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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?
Install Linux! Pollute the Earth!!!!!1111
What a phenomenally stupid idea. I have personally used a half-dozen machines where enabling "power-saving" is a recipe for operational disaster. Machines that power off completely. Machines that lock up. Machines that do something and never come back.
I think the lack of foresight on TFA's part with this inane suggestion reflects pretty accurately on how seriously we should take the article as a whole.
Without a doubt Microsoft has had a jaded past.
Yet Gates was once a man who did not believe in charity, and now he is Time's Man of the Year for his charity. Warren Buffet gave most of his wealth up to the Gates foundation.
Microsoft is embracing open-source, working on filters to save in OpenDocumentFormat, etc.
Microsoft was without a doubt, evil. I believe that Microsoft is becoming considerably less evil, perhaps in an attempt to copy-cat Google's success.
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
People who need better performance would change the settings. The vast majority of people don't need better performance. The vast majority would be okay (performance-wise) running a slightly souped-up C128 with GEOS and the Wave.
What about all the companies that enforce power management settings across their network that remove standby mode etc? And that's just one large example of all of the little situations which would partially negate this ignorantly large savings estimation.
Not saying it wouldn't help, but you don't force something like this down on a 5 year old OS. Now if they included some sort of detection system in Vista that adjusted accordingly, then that would be helpful for the next gen.
Please disable "screen saver" feature altogether. DPMS sleep modes work much, much better for "screen saving" (and screen saver of course do not save energy at all). Flying shits and "nice" landscapes may be kinda fun for a first time but that time ended about 20 years ago. Oh, same applies to all unices and macs of course. I have colleagues who have screensavers running on there PCs/laptops for _days_ (as on weekends) and monitors never go to sleep. Sigh.
I've seen server rooms that run off DC and have substantial power savings.
Google suggested a new standard for ATX power supplies that is supposed to have again, substantial power savings.
There are solutions out there without a doubt. Big businesses would save money on their bills.
So why is no one interested in saving money?
Bueller? Bueller?
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
Number of non-mobile computers out there that support CPU frequency and clock scaling - Very few.
AMD has only had that on the market for desktop CPUs for 3-4 years (or less), and Intel has only had it on the market for 3-4 months (since the Core 2 Duo launch for the desktop). No previous Intel desktop CPU supported any power management of significance.
This is one of those aspects of hardware that can't be changed in software. If the hardware doesn't support it (and for a few more years, most machines won't, people overestimate how often the "average Joe" replaces his hardware, same for corporate users), no software update will do a thing.
If he's talking about suspend and hibernate - That stuff is disabled by default because it rarely ever works properly. Of all the machines I own, only one (My newest machine) can wake up from hibernation with 100% reliability. If Microsoft tried to force hibernation to be enabled on all users, they would have a massive lawsuit on their hands due to all the machines that can't handle it.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
I don't grasp how this is "anti-Microsoft." That's a wee bit hyperdefensive to accuse the OP of. All the blog says is that if more people put their computer in standby or sleep mode at the end of the workday, the world would save a lot of money and electricity. That's not anti- anything except senseless waste. It's true however you want to defend it. I've never worked in a corporation that shut the computers off at the end of the day, despite the fact that it'd probably save them tens of thousands on electricity and having to buy new hardware periodically. As for how complex it is, considering there's already an option in every Windows system to put the computer in Standby after X Minutes, I doubt it would be very hard to change the setting in the Registry or wherever it's stored (I don't do Windows programming, but I use it enough to know the dialog box for Sleep Mode is there). That seems impractical and risky to me. It'd be better for MS just to start some sort of "corporate conservation" campaign telling them to shut the workstations down in the evening and flashing a bunch of slick graphs with captions like "Profit Losses Due to Idle Computers" on them till the executives' eyes glaze over and they submit.
brandelf: invalid ELF type 'KEEBLER'
Car companies could drastically reduce emissions is they would would just limit all internal combustion engines at 3000rpm. Think of what this would do for emission levels.
Or that the engine would shut itself down if you let it run stationary for 30 seconds.
I think I just solved the entire global warming issue!
Onwards to the meaning of life!
What they should do is allow machine power settings to be controllable from an Active Directory policy object. Network admins would then have fine control of the power usage of their desktops.
Microsoft could also use their online updating powers to make windows secure, thus reducing the power consumption caused by viruses, spyware, virus scanners etc.that use 90% the resources on the average windows box.
This blogger should lead by example and turn his machine off.
Permanently.
How would this make Microsoft the greenest company? As far as I can tell, it wouldn't. It would make the companies that use MS products greener companies. It would have nothing to do with the net energy that Microsoft uses.
It's like sex, except I'm having it!
Vista already seems to have a more power-saving profile by default, I was surprised when I couldn't VNC into it a few hours after leaving. Turned out (when I physically got there) it entered the suspend mode. Needless to say (but I'll say it anyway, hah!), the power settings are back at Always On.
While dropping the monopoly word in here is a sure fire way to get modded up, it just amazes me that a community of people who run two, three, or more different OS's, on different hardware platforms cry monopoly at every chance with Microsoft but do not when they are complaining about being stuck with a 3mbit cable modem, or unable to get bare copper lines for DSL back in the day, or even able to get FIOS TV because their town granted a monopoly to the local cable company.
There are REAL monopolies impacting people in the US vastly more than the anti-Microsoft brigade seems to understand.
Its a very myopic view of things.
The same people that play the latest and greatest games?
Sorry, I'm not a gamer. I've been holding out for Duke Nukem Forever.
Can you imagine the support nightmare Microsoft would unleash upon themselves if they did what the article suggests?
Articles like this underline a huge problem in the software industry. Too many people think that software is easy, and that all any problem needs is a few software tweaks. Too many people are willing to offer up solutions without thinking the issue all the way through.
It is attitudes like this that lead to failed billion-dollar IT projects, most of what is offered on the Daily WTF, and VB hacks promoting themselves as software engineers.
Life is like a web application. Sometime you need cookies just to get by.
Those computers are not theirs. So if I have a computer and I save energy, it is I who should step up, not the who told me to do it to save money and not the person I tell to implement it.
If it were that easy, I am also one step away from being the greenest person: Everbody, turn off all your computers. Do not drive your car and don't use any electricity.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
someone please write a worm that sets power-setting to maximum. The world will be a better place in no time...:-)
Apparently unlike some I actually read TFA.
;-)
I don't see where Microsoft commented one way or the other. What we have is a blogger with an idea to inflict power saving modes on people. MS is *way* smarter than that.
It's one of the down sides to free speech on the internet - even people who have dumb things to say can be instantly (and globally) published.
we see things not as as they are, but as we are.
-- anais nin
1. Invest in energy companies.
2. Change software to burn more energy.
3. Profit!
I figured out that my PCs were consuming more electricity than my fridge, dish washer, and clothes washer. Combined.
I made a chart of actual electricity use of various PCs and Macs on my blog: PC and Mac power consumption.
In a nutshell, my annual power consumption went down by 30% (!) once I started to power down my home-built "home server PC" when not in use.
I also figured out that when buying a new PC that is going to see a lot of use, power consumption should be a factor. If you're saving $100 in purchase price, but spending $50/year for additional electricity because the cheap PC's power supply is grossly inefficient, well, have you really saved anything if you keep that machine for 3 years? The short answer. NO.
Not to mention, a significant number (I'd say the majority) of the world's computers are, to a greater or lesser extent, running on managed networks where such things as power-saving settings are set by policy.
Powering down unused PC's would be an even better idea. My desktop at work is only on for the 9 hours I'm in the office, and my home machine is only on for the 6 hours in the evening after work and before I go to bed.
I'm sorry, but I don't see a problem here. This seems no worse than turning on the Windows firewall by default. Those of us who spend a lot of time tweeking and modifying our machines would obviously configure our systems to behave the way we want them to. People who don't care won't care anyway.
I have no issues at all with my sister's computer going into a power-safe mode by default. My grandmother's computer could certainly scale back when she's not playing solitare... could probably scale back while she's playing solitare.
Please don't get your panties in a wad just because we're talking about Microsoft here.
Well, on my 3year old mainboard, it certainly is.
Shut Windows down using a short touch on the power button (you'll see the shutdown window), and Wake-On-LAN does exactly nothing.
Shut Windows down with Start->Shutdown (still funny today) and WOL works.
Shut Linux down with 'halt', 'init 0' or 'shutdown -h now' and WOL works.
See my blog for my free opinions.
Changing just two settings on the average office PC will cut it's useage by over 50% on a daily average, yet hardly any office ever mandates that they be enabled
- Screen saver totally disabled in favor of DPMS suspend after 10 minutes of inactivity and monitor shut off after 15 minutes
- Set hard drives to spin down after 20 minutes of inactivity.
See how easy that was? It didn't affect your backup plan or anything else. The hard drive setting ALONE can save you 15% or more, especially if your office runs lots of applications over the network.
Of course wasn't it Microsoft that implemented all of the power down features because it took so long to boot Windows in the first place that people didn't want to wait so long for the computer to power on? Wasn't it also the bloated Windows code and feature creep that made it necessary for ever faster cpu, ram, video and storage requirements, which all equate to more energy consumption? Isn't also true that Microsoft Vista is going to tax these resources even more? So, isn't it a bit hypocritical to talk about how "green" Microsoft would be by forcing computers to power down?
Maybe a better solution would be an OS designed to run on lower powered devices from the start instead of trying to make the high horse powered PC of today more efficient. As an analogy, although there have been improvements with technology, an eight cylinder automobile is not going to ever be as fuel efficient as a four cylinder one. Nor will a four cylinder be as efficient, say as a fuel-cell powered one. Likewise, as long as the system requirements to just run Windows (not even applications on Windows) keeps increasing, the PC will continue to consume greater and greater amounts of power.
We all know, even if we don't want to admit it, that personal productivity for the business masses, anyway, has ceased to improved, at least significantly, from the latest releases of Windows. Why? Because of those 600 million computers quoted in the article, most are used for things like word processing, simple spreadsheets and surfing the web and to do email. Stuff that computers capable of running Windows 2000 and Office 2000 (if not earlier versions) still do quite well. Sure new versions make it easier to get pictures of our cameras and to create music, etc. But the vast majority of people aren't seriously doing that work and those that are, use specialized tools, anyway.
Now, many will argue, and I would agree, that hardware is cheap, relatively, anyway. However, the point of the article was not about cheap hardware, but about saving energy. And the point of the matter is that as long as we keep adding fluff and flash to the OS, forcing bigger and faster computers, which translates into greater power consumption, they will never be "green." Even if they do power down when not in use, they will still use far more energy than is needed to actually perform the task while they are on.
If Microsoft wants to truly be known as a "green" company, then they should design the next version of Windows so that it runs on less hardware than what is currently required, so we don't have keep to filling up the landfills with technically good computers that become obsolete, just to stay compatible every time Microsoft releases the latest version of Windows.
The title of the article as "Microsoft One Step From World's Greatest Company"
Suffice to say i almost fell off my chair
For Microsoft "Profit" is #2. There is no "???".
Hardware is toxic and energy intensive to produce and to dispose of. MS pushes a short hardware upgrade cycle, aiming to get its customers to make new hardware purchases every two years or so. Remember not only do later versions require newer hardware, eventually out-growing old hardware, most of MS' income is from Windows sales and nearly all of that is from OEM sales. Thus, MS is economically dependent on a short life span of units with unreasonably large ecological footprints.
Say the ecological footprint of hardware is the same over time.
You get the idea. Or ...
A 3, 4 or 5 year hardware cycle is perfectly reasonable, unless the software/operating systems gets so slow and bloated that performance suffers. Or unless the vendor stops supporting the software or operating system and their is no way to get third party or home grown support. So, MS-enforced hardware upgrades are definitely not green.
Anyway, the blog (it's not a real article) is way off base about energy consumption. Shame on /. for pushing MS' hype.
MS' coding practices make the company un-ecological: As the blog points out, currently, most MS machines get left on 24/7 (or as close to that as possible) to allow crackers to get in -- I mean to allow the system administrators to push out patches on "patch tuesday" or whatever it's called now.
Turning the machines off would also make them invulnerable to exploits, at least for the duration of the inactive period. Wake-on-LAN is an underutilized feature and could allow that. But it has nothing to do with any specific operating system.
Beta is broken and the link to classic doesn't work. Stop wasting our time or there won't be anybody left here.
1: invest in energy companies.
2: wait
3: profit
Doesn't everyone know that one? The other is.
1: Invest in banks
2: wait
3: profit
Deleted
To be perfectly honest, I don't really understand why any company would enter into a partnership with Microsoft at all. Much like Wal-Mart, they will fuck you over the first chance they get, because they want the income and marketshare that you have. Of course I know the answer, it's"Money", but that really doesn't change that doing business with Microsoft is ultimately very, very dangerous for your companies long term bottom line.
I do not see Microsoft's recent actions as "embracing open source," maybe in their tried and true "Embrace, Extend, Extinguish" strategy, by attempting to fragment the market, and sow Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt about non-Novell blessed (and hence Microsoft blessed) Open-source software. Bill Gates is no different than Andrew Carnegie (well actually, he is. Gates' parents were Upper-middle/Upper class Corporate attorneys, while Carnegie really did start out without a pot to piss in) he's stolen his Billions, and now he's trying to "Buy his way into heaven" as it were, trying to change history's view of him with good deeds that cost him nothing. Gates can donate $100 million dollars checks to a half dozen charities and not notice a damn thing.
Microsoft is just one line away from becoming the greenest company on earth:
RGB(0,256,0)
It's like green, but it's "one more" than green. It's the greenest.
I haven't seen an app this green since I switched from AS/400.
[emphasis mine]
This definition is more useful than the legal definition of restitution, because it directly addresses the problem of restoring one's moral character through the act of restitution.
The key phrase is "exact reparation as far as possible".
Suppose party A is a member of group B. Can you perform restituion for an injury to A by doing somethign for party B? Only if a a more direct restitution to party A is impossible.
Perfectly exact restitution is never possible. For example, if I break into your house, steal money, then later regret the act and return the money to you, I have not compensated you for the loss of feeling secure in your house; nor can I return to you the portion of your lifetime you spent dealing with the break in. However, returning the money with an apology and accepting the consequences is probably the most exact reparation that is practically possible.
The impossibility of perfect restitution is an important point, because it means we must judge the adequacy of an act of restitution in the context of other acts of restitution that are open to us. If I steal money by breaking into your house, it is not adequate to write an anonymous check to the town you live in, because it is within my power to return the money to you directly. However, if I stole money from your purse, and had no way of identifying my victim, that might be the best possible act of restitution open to me.
In this case, greening Windows might be a morally good thing, but it would not constitute an adquate act of restitution, because while it is impossible to identify the set of persons harmed with perfect precision, it is certainly possible to do better than "everybody in the world." Furthermore, judged as an act of restitution, it is wanting because it is paid by others in the form of slight reduction of system performance, not by Microsoft. Again from the Catholic Encylopedia:
This means an act of restitution which leaves the offender in possession of ill gotten gains is null.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
It gets expensive replacing hard drives after a couple years of start/stop cycles.. one of the reasons you'll notice the hard drive setting is set to off by default after Windows 98.
We have an intiative here where I work, (1000s of seats). Turn computers off at night. This over the last couple months has saved a significant amount of power, much more that I thought it would. This has reduced our power bill (and not everyone is doing it).
The biggest thing MS could do, is to use the screen saver to black the screen (put monitor into standby aka orange mode). This would at least reduce screen power comsumption. Its amazing when roaming around the city, the number of default windows screen savers/login screens you see running all night.
Please note that while sarcastic, I am happy that the mass market blindly following the trend help fund the R&D effort to produce the better computer I need to run my computer-vision programs...
[Linux zealotery] You can surf the web, play divx, mp3, program and write emails using Linux on an "old" (maybe 3 years) configuration. They are less powerful but generaly use less power. Needing a PIV 3 GHz Dual Core with 2 Go RAM and a graphic card with more memory than I have in my file server for reading emails and DVDs is the real waste, Microsoft is only somehow compensating for this.[/Linux zealotery]
[mod me insightful] Linux is not produce by a company but by individuals on their free time, we can't give its "green rank". But if we want to compare this network of people to a company like Microsoft you have to consier some things :
People in large companies tend to use more resources than people on their free time, be it paper, power, AC, better computers, etc...
The "Linux network" only has programmers. No marketing department, no administration, no financial department, etc... each one of these producing their own wastes
Linux is often used to "recycle" old PCs into education tools or simple media boxes. Do do that with, say, Win 95, you would have (in theory) to 1) find a licence 2) forget about internet connectivity because of all the nasty stuff Win 95 is vulnerable about 3) forget about recent software, even those which are lightweight.[/mod me insightful]
The Wise adapts himself to the world. The Fool adapts the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the Fool.
The blogger is advocating Microsoft forcing users to accept drastic changes to the way their PCs function. Because if "opting out" were easy, we'd all do it and there would be no savings.
However, it is quite simple to use group policy and scripting to make use of energy saving features and shut down PCs when they are not being used. I know, the school district I work for uses them.
We have over 1,200 computers in the district, and every one of them will power down its monitor after 15 minutes idle. We've had to disable hibernation because it doesn't work properly on older systems, but we are powering down hard drives after 30 minutes. At the end of the day, the only workstations not powered down are administration and IT--less than 50 total.
Something not mentioned in that article: MS hasn't been able to make hibernation and suspend 100% reliable, and they've had years to work on it. Now this guy wants them to force us all to use it. No, thanks. Maybe when he gets a CS degree and can fix MS's code so that all the energy saving features work right on every PC they encounter I'll consider it, but until then this guy needs to shut his trap about things he doesn't understand.
120 characters for a sig? That's bloody useless.
Turning off or powering down desktop computers at night would wreak havoc on most enterprises larger than 25 desktops. We use after hours to push updates, install new software, and perform other maintenance. Your costs for new hardware would also likely increase significantly as the most likely time for hardware to fail is on power up. If hardware is running it typically stays running and only fails on a change in power status. If you changed to this "Green Policy" you would need to update your enterprise during work hours which would reduce the productivity of your labor force (also expensive). I think this is a case os someone who doesn't know what their talking about trying to make interesting dinner conversation. It is annoying at best for those of us who actually work in IT for a living.
I swear I didn't know it was loaded...
Actually this article touches a good subject. Imagine how much energy we could safe if computers worked a bit less. People running computation stuff as screensavers *might* be cool but it sure costs the planet a lot! We "geeky" types have never really thought much about this... our computers stay on a lot uplaoding, downloading, rendering, screensaving or just doing nothing but they waste shitloads of energy. Nobody would actually leave his telly on while off to work.. but somehow we think that it is ok to leave uour PC on while we are gone "because it is doing stuff". The question is... does it *really* need to do stuff?
What you describe is stand-by state. In hibernation the memory is dumped to disk and the machine turns off completely.
My eyes reflect the stars and a smile lights up my face.
"Sorry, I'm not a gamer. I've been holding out for Duke Nukem Forever."
And you will continue holding out forever.
I often have trouble remembering which way is out of bed in the morning.
Ever hear of remote wake-up or ACPI? Even a Win98 box can be nudged out of Standby mode remotely. The network doesn't have to be fully operational 24 hours a day to receive updates and maintenance, and I doubt you're doing those updates and software installations every single night. If you are, you desperately need to rework your system because it's hanging on to life by a thread. I'm not talking about putting the computers involved in real-time processes, web servers, etc in sleep mode. That wouldn't make a lot of sense. But the dozens or hundreds of workstations the typical customer service department, the mail-room, and all the other clerical and administrative roles a large corporation has are completely unused after the employees leave and none of them except the management would ever have a need for logging in remotely. Not to mention in most of the offices I've worked in that had a Windows platform, usually NT 4 or 2000, all of the updates were run as a batch script when you first logged in. It required all of 5 minutes to complete and it gave you an excuse to go pour a cup of coffee on company time. And on a more cynical note, at least if the WSs were shutdown overnight that'd be 12+ virus- and crash-free hours not to have to worry about.
brandelf: invalid ELF type 'KEEBLER'
Hmm. It seems that the thriving ecosystem of spyware, viruses, worms and trojans is also the direct result of MS' coding practices. Or perhaps to be more precise because of fundamental design flaws in the product. Either way, the problem is not the user, but the vendor.
But that does bring up a very important second point. The "re-format and re-install" mantra has the effect of reducing competition because of the difficulty in auto-installing third-party software on MS-Windows. Unlike Red Hat's kick start or Debian's APT, the third party apps have to wait until they can be installed manually. In that case, especially for large scale sites, the IT dept decides it's too much work to go for best of breed and knuckle under to convenience. Even if they do go with third party apps, time limitations (lunch, meetings, end of shift, project deadlines, etc.) may intervene and prevent completion of installation of the third party apps. With 10's or 100's of millions of PC's, just shifting the frequency a small amount means large numbers of units.
Using a system which is not prone to spyware, viruses, worms or trojans and does well with low system requirements is also an option for many. Power users and hard core gamers may have trouble. Some, a surprisingly small number, of business apps may cause trouble. But low-tech users who just surf or e-mail or play music will do just fine and may not notice.
So there are three choices there:
Beta is broken and the link to classic doesn't work. Stop wasting our time or there won't be anybody left here.
I've just turned powersave features to ma
Deleted
This would be a great idea if Windows power management actually worked half decently. A lot of the Windows XP machines that I worked with crash when you put them into standby mode, and even more of them will not come back out of standby without an application hanging or a hardware device disappearing from the hardware profile until you reboot the system. I'm not sure if it's a problem with Windows itself or with the drivers that manufacturers are releasing (probably a mix of both), but it's certainly not something that I could rely on if I had open applications running when I was away from my desk.
I have a hunch that this blogger is a Mac user, and hasn't experienced how bad Windows power management can be. My Mac Mini comes in and out of sleep mode without any problems (as long as I don't have my HP printer plugged into it), but that's a lot easier for Apple to do considering that they more control as to what hardware and software goes on their systems.
A while back I bought a laser printer. It had a suspiciously good bang for the buck considering that it could do double sided printing. The box said "Optimized for Windows" on it. No problem, a printer is a printer is a printer. Plug it in, fire text at it, and the text winds up on the paper. Fire a few special character sequences at it, and graphics come out. So what if it has drivers that make that process especially efficient in Windows. Anyways, I brought it home, set it up, tried to get my Linux box to print to it, and failed. I tried redirecting text to /dev/lp0 without success. I rebooted the machine into DOS and tried printing from there. No dice. Yet the printer's status pages would come out no problem. A few hours of Googling educated me on a new class of abominations - "winprinters". Mindless zombie hunks of metal and plastic that cannot perform their designated function unless Microsoft Windows is pulling their strings and laughing maniacally. Sorry, no drivers for Macs, or Linux. Windows only.
I brought this abomination back to the store. They were going to refuse to take it back, because I had unsealed the toner cartridge. I pointed out that the box said "Optimized for Windows", not "Exclusively for Windows", or "Must be slaved to a Windows machine, because it isn't really a printer". Fortunately, there was a nice Samsung printer with Tux emblazoned on the side (along with the Apple and Microsoft logos) that was the same price, and the sales guy let me swap. Otherwise I would have been stuck with a $1200 paperweight.
Microsoft may not be a monopoly in the strictest sense of the word, but they are a monsterous company that wields enough power that other companies are willing to lie to, and cheat, their own customers just so they can put the magic word "Windows" on their box.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
I wished screen savers would pause/stop when DPMS come on. I noticed this in Windows and Linux so far. I also avoid 3D screen savers due to 3D card usage.
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
I agree that originally, this was tainted money, in the ways Microsoft originally made it, but I don't think the Gates foundation is a front for more manipulation. I think this really is from his heart, maybe with an occasional nudge from Melinda.
2 9/k.CC2B/Home.htm
If Bill Gates was just milking his donations for maximum publicity or leverage, would he have picked the causes he has? He could focus totally on those medical causes that matter most to the industrialized world, for example. He could avoid all the more politically controversial causes out there. When it comes to willingness to let the chips fall where they may, I'd say the Gates Foundation compares favorably to two of the biggest alternatives, the MacArthur and Ford Foundations:
http://www.macfound.org/site/c.lkLXJ8MQKrH/b.8552
http://www.fordfound.org/
(Info on both the Ford Foundation's Sexuality and Religion divisions, and the MacArthur Foundation's Copyright law related work is accessable through these links. The latter may be of special interest to many Slashdotters. Both programs are examples of a foundation not shying away from doing what it thinks is right for fear of alienating business partners, funding sources or sections of the general public.)
Mr. Gates could increase giving to Europe, where Microsoft has had the most trouble, and he could focus on causes that are likely to be dear to the very politicians that have pushed hardest for fines. He doesn't appear to be doing this.
Bill Gates could also just about ignore Africa, or at least give a much smaller percentage of totals there, and still reap the same sort of publicity. Instead of his saying that computers aren't what's needed first in developing nations, he could encourage someone else to pay for more hardware everywhere, just so he could 'give' away lots of software and count that in press releases as donations worth the full retail value, even though it would actually cost him very little. His whole computer initiative goes exactly the other way. The Gates foundation only pushes computerization in areas developed enough to have libraries and similar locations, and actively avoids treating computerization as a solution where basic infrastructure such as reliable food sources, roads or water filtration are more pressing needs. They also avoid pushing computerization where political stability is suspect or obviously lacking. They don't support 'computer in every classroom' or 'every student's home' type programs, and they do pay for both machines and networking, including some pretty long haul wiring runs.
Who is John Cabal?
Besides the impact on the environment, think of the impact this could have on spam. Given that the bulk of spam comes from infected Windows desktop machines that probably don't have to be on when nobody is using the keyboard and mouse, a scheme that automatically shuts down (or suspends) these machines after a couple of minutes of no user activity could severely reduce spam.
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
I have one question.
When the EU recently gave them 7 days to comply with their order why did Bill and Melinda go meet with the head of the EU to talk about their charitable dealings? When india was talking about using open source why did Bill and Melinda show up in india with a large check for aids prevention?
Was all that just a coinky dink?
evil is as evil does