There's been somewhat of a movement of late to make programs be energyefficient (both for applications that might be running on laptops andfor applications that might run in a cloud computing environment withdetailed charging). This all sounds very good and worthwhile, and hardto argue against.

But it has a problem (the same problem as always, really). Ingeneral, such efficiency is not free since development time is notlimitless. Saying that applications should be optimized to be 'green' inthis way

Here is an interesting question: is getloadavg() a more orless encapsulated way of getting the load average than (onLinux) reading /proc/loadavg ? I wound up thinking aboutthis in the aftermath of feeling rueful about discovering Python's interface to getloadavg() ,and I don't think it's as simple as I made it out to be in my originalentry .

For me, what it comes down to is different perspectives. An interfacelike getloadavg() is nicely encapsulated for

For all that we roll our eyes when people have only online backups or redundancy andsuffer data loss as a result of it, I don't think it's necessarilyas easy to do things the 'right' way as we make it sound, or evenfeasible at all in some situations.

Suppose that you are a modern, efficient Internet-based business, andso you are running your servers the smart way; instead of buildingyour own machine room in a corner of your office space and bringing in