Do you often get surprised when a sudden pop-up on your desktop displays the message “Virtual Memory Low” and somehow you are prevented from downloading stuff just because your computer is running out of memory? Our day to day computer activity includes downloading and viewing so many documents, files, pictures and videos endlessly. We hardly care about the fact that how many of them are actually in our use on a daily basis and which all have been staying inside the memory with no stated purpose. Moreover, a large number of unauthorized sites that we accidentally visit, store a lot many unwanted cookies and temporary files in the CPU memory.
This is definitely not an efficient use of your computer as the digital waste keeps on accumulating and consequently, it occupies precious memory space which lowers your computer’s speed of data transfer. Just as in the real world you recycle stuff that no longer is usable, you can effectively cleanse your system by applying proper waste-management tactics too. Two researchers from Johns Hopkins University, Ragib Hassan and Randal Burns provide a ‘green solution’ to the problem with the help a five-tier pyramid representing different levels of e-waste management.
The top level of the pyramid suggests to cut back on the amount of unecessary and unwanted files that automatically get downloaded with any software you intend to install. Software creators should be persuaded to include minimum number of extra files with the software. This can be done by intentionally including a sort of “punish program” that will do the excessive data dumping.
While creating programs, multiple programs may link to a common module. Every time a subroutine is called from different programs, it would refer to the common module over and again which would lead to ‘redundancy’ and ‘duplication of data’. It would be futile to store the same data over two different addresses in the memory. Rather, you should ‘reuse’ the data stored when multiple programs require a common set of data. This would not only save your disk space but would help enhancing your computer’s data processing speed. This is the second best option in waste-management as per the researchers.
You definitely know about recycling plastic items, such as plastic bottles and poly bags, but you can recycle e-waste too. Though an old software might not be as useful for your daily requirements and it needs to be replaced. Programmers can utilize certain important and useful pieces from the old software and effectively incorporate them into the new one. This is termed as recycling of e-waste and is suggested by the third level of pyramid.
The fourth level of the pyramid signifies the importance of ‘recovering’. When you cannot recycle or reuse e-waste, you can still use it for the purpose of ‘data mining’. Data mining is nothing but the process of discovering new patterns from large data sets and thus, studying changes in historical patterns with the help of statistical methods or artificial intelligence.
Last but not the least, disposing can be an alternative where you can use a semi-volatile storage device. The device will provide a temporary home to waste data which needs to be completely erased. As cloud computing takes a hold in the information technology world, the need for a faster central storage device is huge for large amount of data transfers. Thus, to ensure that in future, the entire system does not get jammed because of piled up e-waste, we should think of green ways to clear up the digital waste from our computers. The sooner it is done, the better would it be in the future.
Via: EurekAlert
