Leaving PCs on costs millions in electricity bills

If you keep your PC on, when you’re not in the office, thinking no harm will be done, you are wrong, especially if left switched on overnight. A computer uses energy even when it appears to be idle.

A study of British businesses showed that it costs more than £300m a year in extra electricity bills!

1E, a power management firm funded the research, and found that leaving a PC turned on overnight for a year costs £17, multiply that by hundreds of thousands of systems and you get an idea what damage it does to the economy and environment.

In the US, it’s even worse, as half of corporate computers are left on overnight which is costing US firms some $2.8bn a year.

Apparently, it is a ‘standard policy’ in many large corporates that machines are left on to allow software patches and virus updates to be remotely installed while the machines are not in use.

However, amidst this recession, it becomes more important to shut down PCs when not in use. It helps businesses significantly reduce costs. Also, from an environmental perspective, it reduces the dissipation of PC heat, and helps reduce the levels of CO2 and other pollutants from electricity power plants.

Gartner estimates the IT and telecom industry generates 2 per cent of world carbon emissions. PCs and monitors account for 39 per cent of that total.

It’s interesting to note that these figures were actually higher a couple of years ago, which may signal growth in the awareness of employees and corporations regarding this wasteful practice.

Harris Interactive, which polled 2,000 staff members of companies in the UK, carried out similar research two years ago and found that half of British computers were left on overnight. The numbers today are less, so it’s possible there’s more awareness.

Conducting such studies in the Middle East could yield interesting results, especially in the Gulf were a culture of business excess may result in appalling numbers! But, to be honest, I sense a study in Jordan would provide shocking results too, especially in large companies which now employ tens of thousands of Jordanians with PCs at their desks.

Even before you install and turn on a PC, the materials and energy-intense production process to manufacture your unit will have contributed to environmental pollution and climate change. And there’s the growing problem of discarded older machines being dumped and causing ‘high-tech’ pollutants, but that’s another story all together.

For now, let’s each do our bit for the environment, and reduce the electricity bill. Turn off your PCs, I know I will!

zanasser@gmail.com

Facebook introduces its Arabic interface

It has been expected for some time now, but the introduction of Facebook’s Arabic interface was big news when the service started a couple of weeks ago.

Facebook had been serving millions of Arabs, albeit in English or other languages. The numbers of users in the region was impressive, and now with Arabic available, Facebook is set to grow exponentially. Already, several of my relatives and friends, who are not fluent English speakers, have sent me friendship invitations and I expect that there’s a ‘viral explosion’ happening now among Arabs hungry for Facebook.

Previously, these users were cut out of the the real action, as they were using other Arabized networks. Netlog.com, for example, is possibly better than Facebook as far as features are concerned, but it’s not as widespread, and does not include as many English-speaking Arabs.

I’ve been contacted by a couple of regional newspapers to comment on what this means to existing Arab social networks, like Jeeran.com or Maktoob.com.

The way I see it is that Facebook was already big, and shall now get bigger, while regional social networks were smaller, but served more specialized requirements. For example, Jeeran has a large community of Arab bloggers, video and photo sharing users and so on. Simply, offering them a social networking function just complements the existing services within that community. Maktoob’s social network, As7ab Maktoob, is similar in that respect. Neither sites were etched into the minds of Arabs as ‘pure social networking’ services, like Facebook is widely known to be.

In any case, Internet traffic in the Arab World has so much room to grow, that everyone will benefit. For advertisers, it just means there are now more options.

On another note, a Hebrew service was also launched with Arabic. This may seem ironic or even political, but the reality is that Facebook is rolling out right-to-left languages and it so happens Arabic and Hebrew share that characteristic. This technicality has been “exceptionally challenging,” according to a spokesperson from Facebook mainly because some of the characters, mainly punctuation marks and numbers, are the same as those used in left-to-right languages, making it difficult for Web applications to determine the direction in which to display the language.

Facebook’s announcement of Arabic and Hebrew is to be followed by 60 other languages. Facebook is also calling on its community of more than 175 million users to help make the service available in every language across the world through its “Translations application”.

Check it out. Many things will come out of all this mutli-lingual social networking activity. Hopefully, greater understanding and tolerance will be the main gain.

Data theft by departing or laid-off employees

This recession keeps on producing interesting stories related to technology.
Reports suggest that laid-off employees may want to exact a certain measure of revenge on the companies they worked for, by stealing data on their way out!

A story in the Washington Post suggests that is occurs ‘often’ and is particularly dangerous when proprietary data is stolen .
Apparently, nearly 60 percent of employees who quit a job or are asked to leave are stealing company information, according to report by the Ponemon Institute,a research group. The survey was based on interviews with 945 people who were laid off, fired or changed jobs in the last year. And the majority who do it do not know it’s illegal!

What are they stealing? Well, 65 percent have taken their e-mail lists, which is somewhat expected, as contacts are one of the main learnings of any job.

The next most frequently stolen data include non-financial business information (45 percent), customer contact lists (39 percent), employee records (35 percent) and financial information (16 percent).

And the two factors that most contribute to this theft are a lack of employee loyalty and “telecommuting.”

Hiring freelancers and part-timers always has its risks, but the idea of them taking their clients with them should frighten employers enough to ensure such staff have limited access to company data.

With PC and phone connectivity, and access rights to information, the question arising is who really controls the data? Can it be controlled at all?
Employees are storing their acquired information and relationships online, on sites like LinkedIn, which is somewhat acceptable. But utilizing other online applications and even ‘online data stores’ should be studied.

Clearly, what the employee does with the data determines the extent of legal action taken by the employer. For example, selling the data or turning it over to a competitor will somehow be discovered and such actions will strengthen the legal standing of the employer. Needless to say, in the US and Europe, laws governs such practices and the are grave consequences.

In Arab countries, and in the Middle East in general, the issue of employees stealing data is not being discussed, and it is doubtful that laws can handle such incidents. Apart from a accepting ‘emails and electronic communications’ as legal tender in courts, laws to govern electronic transactions are yet to be enacted, and all sorts of issues. Sooner or later, cases will arise and we’ll be discussing this.

Maybe the lay-offs in the Middle East will accelerate this, but the generally held false notion of ‘control’ over employees needs to be thoroughly revised in the information age.

zanasser@gmail.com