My work PC’s energy cost
One of the tenets of Enclave Harbor is to help raise environmental awareness while teaching middle school kids a little “real life” science via virtual field trips. It is fitting to look at the environmental costs of computer usage since we are using OpenSim on a dedicated server that is on 24/7.
Today a perfect opportunity arose to explore this on a personal level.
I use Defraggler regularly on my work and home computers. Today I updated to the latest version of Defraggler and it has a new “Health” tab (see below). I was intrigued at the total number of hours that my work machine has been powered on.
My work PC has been on for a total of 14,924 hours over the last five years. I am the second “owner” of this box and the only time I leave it on overnight is for Blender renders (time consuming 3D graphics and animations).
If this power supply runs at 500 watts that means the PC has used 7,462 kilowatt-hours of electricity during that time.
In the US, the average cost per kilowatt is 13.4 cents (June ’11 national average – double that for Hawai’i). It has cost my company $999.91 in electricity to power this computer over the last 5 years. That’s only to power the box and does not include the dual monitors or any servers I access for work files.
Let’s compare my machine’s ~$200 a year cost with two hypothetical scenarios – one in which the machine is on eight hours a day, five days a week for 50 weeks a year and one left on 24/7.
- 8 hours X 5 days X 50 weeks = 2,000 hours or $134.00 a year in electricity
- 24 hours X 7 days X 52 weeks = 8,736 hours or $585.31 a year
That is a difference of $451.31 in one year! Or 4.37 times more electricity!
If we extend these scenarios to a company with 300 employees then we would have a difference of $135,393.00 in one year!
The numbers speak for themselves.
also posted on iliveisl.com
Adobe Media Encoder for Flash
A few years ago I spoke at a number of eLearning conferences about using Second Life for creating fast video footage. Now I use OpenSim, mainly on a USB stick, and the ideology is the same: easy-to-build 3D models combined with fast, real-time rendering makes OpenSim a “rapid development” tool for eLearning. The alternative is to use Blender or Autodesk 3ds Max which mean much longer development time for building sets and characters as well as long render times. With OpenSim you create video footage in real-time but trade that for quality and lighting only possible in a tool like Blender. There is also an added benefit to using OpenSim, if it is done on a server, and that is the chance to have fun with fellow workers when you need to film several people interacting.
When I was talking about Second Life I was using Adobe’s CS3 suite and bringing my Fraps generated AVI files into Flash. Once in Flash, I could add ActionScripting, buttons, and even quiz objects to the Second Life video footage. Last year I upgraded to CS5 and along with it came a new way of importing AVI files. Adobe’s Media Encoder comes bundled with several CS5 packages and is worth its weight in gold. You have far greater control over the quality of your AVI clips and the compression yields nice results. I filmed some footage last week in Enclave Harbour and have been pleased with how well it can be compressed and still hold up quite well.
If you are an eLearning multimedia developer and think that 3D animation is out of reach, either from budget or skills, try OpenSim out – the Ener’s sim-on-a-stick version is a great way to try it. I was able to teach two hour workshop participants how to build in about an hour, so I maintain that the learning curve is very short (contrary to many eLearning Guild members), and how to film in a second hour.
Build something, film it with the free trial of Fraps, and import it into a Flash file using the Media Encoder and you may be surprised at how reasonable the resulting file size is and how the possibilities become far greater for your eLearning (and it looks good on your LinkedIn profile!).
originally posted at iliveisl