leave the same fundamental problem, though eliminating the desk-moving necessity. Though that would also mean that... I wouldn't really have a desk after that.) At home, I built my own standing desk. Due to... I guess not good enough planning (I did anticipate this issue a little bit but not nearly to the degree that it happened), the desk is a bit wobbly and back-heavy. (It will stand upright, but I don't think it'd take much of a bump for stuff -- read: monitors -- to slide off the back.) Right now I have a piece of wood between the desk and the wall that will keep it from tipping over backwards; if I moved it away from the wall to make room for the extra CRT depth, I'd have to come up with some other means to keep it stable. In either case, moving it away from the wall
In other words: I haven't thought "I'm glad I can put lots behind it", but I definitely rely on pushing the monitors back.
I put my monitor in the corner and move the desk away from the corner of my room by a few cm. Pushing the monitor even more back would require me to lower the resolution, so a thinner monitor would mean unused space behind it). Also, my desk has a keyboard tray. The desk is also strong enough to not only support the 42kg monitor, but also a 25kg tape deck. As the desk was bought a long time ago (when LCDs were only used in laptops), putting the monitor in the corner was a good idea, and still is now (since I still use a CRT, not the same one though). If your monitor is flat against a wall then you will have problems with the size of a CRT, byt then again, the desk was designed with a LCD in mind.
You may keep your geek card for another day.
If anything they just reminded everyone that we should switch to LCDs if we haven't yet.
if you cross the Atlantic, your Joules will turn into ergs
And Verne, if you travel those 20,000 leagues under the sea...
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
This is the reason why 'i' is the default name for a loop variable. i is the most energy efficient variable name in a white on black world.
Korma: Good
Does anyone really fucking CARE about this?
Obviously you care, otherwise you would not have clicked on the "Read More" link on the story, then replied to the first post to get you to the top of the page, and then typed a message about this subject. The alternative to all this would have been to just skip to the next story that does interest you.
At time of writing, there have been nearly 200 posts on this story, so the answer to your question is yes, some people do care enough to think about this subject.
CRTs have big geometry problems...
CRTs also take up so much space that is ridiculous.
Is that not also a geometry problem?
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
Who prints anymore? The only printers I own are in the process of being hacked for robotics.
Someone had to do it.
The biggest advantage is probably that LCD's are significantly brighter.
Actually it's funny... if I were to name my single biggest gripe with my LCDs (Dell Ultrasharp IPSs), it would by without a doubt be that even at their dimmest, they are still too bright for dark environments. For instance, I occasionally have trouble falling asleep and decide to get up and do something for 30 minutes or an hour or something before going back to bed. And even though my monitors are at their dimmest settings virtually all the time, they're still painfully bright. Doing a quick Google search there are actually a couple programs (e.g. this) that I'll have to try out that may help a bit.
meh, they tend to have large gamma. If you want to make them more linear at the bottom end you have to turn the brightness up, no more perfect black.
This is why there is software that lets you adjust gamma. Even some games allow it, but it can also be done with the video drivers (at least ATI/AMD ones, there are separate adjustments for desktop and full screen 3D).
It seems like there should be an impact for video, that you'd want 60Hz for NTSC, 75Hz for PAL, 72Hz for film, and that not having this would mean stuttering or tearing.
I would rather have 120Hz for NTSC, 100Hz for PAL and 96Hz for film. My monitor could support that for SD resolutions, but I do not know about 1080p, it is not written in the manual and I do not know how to calculate it based on the horizontal frequency (which goes up to 121kHz). However, like you, I have not noticed tearing. I do notice LCD scaling artifacts though.
I've tried to repair CRT's and usually failed.
Depends on what has failed. I repaired a CRT TV that would no longer display anything. It turns out that the horizontal deflection transistor failed for some reason. I put a new one in and the 18 year old TV works fine.
If the tube fails then it's over, but if the problem is with the electronics then it can be found and fixed.
The biggest advantage is probably that LCD's are significantly brighter
Depends on the user. I agree that bright displays are good for laptops so that I can still see the image even though it's sunny and I am wearing sunglasses. However, for my room, I don't need a bright monitor as I don't wear sunglasses and the lighting is a single 40W lightbulb. It also means that I notice the not-so-black blacks more easily.
The biggest advantage is probably that LCD's are significantly brighter.
And also very well designed/built. For example, using special software it is possible to adjust convergence in 64 (IIRC) separate sectors. Also, all the wires inside are thick, so there are no worries about breaking some really thin wire when taking the monitor apart (the high voltage is another matter though).
Funny I spent 4 years in a vocational highschool and this is what we were taught, guess my teacher who worked on apollo project is dumb eh?
Ah, for the days when most people were literate enough to recognize, never mind use, rhetorical devices like litotes.
Oh, so very, very much this.
Let me count the problems with light-text-on-dark-background:
1) If you have cataracts, corneal irritation, or smudged glasses, bright objects against a dark background are MUCH harder to resolve than dark images against a white background. With black-on-white, you just get reduced contrast; with white-on-black, you get distracting smears and rays all over the page.
2) In a dim room, your pupils dilate more if the scene before you is mostly dark, and dilated pupils generally produce poorer acuity. A bright background causes your pupils to contract, and just like stopping down a cheap camera lens, it improves the focus of the image hitting your retina.
3) In a bright room, a mostly-dark display will be more obscured by reflections and glare.
This is one reason I stopped hanging out at dpreview.com. Yeah, I know, photographers think their stuff looks better against a black background, but more than five or ten minutes on the site gives me a headache.
This is as good a time as any to post a link to something I've used for well over a year now.
http://stereopsis.com/flux/
It automatically adjusts the color temp of your monitor to reduce eye strain at night. I suppose it has the side effect of lowering power consumption as well.
On Windows/Mac/Linux and pads.
No, I don't work for these guys nor am I paid by them. It's just that good.
I tested this using a Kill-A-Watt meter and three Dell P2210s. The results were 56W showing google.com on all three, and 59W showing blackle.com on all three.
How about less Java, flash, and videos?
CPU and network still takes power, too...
Mobile devices like the original iPhone had a black background for good reason. It conserves power. I always view my computer screen in inverse video, not to save power, though it does extend battery life on my laptop a good deal. I need the improved readability that white on black provides. People with low vision universally prefer white on black. The whole black on white background is an unfortunate hold over from dead tree publishing. And likely as not having Stargardt's Disease, I want as few photons lighting up my retina as possible.
So, I hope this whole stupid Apple white page thing goes the way of the dinosaur. Life was better when it was green on black.
Celebrate failure, and then learn from it - Nolan Bushnell
Is that you, Minister Farrakhan?
Dark Reflection
If you were black, then you would have used the n-word, instead of simply referring to it. So that tells me you're as white as I am.
Slashdot: Where people pretend to be twice as smart as they really are by behaving like children.
this is minutiae.....
3.8W is hardly a minute amount of power. If I did my math right, it's approximately the amount of power it takes to lift a full soda can (~390g) 1 meter in 1 second.
Let's say each Google query takes 10 seconds of viewing time, so you could save 38 watt-seconds per query by going black. Multiply this by 3 Billion queries per day, times 365 days/year. That's 12GWh (to 2 significant figures) of electricity that could be saved annually by changing a couple lines of code.
Power costs around $0.10/KWh. I don't consider $1.2M/year to be a minute amount of money.
Why is it that the proponents of "one nation under God" are so eager to get rid of "liberty and justice for all"?
What about measuring power in a circuit? All of the design books I've read measure current in Amps then multiply by the suppy voltage. So that's VA, but it is a non-Ohmic circuit, so... is VA still the power requirement... I only ever see VA when talking about transmission line power. How should I measure / compute power of a circuit with a current meter and a volt meter?
https://www.accountkiller.com/removal-requested
Finally a way to offset maxing out my GTX580 and Core i7-2500k at 100% 24/7
>> Voltage mutiplied by current in Amps equals Watts.
NO. For God's sake will people stop making this mistake.
Voltage multiplied by current in Amps equals VA, not Watts. If you want watts, you have to multiply Voltage in Volts, Current in Amps, and the cosine of the angle between them (which is more commonly known as the power factor.
VA = V*A Watts = V*A*PF
No, Watts is really Voltage times Current. But when referring to AC systems, definitions get all screwed up. Just look at "kWh" - what a mess. It's like electricians have their own definitions for these units. I suppose it is understandable - using a single number to approximate a waveform and then performing calculations using Ohms Law makes most tasks much easier.
So pointing out the difference between Watts and VA is good - thanks for that. But don't be calling the real definition for Watts wrong. Also, your definition for power factor is not correct - or at least it is dated. It only applies to AC systems where the waveform is shifted. Power factor also applies to waveforms that are modified in other ways. For example, a computer power supply without power factor correction consumes pulses of power during the peak points of the sine wave. This changes the shape of the wave without resulting in a phase shift. With power factor correction, a control circuit draws power throughout the entire waveform so that the sine wave is not distorted.
I wonder what they used to measure power usage for this test. Did the instrument record true RMS power? Those instruments are much more expensive but required for accurate results. Guess I should rtfa.
FWIW I hooked up my kill-a-watt to my newer monitor (Dell 2312HM; my older one is almost the same build so I was too lazy to test it). At minimum brightness I got 13W with pure black and 14W with pure white. At maximum brightness I got 33W with both.
It's not the most precise tool, but there's another data point for you. :-) (One perhaps-relevant thing: I'm 99% positive dynamic contrast is off.)
I've measured average use of my 17" LED backlit LCD screens at 8 watts a piece(2 of them), with 16 max in torch mode.(per spec). it might make a diffrence if you are using other technologies, but for the common joe, just get a low power monitor(s)
In high school I'm guessing you probably worked with DC current... where the current does NOT vary over time, so the power factor is 1
.9,
With AC power the parent is correct. However I think the power factor used by most devices is over
It may not save energy, but dark backgrounds save my eyes. I always love when sites use darker themes. Bright white backgrounds on a 24 inch monitor are very very painful, no matter how far I turn down my backlight.
Maybe it's just me, but I would not call "not insignificant" the same as "significant". For example, using some numbers pulled out of no where, 10% would be not insignificant, but it wouldn't be significant until it reached >=90%.
"I'm not sure I like the fugnutish tone you used in your post!" -RogL (608926)-
Doing a quick Google search there are actually a couple programs (e.g. this) that I'll have to try out that may help a bit.
So that seems to have roughly the same effect as lowering contrast. It's a bit nicer in some ways (faster control) but doesn't go all that far toward the solution. Oh well.
(...)of electricity that could be saved (...)
Saved as in not paid directly. Electricity won't suddenly stop being produced because the average consumption dropped a few KWh, and this is one of the most ignored factors by "the green people". Electricity is generated regardless and must be spent almost immediatly - there is no efficient way of storing it (and no, batteries aren't that efficient), specially when considering the sheer requisites of the high values (both voltage and current) involved.
That said, it's always good for the consumers to save a few cents. But take it for what it is (a money question) and not as an "environment-friendly" approach.
Many modern lcd screens have dynamic contrast, so inefficient dimming of the backlight can be blamed for the differences measured. Also, most LCD panels implement tricks for color composition (specially those so-popular-so-fast 6 bit TN panels), so additional processing may be done on specific colors/tones, and that could explain the increased consumption.
Assuming that any dynamic backlighting features are disabled, a typical TN panel will use slightly LESS power on an all-white screen than on an all-black screen.
LCD panels comes in more than one flavor. The cheap and common variety is called TN (Twisted Nematic). A TN pixel is transparent/white until power is applied to it, at which point it turns opaque/black. This means that it takes some small amount of power to make a pixel turn black. A less common, more expensive technology is called IPS (In-Plane Switching). An IPS pixel is opaque/black until power is applied, at which point it turns transparent/while. There are also VA (Vertical Alignment) panels, and I don't remember off the top of my head whether they're transparent or opaque when not powered.
I just ran a test with a power meter of my own, and the IPS-based LCD monitor I'm using consumes 17 watts when displaying an all-black image and 21 watts when displaying an all-white image, and the backlight is not responsible for any of that difference. Tests I've done on a previous TN-based LCD monitor have shown an opposite result, as is to be expected. The thing is that TN panels are far more common because they're cheaper to produce. So if the entire world tries to use use dark web pages in order to save power, then a few people with IPS panels will use less, but the vast majority of users will be be browsing on TN panels, and these users will actually be using slightly MORE power. And, given their greater numbers, I suspect the average power usage would actually go up.
And as long as there are any white or brightly colored pixels onscreen, be they part of the taskbar, the browser's title bar, or the web page itself, then dynamic backlighting shouldn't be much of a factor, either. The backlight can't be turned down any dimmer than the brightest pixel. (This excludes LCD monitors with backlights that are capable of zone-dimming, but those are exceedingly rare.)
They throw off less heat, too.
No. The amount of fuel your power plant uses is proportional to the power it is supplying. In case of coal plant: there is less coal being burned, in case of hydroelectric: less water needs to go through the turbines, in case of nuclear: control rods are inserted into the reactor core to slow down the reaction of the fuel rods by absorbing neutrons.
Less power used = less power generated = less fuel used.
Nice post! I am running a ten year old Dell on XP with a 15 year RT monitor (I broke the nice 21 inch or whatever they were selling in 2002, and replaced it with a 'throwaway' 17 inch CRT from a friends business). The only thing I have replaced in the machine is the video card, and it is still going strong. I admit that the last high end game I bought was HL2, but it plays nicely. I am not a person that buys into the 'three year old hardware is obsolete' crowd, but the 'planned failure' model pisses me off. I am writing this post from a 2009 netbook my brother bought, HD failed, so I installed Ubuntu linux from live boot to a USB external HD. Works fine.
Koalas. They're telepathic. Plus, they control the weather. -Margaret
This is because the cold cathode lamp cannot output any light level from zero to its maximum, the way an incandescent lightbulb, or an LED can. CRTs also can, because the amount of light depends on the current which can be varied from zero to some maximum.
I don't consider $1.2M/year to be a minute amount of money.
Any number can look impressive without context.
Let's divide that impressive $1.2M per year by 12 months and then by the 1 billion uniques that Google is getting per month. This will give you the grand total of a fraction of a cent per user per month saving.
And seeing that this is distributed globally, there is no power plant that will see any significant drop in power generation even if the whole world switch over.
How much trouble do you think power companies are having to keep voltage and frequency of the AC net within nominal parameters? They constantly juggle with the amount of fuel and sometimes the amount of power plants connected to the grid. The amount of electricity produced is exactly the amount that is being demanded, nothing more, nothing less. If that wasn't the case, you'd be paying for every kWh you could possibly consume, because they had to produce it for you, whether you use it or not.
I was promised a flying car. Where is my flying car?
Sorry, but that's as they say "not even wrong". When demand drops, you can produce at less than peak. This saves fuel in a heat-based powerplant, and reduces water-consumption in a hydro-power one. That fuel or water *does* trivially store for months or even years.
Produced electricity stores poorly, but you don't do that.
What about the amount of energy used to generate the page at the web server? Big, dynamic web pages requiring lots of database hits, disk IO, cpu cycles cost more energy to generate. Large pages cost more energy to transmit over networks. Complicated javascript pages, flash and java content cost more energy to generate on the computer that has to render them to display them. The same applies for compressed media, like images, sound and movies. Animated media costs more than static media too to display. Has anybody looked at those factors?
I was promised a flying car. Where is my flying car?
The only thing I've seen failing on an LCD is the power button. Second, it is much less strain on my eyes, directly measurable in hours / day.
nosig today
And seeing that this is distributed globally, there is no power plant that will see any significant drop in power generation even if the whole world switch over.
I think you'd have fit in great as an ancient greek philosopher. After all, according to no one less than Aristotle:
"In a race, the quickest runner can never overtake the slowest, since the pursuer must first reach the point whence the pursued started, so that the slower must always hold a lead."
and
"If everything when it occupies an equal space is at rest, and if that which is in locomotion is always occupying such a space at any moment, the flying arrow is therefore motionless."
This is the same flawed logic you are using. The fast runner DOES overtake the slow runner eventually, because even though you can split their progress into infinitely small amounts of space, you also split the time needed to cross that distance. As such, at some finite point in time, the distance between the two runners will be 0 and then grow in favour of the faster runner. It does not matter that you can theoretically split space infinitely often, as you must also always split time in the same manner.
And equally, the arrow moves eventually to its target, because even though you can split time into theoretically arbitrarily small chunks and thus eventually reduce the speed of the arrow per infinitely small time slice to 0, you split the space covered in the slice just as much. As such, you will reach any finite point in space (assuming the arrow is not stopped by something) in finite time. Again it does not matter than you can theoretically split time, because you need to split space at the same time.
So the same applies in your example. Yes, you can theoretically increase the number of times you split the saved power infinitely often, but to do so, you also have to increase the number of users infinitely often. As such, you will by summing it all up arrive at a non-zero amount of power saved in total. As you know from the laws of thermodynamics, you can't destroy energy. So the saved energy must be stored in some form or another. You can "waste" it by turning it into excess heat, or you can store it for later in a more accessible form, or not liberate it to begin with from its initial high-potential state (as coal, nuclear fuel, wind, water, etc.).
Simply put: Knowledge about the principles of infinities and successive splits has increased dramatically since ancient Greece.
I have seen failed caps, dead pixels and a dead driver chip (which results in an entire bar of dead pixels).
As for strain, I can look at my CRT monitor (runing at 85Hz) for over 12 hours/day, so I don't think it's that big a deal, unless you are comparing an LCD with a crap CRT (that only runs at 60Hz).
Bah, I was using red and neon green on black bacground (with twinkling stars) on Geocities before it was cool. I think my Yellow and Black "Under Construction" ribbon consumed someones 14" CRT energy thou.
Very crafty! I couldn't decipher that double-negative sentence fragment, so I had to actually read the article to come into some kind of conclusion myself!
Bot Assisted Blogging
Ability to display perfect black color;
If you look at a turned off CRT, you can see that the phosphor material is not completely black, it's always a bit grey. This would suggest that by using a very good TFT monitor, you could get even better black level.
Or, if I want to play Doom3 or some other very dark game, I can just turn off the light in the room, then the only light source will be the monitor (and some LEDs on the PC) and the color of the phosphor will not matter.
I'll give you dead pixels, on CRT as wel btw. As for the strain: I can watch 12 hrs with LCD and about 8 with CRT (Iiyama vision master 510, 85 Hz). It may be dust related (dust parts on the monitor get propelled at anything in front of them because of the static charge).
nosig today
not entirely true - characters are black so more characters means less white space on your display and this is less energy dissipated trough your laptop int environment.
the amount of energy consumed is dependent on many factors of which main two are nominal power consumption and time in which it happens. The power consumption of a light bulb is linear for all purposes relevant for its user. This may be different for appliances like dishwasher where indeed power consumption for standard usage (particular program, amount of dirt and fat it has to remove per load, detergents used etc).can be given and in fact is at least in Europe if you go to a shop that information is available. It may be not reliable and it certainly differs from what I and you would actually experience but that is good enough for comparisons. SO no scientifically oriented is good and I am with you on that one (at least as long as science is not fetishised) but light bulbs are marked in watts for a good reason.
Usually static charge attracts dust instead of pushing it away, the flyback transformer and EHT wire inside a monitor are usually covered with a layer of dust.
Maybe my monitor is better or whatever, but I have no problems with eye strain watching it. Then again, I have set the contrast/brightness to a low level and the the light in my room is not intense either, maybe that's why. If I look at a laptop screen at full brightness for long I can get a headache, but if I turn it down (in my room that means down to the minimal setting) it's OK.
the amount of fuel is constant in my solar power plant, you insensitive clod!
I wonder what they used to measure power usage for this test. Did the instrument record true RMS power? Those instruments are much more expensive but required for accurate results. Guess I should rtfa.
Well, if it did, then at least the power is free. Or wants to be. Or should be...
You're special forces then? That's great! I just love your olympics!
That's correct, sir.
The above post has incorrect assumptions.
Standard LCD screens do not alter the intensity of the backlight based on the information displayed on the screen, and the backlight and it's inverter is the majority of the power consumption. In addition, the drive circuit that aligns the liquid crystals can work opposite from how you expect in a TFT. Most TN screens, for example, are white or light gray when unpowered - refreshing the pixels to a black state takes more transistor drive than making the screen white. This is the technology you will find in most portable devices and computer monitors.
Some LED-backlit TVs use dynamic backlight, or even zone-dynamic backlight, where (mainly to create ridiculous contrast ratio specs) the backlight is reduced to the maximum temporal white level needed, or for multi-area addressable systems, the brightest backlight needed in an area.
The only portable devices where the brightness of the screen data is directly related to energy consumption would be those with OLED screens (such as the Samsung Galaxy SII line). The individual pixels are miniature LEDs, and when a pixel is black, they are turned off. On these AMOLED display phones, a black wallpaper can use far less power.
When I think of "power-saving webpages", I may be more concerned about one that runs my CPU at 100% for several seconds to display a page, Slashdot.
In addition to the points raised by the other replies, if 5W of power can be saved per person -- perhaps by mandating that standby power consumption of home electronics can be reduced -- then in a country of 50M people that's 250MW. That's a small fossil-fuel power plant, or a large wind/solar plant, which no longer needs to be built.
While hydro is somewhat more dynamic at scaling power than thermal, it's not as easy as you say (duty cycles, base provisioning, etc), and certainly some KWh don't make any difference production-wise. The cost of scaling power in thermal centrals (excluding nuclear ones) is very high - there was an old coal central nearby, and it took a month from igniting a furnace to be ready for electricity production, so, as you may imagine, they did not turned them off each time consumption dropped.
There also also technical factors to why it is a bad idea to produce electricity near the average consumption level - One of them is that most electrical equipment tend to deteriorate under stress, so having a safe production margin minimizes transformer damage and conductor damage.
Whatever the reason, white on black=bad (and I'm sure I can't be the only one).
You are not, I don't know about an afterimage but I can't read white on black text for more than a few minutes. It really hurts my eyes.
Maybe that was only true on CGA monitors...
Exactly, we need something more than one test performed in the 60's with a dumb terminal! Or whatever it was that supposedly "showed" that.
In the meantime I will keep my white background and my sanity thank you very much.
P.S. make a note of how many people that claim to like dark backgrounds wear glasses...
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
The amount of fuel your power plant uses is proportional to the power it is supplying.
Only to a certain extent. You don't turn on and off furnaces on a coal/gas plant just because demand dropped. Most of those plants burn fuel (a ton of it) regardless of their production being in active use or not.
Hydro plants are more dynamical, but you still have a baseline water consumption value (the minimum needed to keep a turbine working), and turning them on and off isn't instantaneous either. Most hydro generation is done in dams, so you usually need to maintain a minimum flow of water (usually enough to generate electricity) regardless of electricity consumption. Again, a few KWh won't make a difference.
I'm not familiarized with the nuclear powerplants, but I'd guess they are somewhat similar to hydro.
"I don't consider $1.2M/year to be a minute amount of money."
That's pretty minute, when it considers every single Google query.
The sentence is just odd to begin with.
There is a not insignificant difference? So there is a difference that is large enough to be considered significant? Or is the author of the summary mistaken and is there a difference, but is it insignificant?
Guess what the power factor of DC is? Guess what that makes the equation?
Even when you are working with AC, it makes more sense to use the effective voltage and current.
Except that to use Blackie I'd have to GO to Blackie and type in my query, whereas to use Google I can just type it into a search box without loading the page. I bet it takes more energy for Blackie to serve up the page, transfer it to me, and for my computer to display it than it saves because it's black.
in case of hydroelectric: less water needs to go through the turbines
Less power used = less power generated = less fuel used.
But water is not used in the same way as coal is. Same amount of water enters and leaves the hydroelectric power plant. It's not destroyed in the process like fossil fuels. Using less energy from a hydroelectric power plant doesn't save water at all.
Yes yes yes, except those paradoxes come from Zeno, not Aristotle. Aristotle was the first one (I think) to try to answer the paradox.
Read this article in E Ink FTW!!!!!
Indeed. Knowing language well and using it carefully allows us to be precise and expressive, and makes talking to dullards frustrating. While the flexibility exists that someone could say "not insignificant" and mean "significant", it is not inherently an opposite and should not be presumed to be opposite.
I want my Cowboyneal
If we figure google gets about 1/2 billion searches per day world-wide and each search conservatively takes about 5 seconds to type in and view results, we get a global savings of nearly 2,300 kW-h per day. Typical US household usage is on the order of 1000 - 2000 kW-h per month, so this is enough energy to power about 50 US homes and nearly double that number of homes in more conservation-oriented places like Europe. I would consider this number to be on the low end of the actual global power savings, as some sources show google serving 3 billion searches per day (http://www.quora.com/How-many-search-queries-does-Google-serve-worldwide-every-day) , and the watts used will be 5x higher for CRTs.
In the grand scheme of world wide energy usage, this is an insignificant amount, but on the other hand, the effort required to make the switch from white to black background is pretty low compared to other energy-saving efforts, too. What's the saying? "Once you go black, you never go back." Check out HP's corporate site (hp.com) for a sample of how this might look.
( 3.3w*5s/search*500*(10^6) search per day = 16.5*500*(10^6) watt-seconds= 8.25 (10^6) kW-s=2,292 kW-Hours)
We are the 198 proof..
The way LCD monitors work is that they have a backlight that's on all the time and it consumes the lion's share of the power. Dark pixels are produced by applying an electric field to liquid crystal, an act that takes power mostly in the switching of states. So an all-dark screen takes about the same power as an all-white screen.
If you want to save power in display-related actions, display pages that require minimal computing to render. You'll save more power in the CPU and GPU.
If you want to save power again, set your browser to reject cookies, not display video and not run scripts you haven't authorized. Set your firewall to block major advertisement sites.
And that's just your browser. There's more power to be saved by turning off power-hungry services of your operating system.
CRTs and OLEDs need more power to display white than black, but LCDs, the most common kind of screen nowadays, needs more power to display black than white. So black pages actually require more power on average.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
Wait according to TFA I'm wrong, the LCDs are using less power to display black as well.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
Using "not insignficant" instead of "significant" lengthens the sentence and makes it harder to parse. They mean the same thing despite your pointless story about paper cuts. It's never not good to go ahead with stopping not misusing self-contradictory phrases.
(-1, Raw and Uncut is the only way to read)
may well go down in history as the very first truly Orwellian Olympics. Honestly, why would anyone voluntarily spend money or time subjecting themselves to Big Brother's special event number 1? Maybe Big Brother can make all the athletes wear gray uniforms and refer only to their participant numbers to make it harder for anyone to single out a particular person. They should probably paint all the buildings and fields gray too so to dissuade any uncitizen from gleaning any particular location information for bad purposes.
They already figured this out in the hitchikers guide to the galaxy. "Every time I press one of these black controls, labelled in black on a black background, a little black light lights up black to let me know I've done it."
Bleh... that should have read "<=10% would be insignificant, >10% would be not insignificant, but it wouldn't be significant until it reached >=90%". Though thankfully it looks like the intent still got across.
"I'm not sure I like the fugnutish tone you used in your post!" -RogL (608926)-
Which comes out a little over a buck twenty five for a CRT and more than a quarter per year on an LCD using those parameters for one person.
That is definitely not enough to overcome the cost of discomfort of trying to read the hideous light on dark at blackle.com.
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
This! ^^^
I laser-print my spam to save all that power consumed by viewing it on my monitor.
Thank you, I was looking for someone who had done the math of savings over this amount of usage. I agree, that amount of savings is hardly trivial. Plus, I hate bright white screens with black text on it, especially at night. It makes my eyes so tired that it's a pain just to keep reading.
kurzweil_freak
5th Kyu Genbukan Ninpo/KJJR student
Be the darkness that allows the light to shine.
I use a 12 year old CRT that was considered relatively high quality at the time (Iiyama Vision Master Pro 510). So let me answer your claims.
- Ability to display perfect black color :
When the brightness is not set too high the blacks are great (better than LCD) but not perfect. When the brightness it at 100% it is worse than the cheapest LCDs.
- Ability to display more than one resolution correctly :
True, great for games, especially considering that reducing the resolution increases the refresh rate (to about 150Hz)
- Ultrafast response time, no input lag :
True, I especially like the high refresh rate. As for the input lag, my skills are far too low to take advantage of this.
- Reliable and have long life :
Yes and no : Yes because my monitor is 12 years old and just refuses to die and no because there is significant degradation in the colors. I lost about 20% contrast in red and blue leading to a greenish tint in dark areas that is difficult to correct.
- More affordable than a 24" LCD that can display 2304x1440 :
It is difficult to compare prices because CRTs are now a rarity but I remember paying close to $1000 for mine. So let's say it is in the same category as current 2560x1440 LCDs. But I with a maximum resolution of 2048x1536, I stayed well above LCDs for a long time.
- Great image quality :
It is subjective. I find LCDs better for text and CRTs better for moving pictures. At high resolution / high refresh rate, my CRT becomes blurry.
I never really bought into the idea that the flaw in Zeno's paradox was that he didn't realise you could split time infinitely, or that using calculus you can sum infinitesimals. I reckon it is a pretty good argument if you accept its premises.
Personally I think you have to look to quantum mechanics and the uncertainty principle to find a satisfactory way around it. You can't actually say what precise speed either runner is running at or exactly where they are. Once you factor this in, the assumption that you can split the difference between them into infinitely small steps is just wrong so the paradox disappears.
Only to a certain extent. You don't turn on and off furnaces on a coal/gas plant just because demand dropped. Most of those plants burn fuel (a ton of it) regardless of their production being in active use or not.
This is true at a plant-level but is misleading when you consider the whole grid. In many jurisdictions in the US, the different power stations bid on the price of electricity. In a simplified case, if Bob will sell you 100MW at $0.04 and Tom will sell you 80MW at $0.06, but 150MW is needed, then you buy all of Bob's power and then 50MW of Tom's. If the load drops to just 80MW, then you stop buying from Tom altogether, and Tom probably shuts his machine down. There are complications to this scheme including power-purchasing agreements, spinning reserve requirements, etc, but that is basically how it works.
The grid operator knows how much power they will need to within a pretty good margin of error. It is very predictable depending on the outside temperature and the time of day. Most people have a daily routine of electricity use and in the aggregate, the electricity use of a population is very stable and predictable. 10,000 people going home at 5PM and turning on their electric stove is predictable. Large users of electricity are often required to notify the grid operator in advance so a huge machine coming online doesn't cause problems on the grid. So if the grid operator knows they will only need 5GW for the next week (because of cooler temperatures or whatnot) but have 8GW of generating capacity, they give notice to the unneeded stations that they probably won't be buying their power for a while. If nobody is buying your power then you shut the plant down (with the following exceptions).
Hydro plants aren't as restricted in water flow as you might think. Most dams have multiple (even dozens of) turbines so the just shut one down completely. The bigger problem is that they need to keep a certain flow rate because otherwise the downstream river would dry up. This is why hydro plants are usually the cheapest power around when demand is low. The water needs to flow downstream anyway.
Nuclear power stations don't really fit into your argument because they start up, run continuously for months or years, and then shut down for maintenance. Their biggest cost is personnel. Fuel is only a tiny fraction of their expenses so it makes no sense to shut a nuclear machine down unless maintenance is required.
Even those who arrange and design shrubberies are under considerable economic stress at this period in history.
Watts are calculated using Voltage and Amps therefore it is a unit of energy.
Watt is a unit for the rate of energy transfer. The actual unit for energy is the joule where "watts = joules / seconds". The term "kWh" is a term designed to allow people to easily determin home energy usage. It directly maps to joule with 1 kWh = 3.6e6 joules.
Nerd thissers : 2011 :: AOLamer me tooers : 1993
Attention zealots and haters: 00100 00100
When the brightness is not set too high the blacks are great (better than LCD) but not perfect. When the brightness it at 100% it is worse than the cheapest LCDs.
Yes, because "brightness" for a CRT means "black level" or "offset" - the setting basically makes blacks not that black. If you want white color to be brighter, you should increase "contrast" which means "gain".
True, I especially like the high refresh rate. As for the input lag, my skills are far too low to take advantage of this.
Input lag for me isn't so much about skills as it can make the image "feel wrong" if it is excessive. And LCDs increase input lag to achieve fast response, I guess more processing is needed if you want the pixel to change the state faster.
I lost about 20% contrast in red and blue leading to a greenish tint in dark areas that is difficult to correct.
My Dell P1130 also has this problem. However, it can be corrected in one of two ways. I managed to approximate it in the advanced color settings, where I could adjust the offset and gain for each color. A better way to do it is using the WinDAS software (connecting monitor to a RS232 port) to adjust it properly, but that requires a colorimeter, the software basically says "show full screen white, adjust these sliders so that colorimeter showx x: ... y: ...". That software works for Sony Trinitron monitors, maybe there is software that works with yours. Also, at least AMD video card drivers allow me to set the offset, gain and gamma for each color.
At high resolution / high refresh rate, my CRT becomes blurry.
Get a better cable. 1920x1200@85Hz is about 300MHz pixel clock, the cable has to be really good to pass it without blur (limited bandwidth) or ghosting (reflections because of impedance mismatch somewhere).
Also, I bought Nvidia GTX 260 video card and it made the monitor blurry at high resolutions - most likely the analog circuitry was poorly designed or too cheap to cope with the high frequencies. I returned the card and continued to use AMD HD2900XT, later replaced it with a 6850 and the analog output is still good.
In many jurisdictions in the US
I have no experience at 3rd word country power grids. And while I may be flaming a bit, doesn't make it less true - the US grid system is crap.
In a simplified case, if Bob will sell you 100MW at $0.04 and Tom will sell you 80MW at $0.06, but 150MW is needed, then you buy all of Bob's power and then 50MW of Tom's. If the load drops to just 80MW, then you stop buying from Tom altogether, and Tom probably shuts his machine down. There are complications to this scheme including power-purchasing agreements, spinning reserve requirements, etc, but that is basically how it works.
That's how it is on the US. Not how it works. The US probably have the shittiest energy regulation of all civilized countries, and it doesn't work. Week-long outages in some regions isn't my definition of "working".
The grid operator knows how much power they will need to within a pretty good margin of error. It is very predictable depending on the outside temperature and the time of day. Most people have a daily routine of electricity use and in the aggregate, the electricity use of a population is very stable and predictable. 10,000 people going home at 5PM and turning on their electric stove is predictable.
Oh yes. You are absolutely right. How does that contradict what I said? It doesn't. Those 10k people could turn the oven on, there would be no spike. Because electricity is already being produced in excess. All those 10k people switching off a lightbulb? (about 5x the savings of white vs black background on an lcd)? No effect. Turning off the PC? no effect.
Hydro plants aren't as restricted in water flow as you might think.
Did I say they were restricted in water flow? What I said is that isn't just throwing a switch and bam! you have power. The most common dams (on small rivers) have usually upto a dozen turbines, but almost never running at capacity. The bigger the turbines, more water they need to work at production levels. But if it rains a lot, you'll have all those dams running at full capacity generating electricity that won't be spent anyway. Also, if it is a navigated river, you'll always keep the water running.
Nuclear power stations don't really fit into your argument
Didn't I said that?
so it makes no sense to shut a nuclear machine down unless maintenance is required.
So why would you be worried with "the environment" and trying to save some KWh if your energy is produced by a nuclear powerplant? Did you actually read what I posted?
That is whishful thinking. Take the last 10 years as an example - CFL are the most common type of light available, they provide typical 5x savings (we're talking about saving way over those 5W you're trying to save, on an actual common household item that everybody has). Now tell me about all those powerstations that weren't built because CFL savings...