Reliability v. Fire Risk

[David Carter]

[original: v9n21; commenting now on v9n50]

Pete Mellor <pm at cs.city.ac.uk> says:
>I did see one guy turn off the monitor alone to save the phosphor, but he'd 
>forgotten how to run screenblank.

Phosphors, fire and amnesia are not the only considerations. We turn all
our screens off here every night and have saved quite a lot of money. We
started doing this after our local Sun office told us they did so too. If
it's cost-effective for them, it must be for anyone with a hardware
maintenance contract.

>I wonder how much of the earth's resources are spent in
>driving machines which spend around 75% of their time waiting for another
>machine to talk to them? What is the green party's policy on this?

Green Party policy, as I understand it, is to encourage the development of
appropriate technology. In this case, I imagine it could take the form of
some box, with minimal power consumption, which would listen to an
ethernet and whose sole function would be to power a Sun up or down on
receipt of the appropriate request. Does such a box exist? If not,
couldn't someone make a lot of money by manufacturing one? Would it save
resources, or would the effect be nullified by need to replace (and
therefore manufacture) PCBs more frequently? If the latter, is anyone
developing "green"(ish) PCBs that can stand up to regular powering on and
off just like every other electrical appliance?

David Carter
SRI Cambridge Research Centre
Cambridge, UK
dmc at ai.sri.com, dmc at uk.co.sri