Companies are finding themselves embroiled in a power crisis as they struggle to find ways to rein in soaring energy costs as well as do their part to address global climate change. However, how can one be certain that the power-saving strategies that his company has adopted are, in fact, the best ones? After all, there are plenty of myths out there about saving energy that are deliberately false. In this report, 10 such myths are examined and bring the truth to light.

Myth : Powering a computer or server up and down, limits its life span. The extreme temperature and current swings of power cycling can stress electronic components in a machine.

Fact: Power cycling healthy electronics is not a source of stress. The same electrical components that are used in IT equipment are used in complex devices that are routinely subjected to power cycles and temperature extremes, such as factory-floor automation, medical devices, and your car.

There is a kernel of truth in this myth; however, cycling power on a sick system is going to bring attention to latent component weaknesses that go unnoticed in operation. Power-on diagnostics are brief yet rigorous and can be performed remotely on servers with dedicated management controllers. Power cycling doesn't just save energy but it's a zero-cost aid to maximising server availability.

Myth : It takes too long to cold-start servers to react to spikes in demand. If customers are made to wait, they'll go elsewhere.

Fact: Idling servers at zero workload as hot spares is an egregious waste of energy and an administrative burden. If customers need to wait while you spin up cold spares to handle rising workload, brag about it. For a website, put up a static page asking users to wait while additional resources are brought online. As for the wait, people will stay on hold if they know their call will be answered. Build power management into your services architecture and make it part of the message that you send to users and customers.

You can also select systems that cold-boot rapidly. This metric isn't usually measured, but it becomes relevant when you control power consumption by switching off system power. Servers or blades that boot from a snapshot, a copy of RAM loaded from disk or a SAN can go from power-down mode to work-ready in less than a minute.

Myth : The power rating (in watts) of a CPU is a simple measurement of the system's efficiency.

Fact: Efficiency is measured in percentage of power converted, which can range from 50 to 90 percent or more. The AC power not converted to DC is lost as heat, which increases the cooling burden of the system, adding even more to the overall energy loss. Unfortunately, it's often difficult to tell the efficiency of a power supply, and many manufacturers don't publish the number. You can either look for systems with published efficiency numbers or measure the actual power draw of various systems at idle and full load, then make your decisions based on that.

Myth : It's better to pack one big server with all the RAM, CPUs and peripherals, it can hold rather than to use multiple smaller servers.

Fact: This is only true if the big server is fully utilised, which can be dangerous with critical applications. Multiple smaller servers can be powered off or put in suspend mode when not in use, and they are safer from a redundancy point of view.

Myth : LCD monitors use a trivial amount of power, so you might as well leave them on. Their colours and backlight brightness improve with warm-up time.

Fact: The average 17-inch LCD monitor consumes 35 watts of electricity. Adding together the hundreds of LCDs in an enterprise, the power used may not be that trivial. Energy Star LCD monitors will power down to sleep mode if the PCs' power management software is set up to tell them to. This saves energy and money as well.

Myth : A notebook doesn't use any power when it's suspended or sleeping. USB devices charge from the notebook's AC adapter.

Fact: Sleep (in Vista) or Hibernate mode in XP saves the state of the system to RAM and then maintains the RAM image even though the rest of the system is powered down. Suspend saves the state of the system to hard disk, which reduces the boot time greatly and allows the system to be shut down. Sleeping continues to draw a small amount of power, between one and three watts, even though the system appears to be inactive. By comparison, Suspend draws less than one watt. Even over the course of a year, this difference is probably negligible.

Myth : Notebook batteries just wear out. There's not much you can do to make them last longer.

Fact: Many laptops with nickel-cadmium batteries come with a battery-reconditioning utility that drains the battery fully, and then brings it back to a full charge. Laptops with lithium-ion batteries aren't afflicted with the same memory problem as those powered by NiCad batteries. However, unlike NiCad batteries, lithium batteries prefer to be only partially discharged: Running them all the way down will shorten their life span.

Myth : Flash SSDs (solid-state drives) reduce the amount of power consumed by a laptop.

Fact: You may or may not experience a reduction in power consumption if your system is equipped with SSD. It will vary greatly depending on the application. Typical office applications that don't constantly access the hard drive will show very little additional battery life with SSD installed. Software that streams data from the drive constantly, such as video applications, will show greatly increased battery life. Other power savers such as LED backlighting can save more energy in typical applications.

Myth : Going to DC power will inevitably save energy.

Fact: Going to DC power entails removing the power supplies from a rack of servers or all the servers in a data-center and consolidating the AC-DC power supply into a single unit for all the systems. Doing this may not actually be more efficient since you lose a lot of power over the even relatively small distances between the consolidated unit and the machines. New servers have 95 percent efficient power supplies, so any power savings you might have gotten by going DC is lost in the transmission process. Your savings will really depend on the relative efficiency of the power supplies in the servers you're buying as well as the one in the consolidated unit.

Myth : You're bound to save money by rushing out and buying the most energy-efficient equipment as soon as possible.

Fact: Savings realised by more efficient equipment have to be balanced against the cost of running the existing equipment. For example, applying a policy through active directory to shut down systems that aren't in use after business hours doesn't require buying new equipment and will save a lot of money. If you can get user buy-in, other actions such as powering off monitors, PCs, printers etc, will save lots of power without buying anything.

With its ambitious Oslo software modelling platform, Microsoft seeks a new application development paradigm that raises the level of abstraction. But the effort has brought up questions about whether Oslo crowds the modelling landscape and whether Microsoft can achieve its lofty goals.

Microsoft describes Oslo as a code name for a modelling platform consisting of three components: the Quadrant tool to help define and interact with models visually, a relational repository that holds the models, and a declarative language code-named "M" for building textual domain-specific languages.

A goal of Oslo has been to enable application models themselves to become the applications. At varying times, Oslo has been described as a platform for composite applications and SOA, as well as a technology allowing greater levels of agility in the software development process. Oslo lets more people participate in application development and can be used to build any type of application, according to Microsoft.

"Oslo allows you to model things in higher-level ways. It allows you to rapidly assemble things," says Burley Kawasaki, Director, Product Management, Microsoft Connected Systems Division. "Similar to a mashup, Oslo will help developers assemble applications in Lego block-like fashion," Kawasaki says.

Through Oslo, Microsoft intends for developers to spend more time on business intent and less on application plumbing. Currently, developers spend 80 percent of their time on infrastructure and lower-level details and 20 percent of their time on business intent. "We want to flip that," Kawasaki says.

What will Oslo do for developers?

A Microsoft business partner lauded Oslo as a game-changer for composite applications. "Everybody's been building these composite applications but with tools and approaches that really weren't designed with composite apps in mind," says Ed Horst, Vice President, Marketing and Strategy at AmberPoint, which offers a SOA management platform.

Oslo hides a lot of complexity from the development process, Horst says. "If you use conventional tools and conventional languages, the developer has to be quite aware that they're going to deploy this in a distributed environment," he says. "In Oslo, that's not true." The declarative language in Oslo was "built with this kind of distributed nature in mind, which again is a big breakthrough," he adds.

Oslo modelling is set to address the additional complexity that concepts such as SOA and cloud computing entail, Kawasaki says. "People often have thought about modelling as only the upfront visual design," he says. In that paradigm, a model is printed out and handed to the developer. But the software company is pondering how to take models and make them part of the full, cradle-to-grave application lifecycle.

Technologies such as UML (Unified Modelling Language), BPEL (Business Process Execution Language), and BPMN (Business Process Modelling Notation) are accommodated in Oslo, says Robert Wahbe, Corporate Vice President, Microsoft Connected Systems Division.

One developer has questioned the company's strategy. "The point is that they're creating something for the ¸ber-geek," says Michael Rowley, Director, Technology and Standards, Active Endpoints.

Oslo lets developers build their own language for defining new models. "In my opinion, it is bad enough that there are so many different ways to do the same thing. Inventing a new technology that makes it easy to create even more languages (metamodels) can only make things more confusing for users," Rowley says.

And the new "M" language further crowds an already congested field, Rowley says. "It just adds to the proliferation of new languages (and) makes it easier to create more problems." In fact, Microsoft's efforts make it difficult for a user community trying to coalesce around just a couple of different languages such as BPMN, he argues.

A Microsoft official rejected Rowley's description. "I don't know what '¸ber-geek' is, but there's a large class of developers who build apps for a living," says Microsoft's Wahbe. Oslo is interesting to such developers because it aspires to raise the level of abstraction and make them more productive and applications more flexible, he says.

Microsoft intends for standards such as BPEL to be accommodated within Oslo, says John Rymer, a principal analyst at Forrester Research. But there could be a conflict between Oslo's declarative language and the World Wide Web Consortium's RDF (Resource Description Framework), he notes.

Wahbe says that "M" could be used for writing a domain-specific language for the domain of semantic technologies, which in turn could target RDF. A W3C representative said a quick look at Oslo suggests it is different from RDF.

RAF pilot Andy Green made history in 1997 when he drove the Thrust SSC jet-powered vehicle at 763 mph (1,228 km/h). Now he intends to get behind the wheel of a car that is capable of reaching 1,000 mph (1,610 km/h). Known as Bloodhound, the new car will be powered by a rocket bolted to a Eurofighter-Typhoon jet engine.

The team-members have been working on the concept for the past 18 months and expect to be ready to make their new record attempt in 2011.

Bloodhound project leader Richard Noble told, "this is one of the most exciting things you can do on God's Earth; and when you've the opportunity to do it really, really well, with the latest technology, you can't resist the challenge." The initial studies have illustrated just how grand a challenge it will be. The 12.8m-long, 6.4-tonne Bloodhound SSC (Super Sonic Car) will be expected to travel faster than a bullet fired from a handgun. Its 900mm diameter wheels will spin so fast they will have to be made from a high grade titanium to prevent them from flying apart.

The car will accelerate from 0 - 1,050 mph (1,690 km/h) in just 40 seconds; and at its maximum velocity, the pressure of air bearing down on its carbon fibre and titanium bodywork will exceed 12 tonnes per square metre.

"This is a big engineering adventure," commented Bloodhound's technical chief, John Piper. "We've not seen anything yet which we can't overcome given the opportunity and the time. We don't have all the answers yet, but we have quite a few of them, and I'm sure other solutions will present themselves." Wing Commander Green acknowledges there will be risks involved but says the car will be designed to maximise his safety.

"Does that make it zero-risk? No. Is life with zero-risk interesting? No.

"This is worth making a risk for because it's a huge challenge and a huge prize at the end, not just for the biggest record but to inspire the next generation of engineers, to share it with every schoolchild in the country," he said. Inspiration is a key driver for the project. The genesis of the idea came from Lord Drayson, the UK's new science minister who also happens to be a racing driver. He approached Noble and Green when he held a post in the Ministry of Defence to ask them if they could do something that would grab the attention of schoolchildren and turn them to careers in science and technology. "The consequences if we don't inspire the next generation are that we will wither," Lord Drayson told.

"Over the centuries, we've been involved in some of the most important scientific discoveries. We have got to make sure the next generation gets the vision, and has the opportunity to maintain that tradition."

Scientists are on the hunt for evidence of antimatter -- matter's arch nemesis -- left over from the very early Universe. New results using data from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory and Compton Gamma Ray Observatory suggest the search may have just become even more difficult. According to the Big Bang model, the Universe was awash in particles of both matter and antimatter shortly after the Big Bang. Most of this material annihilated, but because there was slightly more matter than antimatter - less than one part per billion - only matter was left behind, at least in the local Universe. Trace amounts of antimatter are believed to be produced by powerful phenomena such as relativistic jets powered by black holes and pulsars, but no evidence has yet been found for antimatter remaining from the infant Universe.

Video game publishing giant Electronic Arts (EA) is to shed more than 500 jobs, after the firm announced lower than expected profits for the year. Nearly 20 percent of its share value was wiped out after the profit warning, with its shares closing at 22.78 dollars. EA said that higher development and marketing costs, as well as delays to the latest Harry Potter video game, were to blame. However, this was offset by the success of titles such as Spore and NFL 09. With the majority of game sales taking place in the run up to Christmas, EA's chief financial officer Eric Brown sounded a note of caution. "We have heard that retailer foot traffic is down in general," he said. EA said the job cuts, which amount to nearly six percent of its work force, would be spread across all functions and locations, and it did not rule out compulsory redundancies.