Wstawki

Wstawka numer 121

Koszalin, 11. sierpnia Roku Pańskiego 2021.

The Green Apollo

Let us imagine a fuel-eating monster. Plays a beautiful tune with its huge engine. The cylinders bang away like a band of monkeys in savanna who have captured the tom-toms of the locals. And it does nothing except stand in the parking lot and roar with its engine. Such are the majority of program set-ups (installation files) for the lazy. And we shall prove this thesis further on.

The great networks of data-transfers announced not long ago that a transfer of 1 GB of data had so far cost them about 1,54 kWh of energy. After reducing the cost of air-conditioning and modernizing the equipment they have kept it down to 0,2 kWh. Supposing that further improvements on equipment in terms of energy usage have allowed them to be using about 0,1 kWh now, or the amount needed for a single 100 W bulb over an hour. So much power for one Kowalski or Malinowski to download 1 GB of data, or the size of an average film.

One big tree provides about 15 MWh of energy if it is burned right in a stove and the energy is pumped into a room directly, and with good burning efficiency. There is no transmission of central heating, nor any conversion into other types of energy, for example electric current, where the conversion and transmission may cause losses even in excess of 70 per cent of that energy. So a single tree will propel the engine of a big tank for about 15 hours. You see it right.

And now let's take an Internet transfer, which is constituted by an operator's transfer – for example, mobile phone operator LTE. So 100 Wh for 1 GB of data. So a tree burned in a stove would make possible, in exchange for its energy, a transfer of 150000 GB of data – or 150 TB of data. This follows from a simple division 15000000/100 [Wh]. That is, an average of about 150000 films.

And now let's take an FPC installation of about 50 MB. So there are about 20 of them for 1 GB. Supposing that in building Apollo we would have created a set-up for the lazy, or one to contain Apollo and FPC. And instead of about 2,5 MB of the Apollo set-up we would have a set-up for the lazy of about 54 MB. Let's round it off to those 50 MB, since – as can be seen – the FPC set-up comprises the lion's share of such a highly lazy solution. Convenient for the user in downloading both Apollo and FPC at one stroke.

Where's the problem? Apollo is updated at least twice a month owing to the fact that it's developing rapidly. FPC is updated sometimes twice a year. What's the point, then, in downloading it every time in such a set-up for the lazy. And lazy not only physically, but also mentally.

And now let's come back to the burned trees. One such a set-up for the lazy will use 1/20 of the use of transfer for 1 GB of data. So about 5 Wh. Ostensibly, not much. For what is this? Such a lazy fellow throws films into his computer by the tons, so why should he care how much energy this will expend. And what about some “set-uplet”. What is this? Only 50 “megabytelets”. It will take as much as 150000*20=3000000, or 3 million set-ups, to burn a single tree. And these calculations do not include the amount of energy needed for the hosting server to store these set-ups and push them away from it. And all of this excluding the amount needed by the server, computers or computer of the receiver, in order to snatch up that set-up. However, he who has built such a set-up knows well how many persons download Apollo. And he knows well that those who have already downloaded the existing set-up (I remind you, 2,5 MB) - if they had got a set-up for the lazy idiots - would have used enough energy to burn a sizeable coppice of trees in order to send those FPC set-ups needed by no one and many times sent, instead of a single one for half a year.

That's why Apollo is green not owing to the fact that for purely functional reasons it pulls and arranges objects on a form (in Polish, which is to say without Latin, this would be “na prawidle”) by the method of little ghosts, which are green in it. It is green because it doesn't allow lazy idiots to burn those trees by the hundreds and thousands. It allows us, as Mankind, to survive the onslaught of idiots who in thinking only about themselves do not consider how much damage they do to others and to our Planet beaten-all-over by ourselves.

God bless.

Andrzej Marek Hendzel

Translated by Rafał Dymek