It's funny because Google is my homepage, and I was wondering if we shouldn't make Plime a 'blackback' site?

It makes sense - it's a no brainer energy saver.

There is a website called www.blackle.com which uses the google search engine, but always has a black screen. It tells you how many watts it has saved at the bottom of the screen. It's pretty similar to what google is doing today.

"We applaud the spirit of the idea, but our own analysis as well as that of others shows that making the Google homepage black will not reduce energy consumption. To the contrary, on flat-panel monitors (already estimated to be 75% of the market), displaying black may actually increase energy usage. "

yup. LCDs are pretty constant when it comes to wattage if keep brightness constant. an explanation can be found here.

An LCD screen essentially acts as a filter that filters colors out of a white backlight. if you analyze the fact that 25% of all the monitors in the world would receive an approx ~15% (avg wattage is ~100-150W) decrease in energy consumption, this number is reduced even more when you take into account the fact that the overall desktop consumes, 150-1000W depending on performance. This turns out to be only about a 1.5% decrease in overall energy consumption, at what, the cost of unreadable text and the need to push the contrast on the world's LCDs to maximum.

If you want to save energy, just get everyone to run ULV-based laptops, where a high-end performance laptop will be around 65-80W, and a low-power machine will only consume 25-40W.
Compare this to a Skulltrail-based machine with a minimum requirement of a 1KW PSU, and with the 80% efficiency, easily tops 1.2KW.

Wow, I had no idea. I never actually used blackle much anyway, because I found it annoying to read white font on black backlight. That's interesting, though, and good comment.

Only here because I'm an idiot.

"Just"? :p

For Earth Hour, you could just invert the color on your monitor.

Of course it's not going to save the planet, but if you are going to use on of these black Google sites, at least have some Ninja cool about it.

I checked, btw, and pirate.com isn't in proper use.

Ninjas 1
Pirates 0

wait...why can't we turn our lights out for an hour when the SUN is up?
i'd kinda like to not trip over things on the floor, ya know. my room is very messy.

NO BRAINER?!?!?!?

Did you read Googles explanation? It was a symbolic gesture that SAVE NO ENERGY AT ALL! Your monitor uses the same amount of power whether the screen is all black, all white, or some shade of purple.

Myth busted

Err... WHAT? Well, I guess that proves once and for all that I don't know s**t!

Dang, I really liked the idea, too!!

Well you wanna know what I think?


Faaaaaarrrrtttt