Green software?

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So, lately, people have been making a big deal about green hardware – hardware that’s produced using environmentally friendly methods and uses as little power as possible.

But what about green software? You don’t really hear all that much about that. And, all this green movement right now is, make slower hardware, and expect users to put up with it. It works because hardware arguably passed the “fast enough” point in the past few years.

However, for a lot of tasks, we arguably should’ve passed the fast enough point 10 or 15 years ago. Word processing and web browsing are not rocket science, for two examples. Operating systems (all of them, yes, I’m even looking at you, modern Linux distributions) are bloated. Let’s not even talk about Adobe’s stuff.

Why isn’t there an equivalent green software movement? Improve compilers, strip out bloat, don’t pull the “you’ve got the CPU power, don’t worry about optimization” card. That way, we can either use slower CPUs and have quite good performance, or our current CPUs and run them at partial load (resulting in less power consumption) or have mindblowing performance.

I know, I know, that’d require actual work.

But, just a thought.

Idea for promoting fossil fuel conservation…

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I’ve posted this on a few different forums for quite a while now, but I’m blogging it here now.

Various schemes have been proposed, some of which have been implemented. These include taxing gasoline to the sky, taxing cars for fuel use, and similar ideas. These schemes all have issues, though.

My idea is a bit more creative. Directly taxing the fuel has the most impact, but also the most opposition. So, my idea is a variation on that theory.

With my idea, a $1/gal (note: that number is just an example, like all numbers in this entry. Plug your own numbers in) petroleum tax would be applied to all petroleum-based fuels. Simple gas tax, right?

Wrong.

At the same time, I would provide a tax break to counter this tax. I’d set a fuel consumption target that the average citizen would have to meet – let’s say, 15,000 miles at 30 MPG, or 500 gallons – to get the tax completely countered. And, how would this work? Across the board $500 tax refund for all taxpayers.

Here’s the advantage of this system over the other systems. For someone who meets that target, they will ultimately pay $0 more. However, for someone who beats that target – let’s say they drive 10,000 miles getting 40 MPG, or 250 gallons… they’ll MAKE $250. And, for someone who doesn’t use petroleum-based fuels at all? $500 in that person’s pocket.

So, this system promotes alternatives to driving, or driving less, or driving more fuel efficient cars, very flexibly (unlike a scheme like CAFE,) while not excessively penalizing for normal consumption. I think it’s the best of all worlds.

What do you say?