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The Energy Saved By Ditching DVDs Could Power 200,000 Homes
Daniel_Stuckey (2647775) writes "The environmental benefits of streaming a movie (or downloading it) rather than purchasing a DVD are staggering, according to a new U.S. government study by researchers at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. If all DVDs purchased in 2011 were streamed instead, the energy savings would have been enough to meet the electricity demands of roughly 200,000 households. It would have cut roughly 2 billion kilograms of carbon emissions. According to the study, published in Environmental Research Letters, even when you take into account cloud storage, data servers, the streaming device, streaming uses much less energy than purchasing a DVD. If, like me, you're thinking, 'who buys DVDs anymore, anyways?', the answer is 'a lot of people.'" The linked paper is all there, too — not just an abstract and a paywall.
And if you're unable to read the study online, you can order a paper copy.
Just par for the course for the internet, with snail mail being it's first and biggest victim (and slowest to die).
A more interesting question to me, is what future libraries will look like bereft of physical media.
Who knew, when they were building thepiratebay, they were simply making the library of the future? Not just in an idealized sense, but in an actual sense of keeping the industry somewhat honest, like what the used car or textbook business does.
Did they also calculate how much energy would be saved if we would not waste processor power on DRM decoding?
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
>> If all DVDs purchased in 2011 were streamed instead, the energy savings would have been enough to meet the electricity demands of roughly 200,000 households.
Or, if you're like my family, the energy "saved" from spinning up DVDs on two different TVs has now gone into a more powerful wireless router (to support better streaming), bigger TVs (bought with money saved from cancelling cable), a digital antenna booster (so we can watch HD network TV without cable), and personal tablets that none my three kids had in 2011.
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When I buy a DVD, I own that DVD. That is why I buy DVDs. I don't want some DRM server somewhere suddenly saying that I cannot stream a movie I purchased.
Now if streaming allowed me to purchase and keep a copy free of DRM, then I'd be interested.
But so long as there is DRM, I'll continue buying DVDs.
...constructing the infrastructure to support all that streaming? Not saying we shouldn't build it, but let's not suggest that it's any more "green" to go that way.
I still buy physical DVDs - primarily because they are passively archival and don't depend on me a) having connectivity or b) having my server nearby. I view programming at some locations (like my cottage) where it's easier to bring a few DVDs than it is to copy a bunch of data onto a hard disk and then connect a computer to the television.
I also wonder if the energy consumption considers the issues of ramped-up Internet infrastructure and server capacity required to store, back up and stream the content. This isn't free and isn't emission-neutral. High-def (e.g. Blu-Ray) content is even moreso whereas the cost of a Blu-Ray disc versus DVD is actually almost trivial. Once you own the Blu-Ray player, you're done except for the marginal two or three dollar cost for the higher definition media.
That pirating movies has actually been helping the environment the whole time? I for one am glad keep up with my civic duty for a better tomorrow...
I can't wait for Bennett Haselton's comments on this study.
As someone who has spent the last decade virtualizing anything with a power supply that wasn't critical, you would be astounded as to the savings from yes, *gasp* running apps in the 'cloud'.
It just doesn't mean what YOU think it means.
The cloud isn't just a hosted application that moves seamlessly around a cluster. It can be a head on a cluster, that hosts an application and save thousands of KW a year and you the end user wouldn't know the difference. It's a direct analog to the idea of ditching DVDs. Move the application where the backing resources can be shared, and managed remotely and you will save carbon.
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Interesting that mention of Blu-ray is only in passing in the original article. Once again raises the question of why did we even bother with the Blu-ray / HD DVD wars when video-on-disk is so close to being obsolete.
If you read the article in detail, the energy cost for a DVD rented or purchased by mail is pretty much identical to that of one streamed (figure 4.)
The purported energy cost difference between DVD and streaming is entirely due to the fact that they assume you drive to the store to buy or rent the DVD. (In fact, there is actually a tiny bit more carbon emitted if you stream instead of rent or buy by mail, if you look at the right image on figure 4).
I assume if you buy or rent from a store you're going to visit anyway, this differnce vanishes
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
i buy a DVD or blu ray all the delivery costs are paid for once
i stream Dune or some other movie more than once and the costs of the data center and delivery have to be paid each time in electricity
maybe geeks don't watch movies on TV, but all my movies are watched on a TV using the same game console or an apple TV. and every blu ray player does streaming as well
I like to have the media in my grubby little hands so that when the powers-that-be decide the lose my purchases in the cloud or decide that I need to purchase the same movie/music once per device, or...
I generally buy used CDs and DVDs from Amazon, rip them to FLAC (for music) and .mp4 for movies then put them on my in-home NAS for streaming. So the discs are touched once by me. I also convert the FLAC files to mp3 for portable devices like iPhone. I have a closet in my house that holds nothing much more than CDs and DVDs. A fire-proof safe holds a 2TB USB drive with a backup of the media just in case.
When I RIAA comes after me, I will be able to put my hands on media proving I didn't pirate anything.
I still pay for a netflix DVD delivery, too, because the PTB will not agree to let netflix stream all the movies that are available on DVD. The streaming selection sucks relative to the disc availability. Oh, and I don't rip the netflix discs 'cause that'd be stealing. I use netflix to watch a movie for the first time, if there's replay value, I'll go to amazon.
They'll hold Netflix up for even more ransom.
Thanks to the War on Drugs, it's easier to buy meth than it is to buy cold medicine!
If I pay with cash, it's mine and nobody has that data to sell to someone about me. Also, nobody ever knows if I ever watched it at all, or if I went back and watched a hot sex scene or some dude's head exploding over and over again.
Streaming services track this kind of info. Many just blow that off, but it matters to some.
And if cloud services didn't disappear from time to time either all together or on legacy platforms, risk me losing access to content due to an account block on some other part of the providers service, rely on me always having a fast connection handy, allowed me to download the content in high quality and transcode it for all my devices, maybe that would be okay.
But they don't. So it isn't.
I wonder how many people are reading that journal in printed in paper and mailed to subscribers form. And how many are streaming it? When would the journal Environmental Research Letters switch to pure electronic delivery to be friendly to the environment?
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
So all of the 'environmental benefits' boil down to the assumptions they make about those purchases.
Perhaps it's just me, but I would lean more towards people already being at a store/mall for another purpose and picking up the dvd as an impulse buy. Non-impulse buys of dvd would seem to more logically take place over the internet.
Don't complain about syntax, grammar, or spelling. There is no.hell like input on android.
When they pry them from my cold dead hands !
When your media is stored in the cloud, you don't have physical control and it can be taken from you via any number of means, and for any number of reasons.
When you have physical possession of the media, it is MUCH harder for it to be taken from you!
We have already seen this problem in the Amazon case where they revoke "ownership" of 1984 (believe it or don't) and other cases of music services dying and taking peoples collections with them. Also services aren't allowing your media collections to be passed to your heirs! This is easy when you possess the media !!
The cloud is just NOT a good idea...
1. no control over purchase as it can be revoked at any time for any reason.
2. even the best internet streams hitch, lag, and drop frames.
3. complexity: the majority of nontechnical people understand the concept of placing a disk in a tray and hitting play.
4. value proposition. I won't pay $20 for a movie I can't really own.
cpghost at Cordula's Web.
Movies I buy (and I still do buy DVDs as well as online content such as through iTunes), usually are bought because I plan to watch more than once.
I'm sure the manufacturing and distribution costs of my DVD purchases are a lot less of a strain on the environment than having streamed these movies over and over. I cant count how many times I have watches some movies in my collection.
Don't start all this "can't tell the difference" crap. Until you can get internet lags and stutters completely eliminated we'll be able to tell the difference.
The savings are infinite when you cannot play at all what you wanted to see, a dark screen uses no power at all.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
NEWS FLASH RUSS, The Cloud is not the Internet. There are clouds on the internet. Last mile's gonna always lag, but I'm still trying to figure out what you exact beef here is.
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Now if only companies such as Concast would allow people to experience that "rich multimedia Internet" I keep reading about rather than terminate people's internet because "they used it too much" then we could go down this road without being hassled for using the service we purchased.
But then again, when you are a monopoly (or near monopoly) why would you care?
Pft. I buy DVD's and blu ray disks more than ever now. Streaming from Amazon Prime and Netflix over a provider who's up front with the terms of the contract rather than hiding it. I know how much I can use and I track all traffic through my firewall using vnstat.
If we were to stream all content we receive it would easily blow through the monthly limits these guys have imposed. Not hard to do especially these days.
Has Comcast disconnected your Internet account? Same here. You can read about it at http://comcastissue.blogspot.com
All "clouds" must be over the internet. The whole point of "the cloud" is that it is located remotely, on someone else's hardware, managed by someone else's IT staff. Elsewise, it's nothing more than the same data center you had a decade ago.
Or in the case of the situations and environments I work, your statement should read: "Move the applications to where they are not accessible when you have no internet connection while you need to do your work".
Not everyone works on their computers in a cubicle with the company or home LAN available 24/7. My work is often on construction sites where the network infrastructure is non-existent, or at client sites, where the IT crowd won't let vendors on their network to access the internet. You have what you brought, and if your lucky you might have enough cell service to get a data card to work if you have one.
Article says: "If, like me, you're thinking, 'who buys DVDs anymore, anyways?'.
Nope, I am not thinking like that. I buy DVDs so that I can watch them on my portable DVD player. Some foreign movies and TV shows are not available online. End of discussion. don't like that I buy physical DVDs from Amzon.com or Best Buy (brick and mortor store)? Don't criticize what I'm doing. I don't criticize online streaming. What is next, you gonna yell at me for using a Walkman instead of a smartphone to listen to my music? Leave me alone, ok??
signed, fed up
This is what causes bridges (and everything else) to fail. Resonating at the harmonic frequency of anything will eventually cause it to fail.
"Growing old is inevitable; growing up is optional."
Maybe your application is not a target for the cloud (or not as mission critical as you think it is)... or perhaps both.
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Yes, but if we get rid of other particular people, it'd benefit both the environment and society. Comcast, Verizon, and MPAA executives would be a good start.
Public and Hybrid clouds are, Private clouds aren't...
The american notion that we should continuously purchase new things as quickly as possible so as to ensure our continued virility and happiness is whats really the problem. Imagine if instead of remaking a movie half a dozen times, we contented ourselves with the original and cultivated an appreciation for film as not just a disposable commodity but an art. Instead of butter-churning 10 sequels we stopped trying to milk storylines for box office parity. If instead of buying ever newer and larger televisions, we contented ourselves to only upgrade when and if the technological advancement were warranted and only if the purchase did not remove or restrict features already present. If instead of e-readers we maintained a small library of books we enjoyed, and when we were through donated them to a library. If Blu-ray and DVD werent packaged so extensively in a misguided attempt to thwart theft and instead came in a simple cardboard sleeve im certain a sizeable quantity of energy would be saved.
Good people go to bed earlier.
Do you mean "less people" as in "less massive/skinnier people", or did you actually mean "fewer people"? I suppose it makes sense either way.
There are advantages and drawbacks to cloud computing; how insightful of you to point out one of the benefits in such an amusing way.
It means, as the poster alluded to FREE ENERGY. Though, as he says - it's not - because then we would call him a quack. He's just implying that 100-102% efficiency is possible when you synchronize the frequency of your input power source to the harmonic frequency of your target power consumption or device.
If you need a car analogy, it's like filling your gasoline tank in your car and marking down the mileage, and then checking to see how many miles you have gone when you fill up the next time. This is where the quantum effect also plays a role, because by simply never filling the tank all the way up, you'll get an infinite number of miles per gallon. Example: Fill tank at 12,400miles, partial fill 4 times, then complete fill of 8.26 gallons at 13,175 miles = (13,175-12,400)/8.26 = 93.8 miles per gallon. Once you fill up the tank and mark the mileage down, though, you've cut off your "harmonics" and you'll get a finite value. That's why it's not really "free energy" because to get free energy or over unity you would never be able fill up the car all the way. The longer you can go without completely filling the tank and triggering the measurement, the closer you are to matching the engine/gasoline fill harmonics. I've achieved well over 300mpg in my truck this way, but I've also got special magnets on my fuel line and installed an "open flow" regulator on the air intake, so there are other advantages which helped me achieve this which are unrelated to the harmonics.
The same thing applies to power - whether it be lightbulbs or networking equipment or freely spinning bicycle wheels, though in an entirely different way.
If my ideas are intriguing to you, I would be happy to subscribe you to my newsletter.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
Most clouds I've worked with to date have been corporate clouds. No internet involved. Networks, yes; but no internet. Lag was never a problem for me in those environments.
All "clouds" must be over the internet. The whole point of "the cloud" is that it is located remotely, on someone else's hardware, managed by someone else's IT staff. Elsewise, it's nothing more than the same data center you had a decade ago.
Not necessarily true. One aspect of the cloud is being able to rapidly expand capacity or relocate workloads based on application needs. "located remotely, on someone else's hardware, managed by someone else's IT staff" is more like a definition of out-sourcing. Cloud can be on my hardware, managed by my staff, be migrated to or augmented by remote capacity during peak times or special circumstances.
Up here, there really only is one broadband provider, and they gouge us by forcing us to bundle their cable service to their cable modem, and the total cost runs us over $150 for a basic 60 GB.
I've burned plenty of DVD's with absolutely no video in sight (and I fully expect to burn in Hell for a truly horrible double entendre).
Analog meaning a physical item compared to a stream of transient electrons.
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
Well said. I buy my music on CDs for the same reason. (Granted, I rip it and file the originals away almost instantly; I still actually use my DVD and Blu-Ray media but that might change soon too if I can ramp up the server space).
>All it is, is virtualized servers and services - absolutely NOTHING new here.
Absolutely wrong. It is Automated, Agnostic virtualization and services.
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As someone who has spent the last decade virtualizing anything with a power supply that wasn't critical, you would be astounded as to the savings from yes, *gasp* running apps in the 'cloud'.
You mean savings for YOU, not for the environment.
You just moved the energy cost to somebody else.
Better to compare that against the CO2 in the atmosphere because most of it is Nitrogen. It's the ratio of the gasses that matters most not the total weight, air head. Even then why should 1 contributing factor have to be over 1% to care about it? My personal contributions are nothing but combined with billions of other people we get the over population created problems we have today.
I find it odd these people vote, their vote doesn't count for anything significant; using their own reasoning they shouldn't ever vote (laying aside all the failed democracy issues.)
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
"The Cloud" is more of a marketing term than a technical description of a specific hosting set up, and different people will use different definitions. You can let them continue the guessing game of which meaning you're using and keep calling them idiots, or you can define the term that you're using.
It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
Is the assumption here that the cloud severs and network connectivity, which need to be running 24/7, doesn't require any power?
No.
Actual KW saved by not running directly on metal, and squeezing every possible resource out of a highly efficient and redundant server.
It means asset depreciation is much lower, so server churn is much lower (less carbon, less waste less garbage), every watt is consumed rather than dissipated as heat. Every Watt that is consumed rather than dissipated is another watt of cooling that is not needed. It means common parts for all servers which leads to less manufacturing waste. The commoditization of CPU cycles instead of x86, P or IA hardware.
Seriously, please refrain from commenting on things you know nothing about, or can't even be bothered to take to its logical conclusion.
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I buy Blu-Rays because I have a home theater 7.2 home stereo with a large hd screen and would like to take advantage of the sound quality of the blu-ray. Also, I happen to like the extras that are on some of them... not all, mind you.. but some are very interesting, especially directorial commentary.
Digitally signed receipts do not exist yet-- somehow everybody is happy to move to the fluffy clouds while being reasonably fearful of the internet (they are not the same thing in the mind of the consumer.) If people resisted more we could get digital receipts!
If they revoke your account you would have proof of purchase for an item and with some laws in place you could get access to your content even if you were banned from the service. Sure, they'd fight like hell and some customers would screw them with requests for DVDs of all their stuff... plus they'd have to device DRM schemes to give out copies for customers demanding them. Naturally, we'd have troubles passing laws making it work just like real items so errors like that 1984 one still don't loophole trash your book... like anybody would mail back the physical book because amazon made a mistake. the digital one should be the same but without strong regulations and a government that isn't totally corrupt... forget it.
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
The cloud is highly shared and redundant clustering that is automated and agnostic. It can be public or private.
It is not any one hypervisor. It is the automation of one or all hypervisors, and clustering of the technologies it hosts. It is automated provisioning and portability between private and public areas.
It is *not* just an ESX server.
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You are both idiots for not knowing how to argue. Zeromous, perhaps your point is "Someone can be hosting a cloud locally to support a business/agency. So it can be available over 1gbit LAN with indiscernible latency, or be in a geographically close data center with an interconnect of equivilant bandwidth."
But you didn't provide any supporting facts so your equally ridiculous.
Zeomous of poor reading comprehension says: "I'm still trying to figure out what you exact beef here is." when Russ had just said "lags and stutters".
Anyhow, usually what people host locally is not a cloud infrastructure, since if you're not doing hosting for third parties, and only your own organization, your virtuallization needs are met by a simpler cluster architecture. Some call it a cloud infrastructure, but usually is just a virtuallized cluster. Virtuallization != cloud. Cloud involves virtualization. Not all virtualization is a cloud. Very much the not-all-black-birds-are-crows kind of thing.
"Embrace cloud content and DRM, its the 'green' thing to do."
No thanks. I will continue to drive down in my gas sucking Escalade to the store and buy actual products i can take home, not just a 'promise'.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
I have defined it consistently and several times. The Cloud is a collection of technologies for automated provisioning, portability between private, public and hybrid highly available clusters of both software and hardware. Did you know you can install what amounts to a 'cloud' on a single machine?
I also didn't call him an idiot, I said his oversimplification was idiotic (lazy and stupid) and the source of his confusion/apprehension.
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Don't they let you downgrade the television service to just the local channels to save money? Where I live, the cable company throws in "limited basic" television (locals and C-SPAN and HSN in standard definition) for no additional charge with home Internet service, but expanded basic television (TNT, ESPN, etc.) costs extra.
Once again, analog beats digital.
Wooo! LaserDisc! It bugs me that the streaming copy of a movie that some of them provide is marketed as the "Digital Copy" of the movie, when the movie itself is on DVD and Blu-Ray anyhow.
It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
I totally agree with most of what you said?
Firstly, I did not miss what RUSS said. Lag and stutter is not a characteristic of a cloud it is characteristic of an inappropriate network connection.
Secondly, I still think you are too narrow. The Cloud is just as likely to be private as public. Virtualization alone doth not a cloud make you point out rather correctly. The cloud is automation layers to manage virtualization solutions and baremetal as a whole, automate management and deployment. It is about efficiency and accesibility for the enduser. It's about the possibility of exposing resources direct to users on demand.
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"The Cloud" is more of a marketing term than a technical description of a specific hosting set up, and different people will use different definitions. You can let them continue the guessing game of which meaning you're using and keep calling them idiots, or you can define the term that you're using.
To me, "the cloud" is just a buzz word which corresponds roughly to the thin client rage of yesteryear.
So like... mainframes and dummy terminals all over again?
Why did we stop using those?
Round and round we go...
Cloud computing is definitely cool and useful for many tasks. I've migrated all my home based server things to an EC2 instance and quite pleased with the results. I however would NEVER advocate ditching my home based General Purpose computer in exchange for a thin client and a cloud backed CPU.
It just sets a bad precedent for one. I immediately think of bad things like the GP computer going byebye and everyone having to rent time from a cloud compute CPU to do anything useful. Not to mention the surveillance implications of having all your stuff only accessible by remote (meaning others can access it by remote as well.)
Cloud computing has a place, but it is NOT a replacement for the home based General Purpose computer.
So like... mainframes and dummy terminals all over again?
Why did we stop using those?
Round and round we go...
In IT, it really is true. What goes around, comes around. Over and over and over and over and over.
Me either. You are wise to recognize this.
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Something they might not have taken into account is the "view it again" factor. Sure, the manufacture of DVDs has a significant environmental impact. But when not simply thrown away after being purchased, it means that saving a movie for a few years, and then seeing it again, does not have the same environmental impact it did the first time. It might be interesting to see how many "views" are needed to make owning a DVD a better environmental bargain that streaming its content.
"The Cloud" is more of a marketing term than a technical description of a specific hosting set up, and different people will use different definitions. You can let them continue the guessing game of which meaning you're using and keep calling them idiots, or you can define the term that you're using.
To me, "the cloud" is just a buzz word which corresponds roughly to the thin client rage of yesteryear.
That's because you see it from the outside in, and that's what you're supposed to see.
From the inside out, there's a whole lot of support infrastructure.
At the end of the day, pretty much (although not quite the same). To answer your question.... think of the cloud as next gen mainframe. Mainframes were very locked to the platform and specialized software. Consider this utilitarian agnostic computing.
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The Magnificent Seven is $4.99 from Amazon (and that includes shipping if you're a Prime member), or it's $3.99 to rent it for 24 hours from iTunes. The BR disc re-sells for $4-8 on eBay, the iTunes purchase can't even be watched the second day.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
Still not making any sense.
Talking about power factor maybe? If a motor is a slightly inductive load, you can put a capacitor to cancel out the inductance and bring power factor closer to unity. You will get the same "real power" out of the system, but your incoming current (amps) will be lower, because the phase angle will shift to be in line with voltage.
However residential customers are charged energy in kWh, so the "Amps", kVA, and power factor have no impact on the bill. Commercial / industrial can get hit with power factor penalties, as well as demand charges in kVA, so controlling power factor is important.
A bad power factor will impact the grid as a whole because the system has to be sized to handle the apparent power kVA, not just kW, increased current (even at a bad power factor) will increase I^2*R losses in the lines, but the mechanical energy in the generator makes real power.
I worked in a shop where circuit breakers were beginning to blow owing to the increasing number of physical boxes running at under 15% capacity.
Virtualization was obviously the first step, since we'd have more physical rackspace, and less idle hardware pulling power.
But the problem with virtualization is that if a host box breaks down or one of the virtual guests suddenly gets hungrier, you have to manually reconfigure stuff.
Cloud software takes care of a lot of that stuff automatically.
You are absolutely right and I take back what I said as being overly simplistic. Back in ARPAnet days there wasn't much an application layer. It really depends if you are looking at it from a transport layer or not. But since we're talking about cloud it's not useful or even particularly helpful to either argument to be overly broad about defining the Internet. I do suppose one could argue the cloud is definitely capable of exploiting favorable packet flows to exist wherever on the network- but it doesn't have to which is precisely my point..
I classify your comment as interesting. But it doesn't say one thing or another of the merits (or lack thereof) of cloud technology.
It just really pisses me off to hear people who think they know what they are talking about dismiss cloud as some revist of technology that has existed since the 70s. In a manner of speaking it is, but it is yet another layer of abstraction with new possibilities and conveniences and fewer disadvantages.
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Exactly. It's nice to see someone on /. gets it rather than spout dated uninformed rhetoric.
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> I decided to move completely to streaming (via iTunes), rather than buying discs. Two advantages:
>
> 1) When the next format comes out, I don't have to re-purchase the same movie yet again (VHS --> DVD --> Blu-ray --> 4K --> ???)
Sure you do. Services like iTunes won't give you the HD version for free. If you want that, you will have to PAY for it.
Who are you trying to kid? Apple is not a charity.
Then there are the decoders. Do you seriously think that your current ATV will be able to decode new formats as they become available. You will have to buy your video appliances ALL OVER again just as if you were switching from DVD to BD.
Advantage Apple? Hardly.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
The cloud is highly shared and redundant clustering that is automated and agnostic. It can be public or private.
Wait, so I can save carbon by having a private cloud in my basement? I mean sure, that saves the lag and whatnot from the always-problematic last mile, but how does the movie get to my private cloud? I'm not seeing the carbon savings!
Also, most streaming content doesn't use TCP/IP anyway.
"The Cloud" is a marketing term used to describe software, platforms, and infrastructure as a remote service.
How do you get agnostic virtualization?
It's reasonable to assume that energy usage per viewing of a media stream will drop significantly over time - which greatly negates the benefits of the DVD.
Or in the case of the situations and environments I work, your statement should read: "Move the applications to where they are not accessible when you have no internet connection while you need to do your work".
The definition of a networked system is "one you can't use because some computer you never heard of is down".
Give the customer a worse and worse product at an ever increasing price.
You to can become one of the proletariat when you can no longer own things.
Make everything a licenseable service, no more ownership!
The charts also didn't cover what the impact of them turning off a DRM server and you losing your 4,000+ movie collection and then burning down their headquarters when they are only willing to give you a 20% off coupon for your first purchase from their new DRM server..
Also "Your average DVD ends up in a land fill after just 5 years".. I suspect that one fails the sanity check.
Seems like paid drivel designed to get people to pay more for less/nothing.
How does this compare from carbon capping and moving to solar/nuclear? How about moving people to bikes and electric vehicles?
There's no question that content providers like streaming because it means we're really just renting the content. There's also no question that it's super convenient (I have Netflix like a lot of people do) but I don't view it as a replacement to physical media, but rather as an augmentation.
Actual KW saved by not running directly on metal, and squeezing every possible resource out of a highly efficient and redundant server.
On the other hand, many "cloud" services are actually grid services that run on many, redundant, small servers, in contrast to the blade center HP and IBM tries to shove down your throat. One example is GMail and the assorted google services. So, while I understand your point about virtualization, cloud and virtualization are two very different and very distinct things.
It means asset depreciation is much lower, so server churn is much lower (less carbon, less waste less garbage)
It depends how you measure it. In a pure cpu-power-per-watt, 1U servers are way cheaper than an equivalent blade solution, easier to service, and will run cooler. They do take more space, but asset depreciation on a 50K blade cage vs 30K of 1U servers is bigger in the blades.
every watt is consumed rather than dissipated as heat
Well, its not, and this is one of the biggest fallacies of virtualization. It wildly varies according to the workload and your configuration. For small workloads, you may even spend more in hardware to provide proper virtualization than you had to pay for a metal solution. You do gain flexibility, and yes, when well done, you may take more advantage of your hardware, but this is not a novel concept. When possible, solutions like linux containers, solaris zones and freebsd jails allows at least some level of flexibility with a smaller execution footprint.
And regarding usage... well, most cpu's even implement an instruction that internally halts the cpu if not in use. Cpu consumption varies according to the workload, and most of the specs mention max consumption, not average consumption. It may even happen that your beefier setup actually spends more power per vm than single dedicated servers.
It means common parts for all servers which leads to less manufacturing waste.
Yes, but is it cheaper? As an example, almost all industrial processes wastes copious amounts of water, when often more sofisticated and reusable replacements are available. But water is cheaper. Its a bit like saying "this aluminium package is 20% smaller, so we can stop using cardboard packaging because it generates less waste". I would like to see proper metrics on that, not sure if it is that obvious.
...is informing my loving big brother about my interests and location. As long as he knows I'm at home streaming X-Men, he doesn't have to worry about me organizing with others to effect social change using untracked communications methods. Privacy is bad for the environment. Go future go!
Cloudiot: A person who does not see offsite storage as a way to lose control over access to his or her own data.
And streaming is stupid... Downloading movies would make a lot more sense than DVDs, but streaming is ridiculous...
Most people would want to watch movies around the same time, so think of the crippling bandwidth requirements all at once. And what about those who can't get fast connections at home for whatever reason - streaming would be impractical, but downloading would usually still be quicker than a mail order dvd.
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
The cloud tooling builds the stack on demand for the platform of choice. Obv you arent going to be running AIX on x86.
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The problem happens when makers of applications that aren't a good target for running on someone else's server move their applications to someone else's server for buzzword and DRM reasons.
Although I don't want to get into the specific definition of "cloud" vs "cluster" vs "virtualized service server" etc -- with the understanding that perhaps it is a definition in flux along with the underlying supporting software and virtualization layers and hence will be hard to pin down and hence easy to argue fruitlessly about -- I agree with all of this. A major point of certain kinds of clustering software from Condor on down has been maintaining a high duty cycle on otherwise fallow resources that you've paid for already, that have to be plugged in all the time to be available for critical work anyway, that burn some (usually substantial) fraction of their load energy in idle mode waiting for work, and that depreciate and eventually are phased out by e.g. Moore's Law after 3-5 years in many cases even though they aren't broken and are perfectly capable of doing work. Software like Condor lets even desktops be part of a local "cloud" that can be running background jobs that don't really interfere with interactive response time much but that keep the duty cycle of the hardware very close to 100% instead of the 5-8% a mostly-idle desktop might be (while still burning half or even 3/4 of the energy it burns when loaded).
So it really isn't all about carbon (except insofar as energy (carbon based or not) costs money). It's about money, and some of the money is linked to the use of carbon. High duty cycle utilization of resources is economically much more efficient. That's why businesses like to use it. It's often cheaper to scavenge free cycles from resources you already have than it is to build dedicated resources that might end up sitting idle much of the time.
The catch, however, is systems management. In many cases, the biggest single cost of setting up ANY sort of distributed computing environment is human. A single sysadmin capable of setting up serious clustering and managing virtualized resources could easily be six figures per year, and that could easily exceed the cost of the resources themselves (including the energy cost) for a small to medium sized company. All too often, the systems management that is available is of questionable competence, as well, which further complicates things. Virtualization in the cloud can at least help address some of these issues too, as one shares high end systems management people and high end software resources across a large body of users and hence get much better scale economy IF you can afford enough competence locally to get your tasks out there into the cloud in the first place and still satisfy corporate rules for due diligence, data integrity and security, and so on.
However, be aware that for all of the advantages of distributed computing, there are forces, market and otherwise, that push against it. I buy a license for some piece of mission critical (say accounting) software, and that license usually restricts it to run on a single machine. If I put it on a virtual machine and run it on many pieces of hardware (but on only one machine at a time) I'm probably violating the letter of the law, and the company that sold the software has at least some incentive to hold me to the letter so they can sell me a license for every piece of hardware I might end up running a virtualized instance upon. Correctly licensing stuff one plans to run "in the cloud", then, is a bit of a nightmare -- if you care about that sort of thing. If one is a business, this can be a real (due diligence sort of) issue.
Which brings us full circle back to the top article. There are ever so many things that would be vastly more efficient "in the cloud" or just "run from an internet and distributed servers" as a more general version of the same thing. Netflix, sure, but how about paper newspapers? Every day, they require literally tons of paper per locality, cubic meters of ink, enough electricity to power a small manufactory, transportation fuel for the workers that cut the trees, the trees as they go to the paper mill, th
Even when the experts all agree, they may well be mistaken. --- Bertrand Russell.
I have little interest in seeing most movies more than once. But some get watched over and over. If I'm flipping channels and see Jaws on TV, I'll stop and watch it. I have it on DVD too. 5th Element, The Waterboy, Tin Cup, Aliens, A Christmas Story, maybe a dozen more DVD/BluRay are watched over and over in my family. And that's not counting kids crap that gets watch 5000 times.
Looks like some special interests are trying to strike another blow against people actually owning the movies that they buy. Lets list some other benefits: You don't get to watch the disc again, or lend it to a friend. And if you do watch it again on-line, you can completely ignore any costs involved (because that's what the research did). You're not distracted by the extra content included on DVDs. The lower quality streaming video is perfectly fine for you. You're completely freed from the "right of first sale' and will never have to concern yourself with selling or trading old DVDs that you have. And those nice people at your ISP who have started capping your service and who will charge outrageous overages if you happen to exceed your monthly quota will gladly forgive your overage if you explain how you were downloading or streaming for the sake of the planet (wouldn't you, AT&T?)
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
I asked because of the use of the word agnostic..
http://www.merriam-webster.com...
http://thesaurus.com/browse/ag...
The standard CSS DRM is cracked and even the additional standard-violating errors they put on there in an attempt to maintain some kind of DRM are easily circumventable. Thus, I can rip the thing off there and put it on whatever device I wish in whatever format I wish. Movie studios are so paranoid about copying that they have all sorts of invasive, registration-requiring schemes to get a "digital copy" through their systems, and the copy you get is almost always limited in some way (e.g., some devices not supported, requires specific software setup, etc.), with no guarantee of being able to continue watching it in the future.
When I buy a DVD, I've added it to an archive that I can permanently keep and format-convert as necessary as technology changes. Offer me the same with digital downloads and I'd gladly switch. But the chances of that ever happening are slim. They don't want to make it easy. They want to be able to rent and re-rent these things over and over again, deliver them at whatever crappy quality they decide is appropriate, they want me to sort out the bandwidth bill with my ISP if I go over my cap when watching a whole season, and they want to up the price and/or revoke any and all rights whenever they want. No thanks.
Also, never underestimate the bandwidth and reliability of a household shelf full of DVDs or archive server on movie night.
A well designed DVD player would only draw significant power when in active use. With streaming, server and internet infrastructure need to be built for peak usage and consume significant idle power the rest of the time. Client boxes also tend to be more complex and maintain WiFi connection for things like software updates.
Even if power usage when actually watching the disk is much higher, it's hard to complete with a system that can be turned off.
That's super, when all you're doing is using data you own. When you're using data someone else owns, it's not going to be in your private cloud.
I admittedly don't buy many DVDs or BluRays, and currently am not a Netflix subscriber (because most of their DVDs don't have what I explain next).
I'm fine with streaming (though hopefully there would be an optional download-locally-to-deal-with-a-bad-net-connection option) for some things, like catching up on TV shows or even some movies (I do have Amazon Prime, partially for the Prime Video)...
But I don't want it to ENTIRELY replace DVDs/BluRays until/unless:
* All of the EXTRA content is available, e.g. commentaries, deleted scenes, etc. Most of the Netflix DVDs became 'rental' DVDs (licensed from the copyright holder at a lower price rather than renting purchased normal DVDs via First Sale Doctrine).
* This one probably will never happen, but I listen to the commentaries/documentaries faster than realtime (just like one can do with podcasts). I realize it's probably a very small use case, but I wished the streaming providers would allow this too. Even just a few options, like 1.5x, 2x, 2.5x maybe, and keep CCs/subtitles available in the FF mode. (I also now use VLC on iPad to do the same thing with news/documentary type shows downloaded from my Tivo -- if only the Tivo app had this faster-than-realtime built in, it would be less of a hassle and more reliable).
... and find out what broadband is like in the private sector. It sucks like a tornado outside the major metropolitan areas. Between crummy bandwidth and data caps -- neither of which, I suspect, the researchers ever have to deal with -- physical DVDs are the easiest way to watch movies in many locations.
CUR ALLOC 20195.....5804M
I actually looked up 'agnostic' because I have no idea what it means:
1. a person who does not have a definite belief about whether God exists or not
2. a person who does not believe or is unsure of something
Soooooo, what the hell does this have to do with 'clouds'?
This was my thought. I can say that I rarely re-watch a DVD.....but also buy fewer these days. I rent from Redbox for new releases. That one DVD is probably viewed on the order of 10 times in the first two weeks of release. Probably 25 times over the shelf-life of the movie. Is that enough to justify it?
1. 17 km to drive and purchase DVD? 50% of the trip is apportioned to the DVD transport to account for multiple purchases and errands per trip in the base-case? I doubt people are driving 10 miles just to purchase a DVD, or as only 50% of the reason to take the trip in the first place.
2. Average disc lifetime 5 years? I still have 'The Matrix' that I got for free with my first DVD player back in 1999. None of my DVDs seem to really have a 'lifetime' that I can tell.
I don't see that in the Sears catalogue anymore...
Really, I wish I had some experience with OpenStack or AWS - these skillsets appear to be in some demand these days.
It a system for having somebody like you fucking around running a server, in an era when computing has gotten so good that everybody could make a one-time (or a once-every-five-years) purchase of an Office Productivity package. You'd have to go find honest work doing something else if they did that. So yeah.
We're all just stupid and lazy and need to employ people like you for your expertise. Yeah, that's it.
Those are called Business Cycles. Ambitious and successful business units figure out ways to do new and innovative things and break free of the infrastructure bullshit. Before IT and the Management Horde catches up and resumes sucking the life out of things in the next step of the cycle.
What do you mean, I can't have the fucking printout until Friday? Can't your tape-mounting monkeys put the job on before then?
To an outsider, you just sound like somebody who swallowed a whistle, and the sound it makes is 'the cloud.' I hope they paid you well to not have it surgically removed.
This is informative ? We're talking about carbon savings of ditching DVD's or streaming movies. Now we're streaming the movies from private clouds within our corporate network. What? While we're at "work" ? /. is astonishingly stupid for a bunch of self-proclaimed nerds.
Same AC as above -
Again, how exactly do you plan to run a cloud architecture, as you define it (I more or less agree with your definition) - that will stream a movie without internet hiccups as you claimed at the beginning of this post ?
Either you're running off public clouds with a kick-ass connection most people don't have, or you're running a laughably inefficient private cloud for streaming home movies. (Or abusing a corporate private cloud which you probably shouldn't be streaming home movies from)
The problem is not your definition, it's that you think it solves internet hiccups for streaming a movie to the average home user.
AOL must have single-handedly doubled the CO2 output of the earth during the 1980's and '90's.
That is all.
I would guess that "agnostic" means "not bound by assumptions about the clients connecting to our servers".
Resonance could rule bigtime. Some of us would LOVE to have the ability to cut into the audio stream of those cars that go by with the big subwoofer. Finding the resonant frequency of the frame of the car, then shaking it apart, would be very rewarding. Hey rap-man, get your pile of scrap metal off the street!
Your thermodynamics are atrocious (all the energy ends up as heat) but you're correct that it can provide significant overall energy and cost savings (The energy provides useful work before ending up as heat rather then just being used for idling).
There are other advantages to various cloud options too. Need 10000 CPU hours for a parallel task? Just fire up 10000 CPUs for an hour rather than have to buy 10 CPUs and run for 1000 hours or even 100 for 100. The flexibility is tremendous.
I have by no means drunk the kool-aid on cloud computing but there are some very interesting use cases it serves very well.
There's more of a smooth continuum between that kind of virtualization and cloud. I doubt you could draw a sharp cut-off. Cloud is kind-of like virtualization taken to its logical conclusion.
The only way I'd even consider dumping DVD's to purchase electronic copies is if I actually own the content. The whole premise of streaming services are that you're leasing your content, you no longer own anything, and they can take it away anytime they choose for any reason they choose.
You just blew it. That's the Internet? DNS? Your comment is only one step above folks that think Internet Explorer is the Internet.
No wonder you think "the cloud" is something new.
How different is that from automated nightly builds with a fricking multi-arch makefile?
You keep defending "the cloud" like it's something new. It's not! People got faster Internet connections so services like google docs, Netflix, AWS, etc got a lot faster and more sophisticated. There is nothing intrinsically new here. The buzz word sounds good to the public and to knowledge-less managers, so it stuck.
It's no different than you calling the cloud "autonomous" or "agnostic". People have considered computers to be "autonomous" to one degree or another for a long time.
How about this definition: The cloud is a marketing buzzword used to describe modern-day implementations of non-local time-sharing services. It is frequently paired with cloud-like icons. Any website that hosts data in any way can claim to be offering a service "in the cloud"
I actually looked up 'agnostic' because I have no idea what it means:
1. a person who does not have a definite belief about whether God exists or not
2. a person who does not believe or is unsure of something
Those are the noun definitions of 'agnostic,' but agnostic is also an adjective.
dictionary.com lists one of the adjective definitions as "holding neither of two opposing positions: If you take an agnostic view of technology, then it becomes clear that your decisions to implement one solution or another should be driven by need."
No. Again, it is this completely idiotic and narrow interpretation of the cloud that is precluding you from understanding its advantages.
The problem is the use of the word "the" when speaking of "the cloud".
The article "the" is and English word that has a meaning and proper use. "The" is used to have the effect to singularize or make specific an object begin referred to. This is opposed to the article "a" which is used when objects are generalized.
Almost everyone in the world is going to hear "the cloud" as services hosted on the Internet. The article "the" means specification, so it can only refer to either the well known case of services hosted on the Internet, or a specific instance of cloud computing. In this case, there was no specific instance mentioned in the context, so everyone is reasonable in assuming you are talking about the Internet.
Yes, I know that "the cloud" is used commonly in IT circles to refer to cloud computing in general. It is a bad usage of the language, a kind of marketing infra-dig that leaves more educated people shaking their heads.
DRM and other content whoring practices limiting the effect of the computer age on us all LOVE streaming. You never own the bits. There is no danger you will rip that DVD. You may be able to rip the box if your are clever enough with whatever encryption protocols are on the stream. And if they don't want you to have anything you have bought they just remove it from the cloud or remove your permission to see it. I love streaming in some ways, don't get me wrong. But I think it has a dark side.
DVDs? How about Disney's Frozen on VHS? http://bitcast-a-sm.bitgravity...
(and, yes, http://www.slashfilm.com/froze...)
Maybe it will save energy, but it would keep me subservient to the content producers and that is a cost I'm just not willing to incur. When I "own" the contents of a DVD I expect to be able to watch it whenever I want on whichever device I choose.
Time is what keeps everything from happening all at once.
So who controls what's available for streaming ? Corporations (again)
Ooh look, all those wonderful independent releases just dissapeared from the face of the earth because some uncultutred turd decided it was no longer commerically viable to store them.
Just look at the BBC and how most tapes of the early episodes of Derek and Clive got put into landfill so they could make space for tapes of Pan-o-bloody-rama (crapulent propoganda at it's finest) How many episodes of Dr Who have also been lost ? How many other culturally interesting things have been lost ?
If something's going to be streamed it'd better be in a format that I can make a local copy or I'm totally uninterested. I'm not paying per view and I'm not having what's available at any point controlled by some tasteless old white man in a suit whose only interest is rent seeking from other people's contributions to human culture.
So no thanks I like my local copies. I control them. Once I do get a spinning disc the first thing I do is remove the adverts and convert it to digital format so it only spins the one time I transcode it anyway.
Sky subscribers are morons. They pay to be advertised at !
No, they have not to be over the Internet. We have a private cloud here. Expensive as hell, hardware and licenses, however pretty reliable, we control it, the data in there is controlled by us, darn fast, and saves us lot of headaches.
Well, it's nice to know that DVDs are still selling better than downloads. I mean, how else do you explain such ridiculous propaganda?
I stick with a DVD only subscription because Suddenlink's useless, scumsucking usage cap prevents me from streaming.
If it's private, it's not a "cloud". It's just a bunch of HA and automated provisioning baked into the data center management software.
Any well designed data center was already able to rapidly provision new capacity and relocate processes around damaged hardware. It's the logical evolution of the batching systems used by the HPC sector since the beginning of digital computing. Calling it "the cloud" is just a way to drum up business for outsourced hosting services by making it seem like they're offering something magical.
No. You have a high availability data center. The cloud refers to the amorphous black box that is someone else's high availability center.
Tell that to our customers ;)
If you are selling abstracted computing services of this data center to your customers, then your customers can consider it "the cloud", but to you, it's just "the data center".
According to the article, that's negligible. The real problem is the energy people use to go get the DVD at the store. Buying online or renting online and getting the item in the mail is as efficient as streaming.
A very salacious headline, but not very factual. Look for a similar study for groceries, coming soon from Amazon.
Cheap storage VM.
Sorry for over simplifying the thermodynamics of the matter, I was talking about waste heat. Not heat that disappated because of actual calculations. I should have been more specific.
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I did. The Cloud tools do not care what platform you are on and can be built to be *agnostic*. I'm not talking about the OS or middleware it sets up. I'm talking control and command agnosticism here.
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Actually I run a build farm, let me tell you how the cloud is different: its just another tooling on top of what we already have. The cloud allows us to scale builds rapidly and to meet actual demand. It allows developers to deploy very specific sandboxes automatically and have them disappear. This can be further automated in to the build cycle so that the build or test itself requests and destroys a very specifically defined resource when its done. That is the difference.
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You are right. These are not defining features, they are capabilities. But I defined what marketing is actually talking about when they refer to the cloud and I described the promise of it.
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You sound like a crusty old sysadmin out of a job.
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> Internet is a place tied together by DNS on the TCPIP (and other protocols).
GFY, this is not an untrue statement. Without name resolution, reliable packet transfer there is no Internet.
The cloud is NOT something new, it is tools can capabilities that have matured for commodity hardware and naturally follow matured virtualized environments.
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>I also like the AC chiming in that he can have his support staff run it on a private cloud locally when we're talking about streaming a movie. That's cloud efficiency in action.
Stop being obtuse.
>How do you install a highly available cluster on a single machine ? And if you mean you can have part of a cloud on a single machine with a hybrid solution, you don't really mean a single machine at all. And probably a really dumb design.
Actually it is useful for software testing (and no a single machine would not be 'highly available') but it could simulate.
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I will start streaming video just as soon as someone runs a fiber to my front door. At this point in time there are huge chunks of this country that do not have a hard broadband connection, they rely instead on broadband connections that have specific limitations on bandwidth. I will wait for the fiber connection, but I refuse to hold my breath.
"According to the article, that's negligible. The real problem is the energy people use to go get the DVD at the store. "
Well that's just stupid. I have never gone to the store 'just' to get a DVD. It was always combined with grocery shopping or other trips. (gas, going to a relatives and picking it up en route, etc) All of those trips would of been made regardless of the DVD purchase.
I would wager (I know of no specific studies on this, but did not try to find one either) that most DVD's are purchased in this manner.
I have ordered some special ones online. Gravity 3D wasn't available locally. If it were, I MIGHT of made a special trip for that one however.
"A very salacious headline, but not very factual."
You're absolutely correct. I can only look at studies like this and think, "False equivalencies."
Donald Trump, on a crusade to make Nixon look respectable
But this topic is about movies. Content you do not own. So it's an offsite 3rd party cloud and has nothing to do with a private cloud.
The original article, yes. The post I was responding to was incorrectly lumping all cloud technology into one big blob.
Understood. :)
We need more information before we can actually draw conclusions from this study.
First, what energy consumption are the tallying up for the DVD? Manufacturing the physical disc, making the packaging, shipping the DVD package various places until it finds its way to a customer, all of those matter. If the disc is rented, we also have energy consumption of the rental store or Redbox, shipping if it's ordered from Netflix, and energy consumed traveling to the rental location if you make a special trip to get there.
What is the use case? Will the disc be bought and watched once? Will it be bought and watched a hundred times like that copy of Frozen that you got for the kids? Will it be rented, and from where? A Redbox in a location that the renter already visits regularly is the best case, a video store that the renter makes a special driving trip to reach is the worst, and discs by mail from Netflix lie somewhere in between as they make only a small incremental contribution to postal trips that are already being made.
The playing over and over case is one where the edge probably lies with the DVD. In most cases the disc will be played in a standalone DVD player. On average those consume less power than a computer does, but it's also possible that the streamed video will be viewed using a DVD or Blu-Ray player or with a set-top box such as a Roku, which might shift the advantage toward streaming. For the streamed video, we also have to add the power used by the server at Netflix or Amazon or wherever, or at their caching company such as Akamai, and the power used by all the internet infrastructure between the cloud and the viewer.
That's all crap any decent sysadmin can accomplish with simple shell scripts and a database.
This kind of thing has been going on since the 70s or possibly even earlier, and it was called "system administrating". When demands became too high for an admin to manually do this sort of work, he or she wrote scripts (or as you would say, "autonomous agnostic software") to balance loads and free up resources automatically. Some of this work was the basis for memory-protected SMP OS designs. On a larger scale, this is how most enterprise systems operate.
So what you call "cloud computing" most people used to just call "getting work done efficiently"