Way back in February, TreeHugger gave us a sneak peek at the beta version a green index, which they said would

“It works a bit like a stock market index, except that instead of tracking stocks, it tracks mentions of certain key green phrases in the media. It's a way to gauge how much mindshare certain concepts have and see if they are gaining or losing ground compared to last week.”

Well, the final version is here…and there doesn’t seem to be many changes from the beta version. In fact, even the text on the page, is just the “sneak peek” text reworked. Did TreeHugger just give up on this?

There was a very interesting, and concerning, article published earlier this week in InformationWeek. Forrester Research has made public a study of U.S. consumer electronics buyers that suggests that there's an emerging environmentally conscious group that's willing to pay more for green products.

The study claims 12% of U.S. adults, or 25 million Americans, are willing to pay extra for gadgets that use less energy or come from a company that approaches product design with the environment in mind and make up the vanguard of an emerging consumer market that will be an attractive target for technology companies.

Along with some other interesting statistics, among PC brands the study lists “Apple's customer base [as] the greenest, with 17% of its customers in the bright green category”. And this is the part that concerns me. Is this the same Apple that was slammed by Greenpeace for its lack of responsible green policies, resulting in Steve Jobs coming out with a statement vowing to clean up their act, only to receive another rebuke months later for not sticking to what they promised?

If you have a look over near the bottom of the left-hand sidebar, you’ll see we’ve added a new widget. CO2Stats is a free tool that monitors and offsets your blog or web site's carbon dioxide emissions by calculating how much power site visitors are consuming to view it. For each pound of CO2 resulting from site traffic, the CO2Stats Project purchases carbon offsets from Sustainable Travel International that benefit the environment.

Now, there isn’t much info on how they calculate how much power each visitor uses while visiting the site (I guess it’s through averages), but it seems like a good idea and has taken off by all accounts.

Twice-yearly TOP500 puts out a list of the world's fastest supercomputers. This is a closely watched event in the world of high performance computing, with inclusion in the list having become a highly sought after prize.

For decades now, the notion of ‘performance’ has been synonymous with ‘speed’ (as measured in FLOPS, short for floating-point operations per second). What this has led to is the emergence of supercomputers that consume egregious amounts of electrical power and produce so much heat that extravagant cooling facilities must be constructed to ensure proper operation. As a consequence, there has been an extraordinary increase in the total cost of ownership of a supercomputer, with costs running as high as US$1m to US$4m per year to operate a mega system.