During the last week, we at InterFace AG had to finish our balance sheet for the business year 2009. Being an “open corporation”, we have to be careful about quite a few formalities as written down by the law. For instance, we have to hand in a report on the state of affairs as part of the balance sheet.
The report on the state of affairs must contain various items of information around the enterprise, such as the development during the last year and the expected development during the next year or the type of risk management we practice. A report on the externality (external effect) of the enterprise is also part of the state of affairs.
As I read on, I came across a sentence that, even though sounding correct to me, is of huge consequence in my way of thinking:
The enterprise always adhered to the environmental obligations as required by the law. This is true both for the disposal of former waste and, for example, the recommended use of environment-friendly transportation.
(From the state of affairs section of the InterFace balance sheet of 2009).
To be sure, we try to be a “green” company. We always dispose of our electronic waste in a conscientious way (unfortunately, there is plenty of same to dispose of) and we go more and more by train, instead of by plane or car. This is not just for environmental reasons. Often, we do it because it is easier to prepare for your upcoming task while not sitting behind a wheel. And we also try to economize on electricity, because it makes sense and is easily done.
However, we are still an IT enterprise. And with the IT, a new sort and dimension of wastefulness has been quasi genetically implanted into our lives.
Of course, most of us IT guys have more than one laptop. Mostly, we also have a PC, on top of at least one smart cell phone. In addition, we have various external drives in order to save all the individual systems. And there are probably a couple of old PCs or laptops of the older generations lying around in the basement.
Not to mention all the storage cards for the digital camera and the old model. And do not forget the old printer or two… And all around the place, both at home and in the office, storage sticks lie around. It used to be floppy discs (you can still find them somewhere if you look long enough), and before that we had tapes, paper tapes or cards. Incidentally, that might also be something the protection of privacy legislation would find quite interesting.
And how many servers do we need for the smallest of transactions? Whenever a productive server supplies a single application, an entire battery of computers that have nothing to do with the actual application works in the background. Some of them are necessary for data transfer and communication.
The rest is not strictly necessary for the task. They realize firewalls and DMZ, frisk the data for viruses (allegedly, there is a new virus for MS systems every five minutes) and search the internet for new threats. Some do nothing other than permanently (and rather senselessly) encode data that another computer will then have to decode again. For reasons of security, proxy servers are superimposed.
There is a permanent gigantic orgy of automated wastefulness.
The same is true for storage systems. If I assume that 95 % of all data stored world-wide is useless, I can probably be called an optimist. The reality is likely to be closer to 99 %. And we continue to collect, store and download more and more items, most of which will certainly never be used. After all, the majority of users are the purest of data Messies. They are constantly afraid of losing a very important document. Instead, we should be happy if all the rubbish is gone, for a change.
Useless emails whirr around the orbit of our networks in endless, constantly increasing numbers. They are generated and discarded automatically. We do not even notice this any more, but many servers are busy doing it.
“Forward”, “cc-” and “bcc” functions and long address lists make it possible for the “useful” (?) emails, too, to be copied as often as anybody wishes on the various systems and saved as copies, including their huge attachments. I once heard that every email is copied an average of 17 times. Though that sounds plausible to me, I have no idea how you can do a calculation giving you such a number. In my opinion, the number 71 would be just as possible.
It is similar with our networks. As long as I am anywhere in the civilized world, my emacs or linux notebooks mostly find several WLAN connections. Strangely enough, most of them are secured by a password. All of them are active all day and all night long, seven days a week, even if they are only used for a few hours each day (or not at all – that is also something I often see). Quite often, one WLAN for the entire building would suffice. But, for fear of abuse or inimical eavesdroppers, each occupant has his or her own.
Along with it, most people have (at least) an additional cable-based LAN. And if you are the owner of a “UMTS sticks”, you are equipped with one or more additional providers through the ether.
People keep comforting themselves with the thought: it is not so bad; after all, it all costs nothing. To be sure, IT comes cheap. Just imagine how much a flat rate costs for the entire month, compared with filling the car with petrol only once a week. And even an Apple luxury laptop is less expensive than most of the extra equipment of a totally ordinary middle-class car. The equivalent of one set of Porsche winter tyres including wheel rim at equal quality standards is probably more than 10 Macs.
But that is exactly where we are wrong. Everything costs raw material and energy. Producing same gives us huge amounts of special waste (luckily in Asia), but a few years later, these products will be technologically obsolete and will again be the new special waste. Then we will have the disposal problem.
Such behaviour has nothing to do with the virtue of frugality or the Kaizen principle. It is sheer wastefulness.
Here is what I wish we had:
A server-centred world with browser-based applications, without all the virus and spam nonsense. The producers of viruses and spam should be fought at the source (just as it should also happen with child pornography and other obscenities).
Clean operating systems that cannot be violated by hackers for various reasons. An open and fear-free world devoid of paranoia. Encoding should remain the exception from the rule and only be done with really sensitive data.
Every data object should be stored and saved only once (which, in theory, can be easily done).
Computers should be modular and easy to update. Basically, all I need is a laptop as big as my pocket. I always carry it. All the places where I work have a screen where I plug my computer in like into a docking station. And, of course, I use the same screen for watching the occasional soccer match or film.
And I wish currently passive systems would log off automatically.
And, above all, I would wish for all networks to be open.
🙂 Well, another one of those nice utopias. But who says we cannot dream?
RMD
(Translated by EG)
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