Green IT

The recently held Cebit 2008 focused on Green IT. The global warming awareness has come a long way and so has the connotation of the word green. In India we often heard about green revolution in the 80’s! Getting back to Cebit, I was struck by a piece of information which circulated in the media during the fair. The commentators spoke about the enormous energy consumption by the big data stations and servers and our random internet use.  The assumption, that changing our net habit is probably a more effective way of cutting down on power consumption than using power saving computer components was frankly unsettling. It sounds mundane, but then many of us look up even the simplest of information on internet. Not to mention the degree of dependence for professional reasons! I have difficulties imagining a day at work with only traditional dictionaries. Certainly translators won’t go back to the 60’s way of working; no more than the car owners who wouldn’t go back to horse carts. Nonetheless, it is worth giving a thought to our daily net practices as responsible professionals or otherwise.