Back in 1999, a computer scientist at Cornell University began monitoring the way that the Windows NT 4.0 operating system used files. What he found was astonishing.<p>About 80 per cent of all files that NT creates are either over-written or deleted within 5 seconds of being born.<p>Today, Ragib Hasan and Randal Burns at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore say this ought to give programmers pause for thought. Deleting data requires energy, which means that a substantial fraction of a computer system’s energy budget is currently devoted to creating and then almost immediately scrubbing data.<p>And if the wasted energy weren’t bad enough, computer memory has a limited life span. Flash memory, for example, has a lifespan of 100,000 cycles. So cycling it needlessly brings the inevitable breakdown closer.
This reads like it's from 4/1 not 7/4.<p>Reading the article wastes enough of the reader's time to pay for many GB of 'waste data'.<p>Apply Gilderian logic: some things are so cheap it makes sense to 'waste' them to save on what's really valuable (user or programmer attention).