Another of these lovely coincidences. The publication of my article in Project Magazine on Sustainability in IT has been marked by text messages from colleagues in the APM congratulating me on my new status as a cover girl. In the article I make the case that IT has to get serious about sustainability issues.

And lo and behold, what do I read on the BBC website today but a completely uncritical, gee-whiz piece on the extravagant computing power needed by Microsoft’s latest piece of eye candy – the Aero display for Vista.

Suddenly, ordinary business PCs will need

…lots of power and today’s graphics cards have that in spades, but under the fans, heat sinks and brightly coloured designs, the chip looks just like most other chips.

The new cards are seriously powerful. You can now get a card array as powerful as the IBM Deep Blue computer that beat Garry Kasparov at chess in the 1990s – and that is pretty powerful.

So, more PCs consigned prematurely to landfill, more power consumption per desktop PC, more air conditioning per office to get rid of all that heat … in the pursuit of coolness!

“It means your operating system will look completely different to any OS you’ve seen before. There are some very cool visual features in there, the main one being what we call Aero Glass. This allows the windows to be transparent and you can move them around in a 3D environment.”

So that’s alright then. Never mind climate change, we’ve got pretty pictures in our call centres. More complexity, more to go wrong, more distraction from getting the job done. No doubt bored receptionists the world over will now rejoice in the photo-realsistic qualities of “Minesweeper” on Aero.

This entry was posted on Monday, July 10th, 2006 at 12:10 pm and is filed under Greenery. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.