The Wall Street Journal recently opined that "the inconvenient truth is that the earth's temperatures have flat-lined since 2001, despite growing concentrations of CO2," causing a greater number of scientists to question the science behind global warming. Whatever your opinion in the matter, it's certainly true that the world would be better off if we wasted less energy, which is what makes open-source Ecobot so useful.
Ecobot tracks your carbon footprint
(Credit: Taxi)While programs like Amee help businesses measure their carbon footprints, Ecobot offers a personal "carbon trainer" for Mac users.
Designed by Taxi, a Canadian corporation, Ecobot is derived from Taxi's participation in the "Green for Green" competition. The program "calculates your carbon footprint by measuring the fuel, power, and paper you use," and, importantly, does a lot of this data aggregation automatically. ("Automatically" is good - heck, if we weren't so lazy, we probably wouldn't need all these vehicles to power us from Point A to Point B.)
Not only does Ecobot keep track of how many pages you print from your laptop, but it also tracks the wireless networks to which you connect and works with you to figure out how you got from one to the other, and calculates the carbon emissions required to make the journey.
Pretty slick.
Even if you're not a tree-hugging, carbon-footprint-obsessed member of the Greenimati, Ecobot is an easy-to-use, unobtrusive way to monitor how much carbon your lifestyle requires. Of course, it only works if you're a Mac user.
Even so, despite Dell's insistence that Apple's Macs aren't as green as Apple claims, Ecobot lets you be as green as you want to be...and brag about it to anyone patient enough to listen to you.
Follow me on Twitter @mjasay. But please consider the environment before printing out my 3,000-plus tweets.
I laughed when I read on Savio Rodrigues' blog that Canada's Green Party has added open source to its official platform. Save the environment! (And save me a little open source while you're at it.)
Canada's Green Party, which has apparently struggled to be taken seriously as a major political force in Canada, has some serious aims for open source:
- Ensure that all new software developed for or by government is based on open standards and encourage and support a nationwide transition to FLOSS [Free/Libre/Open-source software] in all critical government IT systems. This will make Canada's IT infrastructure more secure and robust, lower administration and licensing costs and develop IT skills.
- Support the transition to FLOSS throughout the educational system.
Personally, I find it a bit ironic to see open source on a liberal party's platform. Conservative politics tends to be about smaller, local government solutions, even Libertarian in nature. Open source is the same, favoring tight customization/systems integrator or customer-tailored solutions. Liberal politics? Big government solutions strike me as akin to proprietary software.
Maybe I should call the Green Party in Canada. Perhaps it can start fighting for Microsoft's rights, instead. :-)
CNN reports that "switching from a Windows-operated computer to a Linux-operated one could slash computer-generated e-waste levels by 50%." It's no longer about software freedom. It's also about environmental responsibility.
A UK government study in late 2004 reported that there were substantial green benefits to running a Linux open source operating system (OS) on computers instead of the ubiquitous Windows OS, owned by Microsoft. The main problem with Windows users was that they had to change their computer twice as many times as Linux users, on average, thereby effectively creating twice as much computer-generated e-waste.
Those of us who actually like the idea of getting a new machine on a regular basis (mea culpa) should not cheer too loudly, however. Actually, I've found that I pass my Macs down to other family members such that they stay in use for generations...or five or six years, whichever comes first. :-)
Back to Linux....Do you think that this elongation of effective use of Linux machines has more to do with the lack of a strong Linux desktop commercial agenda? Consider:
... Read moreI just read that Gartner believes Green IT is the number one concern for CIOs in 2008. I'm not actually sure I believe that (these "top 10" lists often read like buzzword popularity contests), but if you're into green, you really should consider open source. Here are a few reasons, according to 21st Century Citizen:
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