This post is in response to Blog Action Day. This year’s topic is one that is important to everyone – the environment.

Screensavers have been around since the beginning of computing, but the days of CRT burn-in are now far past us. So why do we still keep screensavers around? If solely for entertainment, there is a grave cost slowly piling up.

Nicholas Carr has already done the footwork and says the following:

A PC with a screensaver going can use well over 100 watts of power, compared with only about 10 watts in sleep mode. An analysis by the University of New Hampshire indicates that if an organization has 5,000 PCs that run screensavers 20 hours a week, the annual power consumed by those screensavers “accounts for emissions of 750,000 pounds of carbon dioxide, 5,858 pounds of sulfur oxide, and 1,544 pounds of nitrogen oxide.” Considering that there are something like 600 million PCs in use today – and that it’s not unusual for people to leave screensavers running all night – we’re talking some big, ugly numbers.

How much damage can one computer cause?

The Harvard Green Campus says one desktop computer left on for one year can result in more than 1500 pounds of CO2 being released into the atmosphere. It would take 100 to 500 trees to offset that amount of extra CO2.

What can you do?

• Turn off screensavers – Turn on energy reduction
• Turn off your computer when not returning soon
• Turn off any peripherals not being currently used

Spread the word! Kill your screensaver!

The last 50 years has been filled with technological breakthroughs, but we have quietly ignored our superhuman efforts to refine communication. The evolution of how we communicate from RUP to Agile/SCRUM has led us down a path of learning how to be pragmatic communicators; yet we still view ourselves as average developers before recognizing we are attempting to become master communicators.

The biggest and ugliest problem facing the advancement of software development is that we place it within the physical engineering model.

Perhaps it is force of habit or that the engineering analogies fit logically in our brains, but the largest mental hurdle that we [software developers] have to admit is that 90% of software engineering is actually social engineering.

The concepts of Planning Poker, Daily Scrums, and Continuous Integration are inventions of the software community to further communication between teams and clients. I find it intriguing that we choose to not view these as leaps in communication innovation but as just another estimation game, a scheduled meeting, and the constant building of software.

Software process will evolve, but we first need to recognize what the “essence” of our craft actually is. Some developers still believe that they are rearranging unintelligent bits and bytes into intelligent shapes. Unfortunately, anyone can be taught to code.

The best inventions yet to be delivered by the software community will be in the arena of communication; however it will only occur to those who except that the true essence of software engineering is actually social engineering.

Scott Hanselman is now quoted:

I love CodeSqueeze! It’s much better than Cats! I’m going to read it again and again!

Thank you Scott, and as a result I give my adoring fans:

Notice: The author of this blog reserves the right to take any comments or quotes and spin them completely out of context for his personal enjoyment. Thank you.