I’ve always believed technology can do a lot to enable a greener lifestyle. Companies like Intel are forever developing more efficient, cooler chips, allowing our computers to run without consuming so much power. Software developers like the teams behind open-source OpenOffice and various flavours of Linux are helping us to securely and efficiently use old machines for longer than ever before. The ability to video-conference using nothing more than a £20 web-cam and free instant messaging software is helping cut down on travel as we do more of our work and have more of our meetings online, rather than in person.
So it’s a shame that every update of something like Windows makes people rush out and simultaneously upgrade their computers. The Guardian estimates that 85% of computers currently in use will be unable to run Windows Vista fully without being upgraded. This means, says Siân Berry Green Party, Female Principal Speaker, that
there will be thousands of tonnes of dumped monitors, video cards and whole computers that are perfectly capable of running Vista – except for the fact they lack the paranoid lock down mechanisms Vista forces you to use. That’s an offensive cost to the environment.
Future archaeologists will be able to identify a ‘Vista Upgrade Layer’ when they go through our landfill sites.
Of course, we’ve come to expect a hardware upgrade cycle with every new release of Windows, now in its 17th incarnation. The blame this time around, though, can’t be lain entirely at Microsoft’s door. Yes, Vista requires greater processing, memory and storage power than ever before, but largely this is because of the demands made by the Hollywood studios that Vista spends a lot of its time protecting their copyrighted, and highly lucrative content. They insist that Vista must support certain interfaces, which in turn uphold digital rights measures. The only way that it can do this is to continually scan its ports, set-up and connected peripherals to make sure that nothing has changed that could compromise the security of any media streams it’s decoding. It is for this reason – to the exclusion of several others – that it requires many hardware upgrades.
It is also for this reason that users of many alternative operating systems, including Linux and Mac OS X, are often locked out of enjoying up-to-date content on their computers. Channel 4′s on-demand service, 4OD, doesn’t yet support the Mac, and the BBC is currently running an online consultation asking whether its future plans for an online on-demand service should include provision for non-Microsoft-based hardware.
The answer, of course, if a resounding yes. If anyone should be supporting as diverse a range of platforms as possible, it should be the BBC. However, without the agreement of the content owners, it will never be able to provide such content to computers running any OS other than Vista as no other platform supports the full range of digital rights controls that they require.
You could blame the studios here, but I am more inclined to blame Microsoft. It could have made a big difference by insisting that some less power-hungry form of DRM be implemented, saving us the requirement to wastefully upgrade our PCs in order to run Vista. Let’s not forget – Microsoft is an incredibly powerful organisation. It could have made a difference.
Apple’s Fairplay, on the other hand, controls rights on the world’s most successful online music service (iTunes), and this will run quite happily on systems eight years old or more. The same cannot be said for Vista. Yet Apple is no better than Microsoft, as it has so far refused to license Fairplay at all.
As a results, PC users who are not minded to replace their machines wholesale have little choice but to at least throw out some components as they swap them for newer, compliant items. The environmental cost will far outweigh the financial, making the UK asking £219 asking-price for Vista Home Premium edition (it’s only £115 in the US) look massively underrated.
How much should we really be paying if we also want to offset the carbon burden, I wonder?
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