Programming trend No. 7: Energy is no longer free, either
The cost of keeping a computer plugged in has never been an issue. It never mattered how much energy your rack of servers sucked down because the colo just sent you a flat bill for each box.
No longer -- energy consumption is a big issue, whether you're programming for smartphones or the server farm. The biggest limitation of my Android phone is that it can drain its battery in 8 hours doing nothing but sitting there. Design an app that eats up battery power faster than GPS features do and watch downloads of your app plummet.
The problem is less understood by server programmers, who could always take power for granted. You worry about speed, but rarely the cost of energy for completing a database transaction. Google is one of several companies in front of this issue, investing in finding the lowest-cost electricity to do extensive searches. It's likely the company is already deciding how to fine-tune a search based on energy costs and how much ad revenue the search will generate.
Cloud computing is helping make this issue more obvious. Some of the more sophisticated clouds -- like Google App Engine or Amazon S3 -- don't bill by the rack or root password. They charge for database commits and queries. While this is a new challenge for most programmers, it's making the cost of energy more transparent. Get ready to start thinking about the cost of each subroutine in dollars, not in lines of code or milliseconds of execution time.
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