Power Cuts and Programming
By Moshe Zeidman in Reader
Posted in Computer power on May 15, 2008 at 11:58 am
What do power cuts and shortages in South Africa have to do with computing in the UK?
An odd comparison you might think. But consider the situation where electricity is rationed, or at least in short supply, as is the case in South Africa. How would you handle keeping household and office equipment functioning under such conditions? UPS’s don’t generally work for a two hour stretch. How would you ensure that your workforce maintains a semblance of productivity without functioning tools?
Aside from the option of buying your own power generator, chances are you would plan carefully what machines would be left running and for how long. You might perhaps change to appliances that consumed less where you received a daily energy allocation. For your workforce you might design more flexible shift/ work patterns.
In the UK we are not faced with these questions despite the new religion called Environmentalism. However, when challenged with scarce resources, minds are focused on the effectiveness of their use.
That’s why as I stare longingly at my Vista laptop waiting with Job-like patience for it to finish booting up. I wonder, perhaps dream, about bygone days when programmers wrote entire applications within a few kilobytes of memory!
A colleague of mine recalls a period, about 20 years ago, when a complete time & attendance program was written within 4KB of RAM – and it worked very well!
Just because we live in a world of abundant memory and storage capacity, does this justify the software equivalent of urban sprawl?
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