Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Do Any Companies Power Down at Night?

Posted by Soulskill on from the when-else-can-employees-run-their-torrents dept.

An anonymous reader writes "My Health Sciences Campus has about 8,000 desktop computers, and on any given night about half of them are left on. I know this because I track all the MAC addresses in case there is a virus outbreak. Aside from the current fad of 'being green', has anyone had any success in encouraging users to power-down at night? You could potentially eliminate running bots, protect yourself from the next virus outbreak, keep your data safe, etc. Do security concerns and power consumption issues matter enough to do this?"

13 of 646 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Good idea! by fotoflo · · Score: 5, Funny

    The top three "energy efficiency" people are the people taht never show up for work and leave their computers off all the time.

  2. Re:Good idea! by Angostura · · Score: 4, Funny

    Hmmm, lets see if a small amendment to the metric could circumvent that problem.... no, you're right it's an impossibly difficult flaw to fix.

  3. Re:Common wisdom by oldhack · · Score: 3, Funny

    Common wisdom (which may or may not be actual wisdom) suggests that powering up/down of computer power supplies is one of the largest sources of "wear" on computers nowadays, and so it's best to avoid that (replacing system components and increased costs in the industries to make this possible should be factored into eco-costs as well). Having systems go to sleep to various degrees presumably gets one much of the way towards being more eco-friendly without so much of this wear. That said, presumably a rigourous analysis on the topic would provide more reliable guidance.
    Some paragraph. Can you, like, up a notch on ass-covering? It can use some more "presumably" and "may or may not". Throw in some "perhaps" and "possibly" too.
    --
    Fuck systemd. Fuck Redhat. Fuck Soylent, too. Wait, scratch the last one.
  4. Re:Create job to force automatic reboot or shutdow by CastrTroy · · Score: 3, Funny

    Microsoft seems to have figured it out. They shut down my computer for me quite often to do updates.

    --

    Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
  5. Re:Common wisdom by Improv · · Score: 5, Funny

    False certainty characterises a bit too much of dialogue on the internet, I think, and makes it hard to be careful and humble in discussion. If I felt more sure of what I were saying, I'd have phrased it differently :) Presumably :P

    --
    For every problem, there is at least one solution that is simple, neat, and wrong.
  6. Re:Aside from being green... by Wordsmith · · Score: 5, Funny

    I'm against anyone working after 2 p.m., myself.

  7. Re:Hibernate by Atlantis-Rising · · Score: 3, Funny

    Obviously, he works for the NSA.

    --
    "It is possible to commit no errors and still lose. That is not a weakness. That is life." -Peak Performance
  8. Re:Aside from being green... by rebelcan · · Score: 2, Funny

    a lot of the machines are running automated stress test scenarios I'm glad to know that they have trouble installing the updates for Windows too.
    --
    God is dead -- Nietzsche
    Nietzsche is dead -- God
    Zombie Nietzsche lives! -- Zombie Nietzsche
  9. Re:Create job to force automatic reboot or shutdow by PFI_Optix · · Score: 2, Funny

    They really should get their own computer instead of sneaking into a public school. Do you have any idea what kind of trouble that can get you into these days?

    --
    120 characters for a sig? That's bloody useless.
  10. Re:Uh, Sleep Mode - shutdown? by seaturnip · · Score: 2, Funny

    Yes, a lesson about stupid IT departments and their apathy towards anybody getting work done.

  11. Re:viruses by Fred_A · · Score: 4, Funny

    I think he should go the whole way and call them viriises. It's technology after all.

    --

    May contain traces of nut.
    Made from the freshest electrons.
  12. Quality time by mixmaster · · Score: 2, Funny

    Everyone knows that most of the students sit up all night slashdotting, playing WoW, facebooking, digging. The night is the best time to have some "quality time" with you and your computer!

  13. Re:Uh, Sleep Mode - shutdown? by xelah · · Score: 2, Funny
    You save documents less than every five minutes?? Wow! On a Windows PC?


    I've long had a habit of pressing the save shortcut after every change I make. A sentence just doesn't feel 'finished' until I've pressed the save key...