Think about all the gas that is saved because people don’t have to drive to the library, all the plane trips saved by video conferencing, all the photo film, all the sheets of paper in file cabinets, all the letters being sent as emails, all the mail order catalogues, ... you get the idea.
Does anybody know of a comprehensive study on this?
You're right that computers have saved huge amounts of energy compared with the things you mention. My point here was that even more could be saved with a bit of thought about efficiency in programming.
In my - perhaps limited - work experience, there's enough slack in the process of software development that I don't buy the "time to market" argument all that much.
I'm quite disenchanted with software myself. It takes way too long to open any program, for this JIRA ticket to properly display.
One thing that has improved was boot times, I seem to remember that Windows 7 was quite a bit faster than XP. Maybe someone in upper management wanted it to be as fast as MacOS? So speed IS possible, if it is prioritized.
I seem to remember boot times being a frequent topic of discussion the early 2000s, because people turned off their computers.
In a way, this is a great little microcosm of the problem. Just fix habits instead of fixing the software.
The things I'm doing on my phone today are not fundamentally different than what I was doing ten years ago. And yet, I had to buy a new phone.
1. The environmental cost of ineffective software is negligible, when compared to Bitcoin mining or other forms of hardware planned obsolescence.
2. By using more efficient software, surely, you can save a lot of CPU cycles, and it can improve the energy efficiency of some specific workloads under some particular scenarios. However, on a general-purpose PC, the desire for performance is unlimited, the CPU cycles saved in one way will only be consumed in other ways, and in the end, the total CPU cycles used remain a constant.
Running programs on a PC is like buying things, when you have a fixed budget but everything is cheaper, often people will just buy more. For example, I only start closing webpages when my browser becomes unacceptably slow, but if you make every webpage use 50% less system resource, I'll simply open 2x more webpages simultaneously. LED lightning is another example, while I think the overall effect is a reduction of energy uses, but in some cases, I think it actually makes people to install more lightnings, such as those outdoor billboards.
This is called the Jevons paradox [0].
For PCs, certainly, as I previously stated, in specific workloads under some particular scenarios, I totally agree that there are cases that energy use can be reduced (e.g. faster system update), but I don't think it helps much in the grand scheme of things.
if you haven’t seen it already, you’d probably be interested in the below talk by chuck moore, inventor of forth.
Fascinating talk. Thanks for the link.
(Do individuals really bother mining bitcoin these days anyway?)
But the vast majority of software is one-off stuff. It makes no sense to optimize it for performance instead of features, development time, correctness, ease of use, etc.
Is it now? I can't think of any example, except a few tools we use internally in a project. Everything else I use, or I see anyone else using, has an userbase of many thousands to millions, and a lot of that is used in context of work - which means a good chunk of the userbase is sitting in front of that software day in, day out.
I wouldn't be at all surprised if it's the majority. For every big-ticket software offering there's going to at least be things the user never interacts with, like a build system and a test suite and a bug tracking system and whatever else. And there's just so much software everywhere, most of which we never see. Every small business has its little web site. Who knows how much software there is powering this or that device or process at random factories, laboratories, and offices.
The Debian popularity contest looks like it has a big long tail of relatively unpopular packages [1]. It looks like the app store has 2 million apps, only 2857 (.14%) have more than a million dollars of annual revenue. These are of course incomplete and flawed and do not really directly address the question. I don't really know how to research this in a thorough way.
[1] https://popcon.debian.org/by_inst [2] https://expandedramblings.com/index.php/itunes-app-store-sta...