The Hidden Damage From Waste Data (And How To Deal With It)

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.

About 80 per cent of all files that NT creates are either over-written or deleted within 5 seconds of being born.

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.

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.

Reading the article wastes enough of the reader's time to pay for many GB of 'waste data'.

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).