Microsoft One Step From World's Greenest Company

An anonymous reader writes "According to this article, Microsoft is only a few lines of code away from becoming the greenest company on Earth." From the article: "Redmond should issue a software upgrade to every computer running Microsoft Windows worldwide to adjust each machine's energy-saving settings for maximum efficiency." The author figures that the upgrade would affect 100 million computers and that the power cost savings could hit $7 billion per year. CO2 emissions would be cut by 45 million tons. But what about the impact on computing?

Comments

I'm not sure what's scarier...

[SuperJ]

"The upgrade would adjust the machine's energy-saving settings for maximum efficiency. Of course, this upgrade would have to allow critical systems to opt out. Nobody wants air traffic control computers to suddenly go into deep hibernation. But correcting for critical systems should be very simple for a company that churns out millions of lines of code every year."

Wow, this paragraph made me soil my jeans. What's scarier: a) critical systems running Windows, b) critical systems running Windows connected to the Internet, c) critical systems running Windows connected to the Internet accepting patches from Microsoft, or d) trusting Microsoft to let anyone opt out of anything.

"Correcting for critical systems should be very simple for a company that churns out millions of lines of code every year." HA! What are you smoking? Microsoft has no way to know which systems are critical. And Microsoft doesn't have a wonderful track record with patches.

It's very frightening to think that c) above could actually exist, but unfortunately it's probably true.