Even if it was a recent invention it is still right and proper
Certainly, modern copyright law is much more recent than the bill of rights; the founders gave copyright for 15 years, not life + 70 years.
The point is, that it is recent implies that it's not some infallible doctrine that has centuries of evidence to back it up, that should never be questioned.
I am neutral about the debate of whether copyright should exist.
However, I do think there needs to be a real debate, not simply an automatic (an often emotional) dismissal of the very notion that copyright (or patents, for that matter) might not be the best system for promoting invention, the arts, and the common good.
It is your choice because the government has granted you a monopoly over it.
Much as it is the Motion Picture Experts Group's choice whether to charge exorbitant rates for various codecs, because the government has granted them a monopoly over it.
Certainly in the case of software patents, I don't believe any one company should own mp3 -- but they do.
If a pledge / donation system was setup - and they reached the target quickly - then that would also send a strong message to the RIAA and their ilk that their "potential" customer base don't agree with the verdict.
It would also send a strong message that this isn't about the money.
If I buy a DVD, legitimately, and watch it only on approved players, then as soon as the disc gets scratched, I lose the movie. Additionally, I have to sit through the logos, and very likely any ads, and I miss out on features like being able to quickly seek within the film (chapters are nothing compared to skipping 10 minutes at a time), watch it on Linux on my fairly expensive new laptop, etc etc.
If I buy a Blu-Ray disc, legitimately, aside from the extra hardware cost, and battery drain, of putting one in a laptop, there currently are no good Blu-Ray players for Linux that I know of, legal or otherwise.
If I pay for TV service, even assuming I hook it up to a Mythbox and get the full benefit of that, I still have to watch ads in the middle of the fucking show -- that is, while the show is playing, an ad will slide up to cover part of it.
If I purchase music through Amazon MP3, I still have to install their software, and click through several pages to spend that money on a single song, or an album at a time... and I get it in that old, crappy mp3 codec.
If I pirate, I get a better experience than is available at any price. I can download movies or TV shows, in HD, without having to sit through ads, and watch them wherever I want, on any OS. I can download music in Flac format, not just whole albums, but whole discographies at a time.
Occasionally, I get what I want legitimately. I have bought albums in Flac format from places that sell them that way. But for the most part, I pirate not for the price, but for the features I want.
So I'd be delighted to see validation that I'm not the only one who feels this way, and to demonstrate clearly how much the MPAA/RIAA is missing out on by not playing by our rules.
it's the rights of the creator of that work to have a say in how and when its reproduced that are being preserved.
Copyright law is actually a relatively recent invention. So no, I would argue that copyright law took away something that was already an inherent freedom, if not a right.
You could argue that it's similar to murder -- no one argues that we have a right to kill people. I would argue that this is a case where the government is stepping in to preserve a particular business model. Whether that's a good thing or not is up for debate, but I don't think the right to control an idea you had is anywhere near as inherent as the right to live.
If you don't like the fact that an artist or other creator wants to be in charge of their own work, then just walk away.
That is a good idea.
But I would think, as a content creator, I'd much rather see people pirate my work than see them walk away. Better to be famous and unpaid than just unpaid.
it can go into the public domain after I'm dead, but not before.
Why should it last that long?
Copyright, if I remember, was originally something like 14 or 15 years. Seems to me that if you can't sell a book in that long, you've missed your chance anyway.
The time it would take to switch between the OSes is unacceptable.
For gaming? Really?
I don't know about you, but I use Linux for a few games known to work (including an MMO), IM, email, web, programming, music, movies, really everything I do with a computer -- except games I know will work better on Windows.
I don't really do any of these things at the same time as I play games -- except for the MMO, which works on Linux. It's not WoW, but hey, WoW does work on Linux.
It takes about a minute, certainly less than two, to reboot.
How neurotic are you about gaming that you can't wait two minutes to switch between email and Half-Life 2? Or, how crappy is your Windows installation that it takes more than 30 seconds to boot?
Contrast to, say, owning a console. It could take that long to walk to the other room, turn it on, and wait through the various logos. I'm pretty happy with it.
Gimp has gotten a few things right, but in general, yes, Photoshop is superior.
For a simple example: How long did Gimp take to get CMYK support? Is that even as good as Photoshop's, now?
An example that's actually bitten me, personally: Photoshop has the ability to organize layers into groups, and build a hierarchy of such layers. Last I checked, Gimp doesn't have that, and Krita doesn't have that. On some larger Photoshop files I've had to work with, this really becomes a necessity.
most Apple users (and I use the term 'most' in the sense of 'all but one of the Apple users that I know') don't need Photoshop, or even MS Paint. They buy Macs purely because they're so desperate to differentiate themselves that they'll spend any amount (the more the better,
I know exactly one person who bought a Mac based on aesthetics.
I know two people who bought a Mac because they'd only ever used Macs, and didn't want to deal with learning PCs.
I know seven people, directly, who are quite technically-minded, and bought a Mac because the only other real choice was Linux, and the Mac is physically sexier (and there was a decent deal on iMacs), and it will run other software they occasionally want/need, like Photoshop.
If real, useful communication that's what actually ends up taking place at these conferences (rather than just a lot of grant-money-funded boozing, as happened at the only one I attended) then that's awesome. But unless this was literally a 'team meeting' for all the contributors, I can't see it being quite that important.
Given that this was Joomla, you may have a point... I do wish that thing would die.
But I've seen far more conferences in the BarCamp fashion -- there may be pizza, but no real wining/dining, and no real room for people who aren't actually contributing.
Even the ones I haven't been to -- I saw a bunch of MerbCamp presentations -- frankly, many of the people there had Macs, and most of them did present something interesting.
Maybe it's a recent phenomenon, or I'm just choosing my conferences carefully?
I went through a similar learning curve when I left university - it was a shock to realise that not only was my boss telling me that it doesn't MATTER how batfuck ugly the code is, if it does what the customer wants and the customer is happy, then that's fine... but that he was right.
That's actually not quite what I'm talking about, and isn't entirely true.
Aesthetics and clean implementation are for us, the engineers, not something that matters a jot for the end user as long as it fills their needs.
Correct. However, as thedailywtf shows repeatedly, aesthetics and clean implementation matter. If the code is buttfuck-ugly, it's also likely to be too inflexible. The customer doesn't think they care whether it's flexible, until their requirements change, or we discover that we misinterpreted one.
Granted, this can be taken too far in the other direction, with "soft coding", and various other attempts to extract "business logic" and make it easier for the customer to change it without coming back to the programmer, etc.
However, somewhere between that is a balance. And yes, aesthetics matter -- you don't want to spend all day debating the prettiest way to code something, but given two equally valid (technically speaking) ways of doing something, code like a girl.
The communication you're espousing is the only way to actually achieve that.
But it is also useful between developers, for the reasons listed above.
All my (admittedly somewhat trollish) post was aiming at was that people who buy Macs to try and make themselves feel special are the same kind of people that would go to a conference for the same reason, so their presence at a conference doesn't automatically imply tech savviness.
Fair enough. My reply was written with some amount of ignorance -- I don't actually know anyone like that. The one person I know who bought a Mac for looks alone is a graphic designer -- no way they would be at this kind of conference.
It would also make it significantly more expensive to develop third-party software for OS X. And, if Apple held the keys (as opposed to just using the normal SSL chain of trust), they could easily block software on no basis other than "We don't like this," or "It competes with us / kills our business model."
See: iPhone.
And yes, this would still be possible. A pirated copy needs to be cracked. A crack modifies the binary, in the same way that a trojan would. So the signature would fail on both the pirate copy and the cracked copy -- thus, either this exact attack would work, or no users would torrent software. The latter is unlikely.
Apple users have already proved (in general, by their purchase) that they're willing to spend large amounts of cash to make themselves feel like they're different or special.
The same could be applied to Windows users. In general, by their purchase, they've proven that they're willing to spend small amounts of cash to make themselves feel like they're different or better than Linux users.
Or Photoshop users. They've proven that they're willing to spend large amounts of cash to prove they're different or better than Gimp users.
Look, Gimp isn't Photoshop. I like Linux, and I like open source, and I use Gimp myself -- but I'm not a graphic designer, and Gimp is definitely missing large amounts of functionality that Photoshop has.
The same can be said about OS X vs Windows. Whether that functionality matters to you is a different matter -- like I said, I use Gimp -- but to pretend that Windows (or even Linux) is always just as good as OS X is just as ignorant as claiming that Gimp is always just as good as Photoshop.
I'd say that puts them high up the list of people who'd pay to go to a conference (rather than just staying at home, you know, actually coding).
I suspect that's why you're at home coding, rather than at work coding.
Communication is at least as important, even as necessary, as "actually coding", for anything beyond a one-man project.
Face-to-face meetings, and whiteboards, and projectors, can help to get a lot done in a short amount of time. While email and IM may be more efficient in some ways -- certainly it's cheaper than actually going to a conference -- I have definitely had the experience where I tried to communicate an idea back and forth with a developer via a board system (may as well have been email), and we just did not understand each other for several months. He flew out, and within one or two days, we were on the same page.
Before I had a real programming job, with a team of more than one, I had the same illusion you did, that this was all about code, and that a Mac is just a waste of money. I had some other assumptions, too -- that Windows was absolutely unworkable, that Javascript is a crappy language (and that HTML/CSS was a mess)...
Then I got into the real world.
HTML/CSS has a few messy implementations, but it's a fine technology in its own right. Javascript is an excellent language. And communication is as important as code -- indeed, I would cite communication skills above coding skills on my resume.
Now, frankly, you are just a troll, and probably not worth all that effort. But I see a bit of myself in you. Maybe you'll learn something today. Maybe someone else will.
If so, notice how that happened without any actual coding. Not counting <quote> tags, there isn't a line of code in this post.
It could also be because OS X is getting large enough to actually provide sufficient numbers for a botnet, but since this hasn't happened before, both Apple and Mac users are cocky.
But understand, no OS can protect you when you do things like pirate software via BitTorrent. OS X could well be the most secure system in the world (though I agree it's not), and still not be able to protect users from themselves.
why go through all that trouble for $75 per year. If I even spent one hour on a project like that my hourly internal charge rate would exceed that figure.
Multiply it by a thousand desktops, and that one hour starts to look reasonable.
you're not involved because you might or might not ever pay Amazon
Actually, I absolutely do pay Amazon, just as I would any other hosting provider which I am using bandwidth on. Here, go read.
has nothing to do with how much / GB you are charged on your connection.
Again, this is for my connection, to my EC2 nodes, which are hosted on Amazon -- or to my S3 storage, which is also hosted by Amazon -- therefore, it is Amazon's connection, and it is directly relevant. Amazon is somehow managing to spend less than that amount for their connection, because they are reselling it to me at that amount.
If not, they are playing a very risky game -- for instance, they would be making assumptions about how many times a given file on S3 is accessed, and a particularly popular one could end up costing them a fair amount of money.
I apologize if I wasn't clear, but I did mention that this price per gig is something I am paying to Amazon, and I mentioned it several posts up.
Things like asset tracking, system/firewall upgrades, application software install and upgrades, disk optimization, etc.
Things that, all told, will take something like 2-3 hours, at most, right?
Wake-on-LAN. Shut down when done. If boot time is really having an impact, send a wake-on-LAN packet a set time before everyone is supposed to arrive.
It's like the problem with unplugging TVs when not in use. You can't use a remote control to turn it on if the remote sensor is not getting power first.
Actually, there are solutions to this problem -- after all, RFID tags don't need to be powered, they're powered by the signal itself. But even so, no one would argue that the TV wastes more power waiting for a remote signal than when simply turned off.
So yes, with wake-on-LAN, you need the switches to either be on themselves, or have some small part that's awake enough to be triggered automatically by somewhere else. Ultimately, you end up with very little power being used beyond the servers, which are always on anyway.
Instead of shutting machines down, just measure when they're on. Anyone whose machine is still on outside business hours, dock their pay by some small amount to cover the wasted power and AC.
Better yet, monitor the entire cube (or office), not just the computer.
The first time some manager gets "slammed" with a few dollars docked from their salary, honestly, the manager is likely well enough paid that they don't care. If the problem is people working overtime, pay them enough overtime to compensate.
Is there an obvious reason this would fail, if actually implemented?
Most users are going to have to click one thing to connect to the VPN, and another thing to connect via RDP, unless RDP got some decent crypto while I wasn't looking.
So, either add a script to the VPN system, or have them click three things -- one to start the VPN, one to send the packet, and one to connect via RDP once the system is up.
Or, yeah, just have a terminal server. Or laptops. Or route actual services (like SMB) through the VPN, and let them run the app on their home machine.
Your users weren't born knowing how to use RDP. This is not the end of the world.
Myth No. 3: Turning my PC on and off will reduce its performance and useful life. There may have been some truth to this once upon a time, the report notes, but today's new and improved modern hardware can handle it.... some studies indicate it would require on/off cycling every five minutes to harm the hard drive.
I realize you're probably being sarcastic, but I don't feel like underestimating the stupidity of the average person.
No, then it'll just use twice as much power or more, if it's a modern computer capable of clocking itself down when unused.
The only time I'd use a boinc project, or a SETI project, is on a server that I don't directly pay for power usage (or CPU cycles) on, but which also isn't shared in any meaningful way. For instance, I might do it on Amazon EC2, but I wouldn't do it on Slicehost, because other Slicehost users would be pretty directly hurt by it.
Slashdot Mirror
Which is exactly my point.
These challenges are new. I don't believe we've figured them out yet.
Even if it was a recent invention it is still right and proper
Certainly, modern copyright law is much more recent than the bill of rights; the founders gave copyright for 15 years, not life + 70 years.
The point is, that it is recent implies that it's not some infallible doctrine that has centuries of evidence to back it up, that should never be questioned.
I am neutral about the debate of whether copyright should exist.
However, I do think there needs to be a real debate, not simply an automatic (an often emotional) dismissal of the very notion that copyright (or patents, for that matter) might not be the best system for promoting invention, the arts, and the common good.
copyright law provides the means which you can allow people to freely copy your work
No, copyright law provides other restrictions above and beyond this. Without copyright law, people would be allowed to freely copy your work anyway.
and you can reserve certain other rights if you'd like.
This is what copyright law does, nothing more.
It is your choice because the government has granted you a monopoly over it.
Much as it is the Motion Picture Experts Group's choice whether to charge exorbitant rates for various codecs, because the government has granted them a monopoly over it.
Certainly in the case of software patents, I don't believe any one company should own mp3 -- but they do.
If a pledge / donation system was setup - and they reached the target quickly - then that would also send a strong message to the RIAA and their ilk that their "potential" customer base don't agree with the verdict.
It would also send a strong message that this isn't about the money.
If I buy a DVD, legitimately, and watch it only on approved players, then as soon as the disc gets scratched, I lose the movie. Additionally, I have to sit through the logos, and very likely any ads, and I miss out on features like being able to quickly seek within the film (chapters are nothing compared to skipping 10 minutes at a time), watch it on Linux on my fairly expensive new laptop, etc etc.
If I buy a Blu-Ray disc, legitimately, aside from the extra hardware cost, and battery drain, of putting one in a laptop, there currently are no good Blu-Ray players for Linux that I know of, legal or otherwise.
If I pay for TV service, even assuming I hook it up to a Mythbox and get the full benefit of that, I still have to watch ads in the middle of the fucking show -- that is, while the show is playing, an ad will slide up to cover part of it.
If I purchase music through Amazon MP3, I still have to install their software, and click through several pages to spend that money on a single song, or an album at a time... and I get it in that old, crappy mp3 codec.
If I pirate, I get a better experience than is available at any price. I can download movies or TV shows, in HD, without having to sit through ads, and watch them wherever I want, on any OS. I can download music in Flac format, not just whole albums, but whole discographies at a time.
Occasionally, I get what I want legitimately. I have bought albums in Flac format from places that sell them that way. But for the most part, I pirate not for the price, but for the features I want.
So I'd be delighted to see validation that I'm not the only one who feels this way, and to demonstrate clearly how much the MPAA/RIAA is missing out on by not playing by our rules.
Except that the purpose of the GPL is to enforce user freedom.
With no copyright, all they could do is withhold source code. Users would be free to hack up and redistribute binaries as much as they could.
I'm not sure whether that's an improvement, but it's worth considering.
it's the rights of the creator of that work to have a say in how and when its reproduced that are being preserved.
Copyright law is actually a relatively recent invention. So no, I would argue that copyright law took away something that was already an inherent freedom, if not a right.
You could argue that it's similar to murder -- no one argues that we have a right to kill people. I would argue that this is a case where the government is stepping in to preserve a particular business model. Whether that's a good thing or not is up for debate, but I don't think the right to control an idea you had is anywhere near as inherent as the right to live.
If you don't like the fact that an artist or other creator wants to be in charge of their own work, then just walk away.
That is a good idea.
But I would think, as a content creator, I'd much rather see people pirate my work than see them walk away. Better to be famous and unpaid than just unpaid.
it can go into the public domain after I'm dead, but not before.
Why should it last that long?
Copyright, if I remember, was originally something like 14 or 15 years. Seems to me that if you can't sell a book in that long, you've missed your chance anyway.
The time it would take to switch between the OSes is unacceptable.
For gaming? Really?
I don't know about you, but I use Linux for a few games known to work (including an MMO), IM, email, web, programming, music, movies, really everything I do with a computer -- except games I know will work better on Windows.
I don't really do any of these things at the same time as I play games -- except for the MMO, which works on Linux. It's not WoW, but hey, WoW does work on Linux.
It takes about a minute, certainly less than two, to reboot.
How neurotic are you about gaming that you can't wait two minutes to switch between email and Half-Life 2? Or, how crappy is your Windows installation that it takes more than 30 seconds to boot?
Contrast to, say, owning a console. It could take that long to walk to the other room, turn it on, and wait through the various logos. I'm pretty happy with it.
Gimp has gotten a few things right, but in general, yes, Photoshop is superior.
For a simple example: How long did Gimp take to get CMYK support? Is that even as good as Photoshop's, now?
An example that's actually bitten me, personally: Photoshop has the ability to organize layers into groups, and build a hierarchy of such layers. Last I checked, Gimp doesn't have that, and Krita doesn't have that. On some larger Photoshop files I've had to work with, this really becomes a necessity.
I want Gimp to be better, but it isn't.
most Apple users (and I use the term 'most' in the sense of 'all but one of the Apple users that I know') don't need Photoshop, or even MS Paint. They buy Macs purely because they're so desperate to differentiate themselves that they'll spend any amount (the more the better,
I know exactly one person who bought a Mac based on aesthetics.
I know two people who bought a Mac because they'd only ever used Macs, and didn't want to deal with learning PCs.
I know seven people, directly, who are quite technically-minded, and bought a Mac because the only other real choice was Linux, and the Mac is physically sexier (and there was a decent deal on iMacs), and it will run other software they occasionally want/need, like Photoshop.
If real, useful communication that's what actually ends up taking place at these conferences (rather than just a lot of grant-money-funded boozing, as happened at the only one I attended) then that's awesome. But unless this was literally a 'team meeting' for all the contributors, I can't see it being quite that important.
Given that this was Joomla, you may have a point... I do wish that thing would die.
But I've seen far more conferences in the BarCamp fashion -- there may be pizza, but no real wining/dining, and no real room for people who aren't actually contributing.
Even the ones I haven't been to -- I saw a bunch of MerbCamp presentations -- frankly, many of the people there had Macs, and most of them did present something interesting.
Maybe it's a recent phenomenon, or I'm just choosing my conferences carefully?
I went through a similar learning curve when I left university - it was a shock to realise that not only was my boss telling me that it doesn't MATTER how batfuck ugly the code is, if it does what the customer wants and the customer is happy, then that's fine... but that he was right.
That's actually not quite what I'm talking about, and isn't entirely true.
Aesthetics and clean implementation are for us, the engineers, not something that matters a jot for the end user as long as it fills their needs.
Correct. However, as thedailywtf shows repeatedly, aesthetics and clean implementation matter. If the code is buttfuck-ugly, it's also likely to be too inflexible. The customer doesn't think they care whether it's flexible, until their requirements change, or we discover that we misinterpreted one.
Granted, this can be taken too far in the other direction, with "soft coding", and various other attempts to extract "business logic" and make it easier for the customer to change it without coming back to the programmer, etc.
However, somewhere between that is a balance. And yes, aesthetics matter -- you don't want to spend all day debating the prettiest way to code something, but given two equally valid (technically speaking) ways of doing something, code like a girl.
The communication you're espousing is the only way to actually achieve that.
But it is also useful between developers, for the reasons listed above.
All my (admittedly somewhat trollish) post was aiming at was that people who buy Macs to try and make themselves feel special are the same kind of people that would go to a conference for the same reason, so their presence at a conference doesn't automatically imply tech savviness.
Fair enough. My reply was written with some amount of ignorance -- I don't actually know anyone like that. The one person I know who bought a Mac for looks alone is a graphic designer -- no way they would be at this kind of conference.
It would also make it significantly more expensive to develop third-party software for OS X. And, if Apple held the keys (as opposed to just using the normal SSL chain of trust), they could easily block software on no basis other than "We don't like this," or "It competes with us / kills our business model."
See: iPhone.
And yes, this would still be possible. A pirated copy needs to be cracked. A crack modifies the binary, in the same way that a trojan would. So the signature would fail on both the pirate copy and the cracked copy -- thus, either this exact attack would work, or no users would torrent software. The latter is unlikely.
Apple users have already proved (in general, by their purchase) that they're willing to spend large amounts of cash to make themselves feel like they're different or special.
The same could be applied to Windows users. In general, by their purchase, they've proven that they're willing to spend small amounts of cash to make themselves feel like they're different or better than Linux users.
Or Photoshop users. They've proven that they're willing to spend large amounts of cash to prove they're different or better than Gimp users.
Look, Gimp isn't Photoshop. I like Linux, and I like open source, and I use Gimp myself -- but I'm not a graphic designer, and Gimp is definitely missing large amounts of functionality that Photoshop has.
The same can be said about OS X vs Windows. Whether that functionality matters to you is a different matter -- like I said, I use Gimp -- but to pretend that Windows (or even Linux) is always just as good as OS X is just as ignorant as claiming that Gimp is always just as good as Photoshop.
I'd say that puts them high up the list of people who'd pay to go to a conference (rather than just staying at home, you know, actually coding).
I suspect that's why you're at home coding, rather than at work coding.
Communication is at least as important, even as necessary, as "actually coding", for anything beyond a one-man project.
Face-to-face meetings, and whiteboards, and projectors, can help to get a lot done in a short amount of time. While email and IM may be more efficient in some ways -- certainly it's cheaper than actually going to a conference -- I have definitely had the experience where I tried to communicate an idea back and forth with a developer via a board system (may as well have been email), and we just did not understand each other for several months. He flew out, and within one or two days, we were on the same page.
Before I had a real programming job, with a team of more than one, I had the same illusion you did, that this was all about code, and that a Mac is just a waste of money. I had some other assumptions, too -- that Windows was absolutely unworkable, that Javascript is a crappy language (and that HTML/CSS was a mess)...
Then I got into the real world.
HTML/CSS has a few messy implementations, but it's a fine technology in its own right. Javascript is an excellent language. And communication is as important as code -- indeed, I would cite communication skills above coding skills on my resume.
Now, frankly, you are just a troll, and probably not worth all that effort. But I see a bit of myself in you. Maybe you'll learn something today. Maybe someone else will.
If so, notice how that happened without any actual coding. Not counting <quote> tags, there isn't a line of code in this post.
It could also be because OS X is getting large enough to actually provide sufficient numbers for a botnet, but since this hasn't happened before, both Apple and Mac users are cocky.
But understand, no OS can protect you when you do things like pirate software via BitTorrent. OS X could well be the most secure system in the world (though I agree it's not), and still not be able to protect users from themselves.
why go through all that trouble for $75 per year. If I even spent one hour on a project like that my hourly internal charge rate would exceed that figure.
Multiply it by a thousand desktops, and that one hour starts to look reasonable.
you're not involved because you might or might not ever pay Amazon
Actually, I absolutely do pay Amazon, just as I would any other hosting provider which I am using bandwidth on. Here, go read.
has nothing to do with how much / GB you are charged on your connection.
Again, this is for my connection, to my EC2 nodes, which are hosted on Amazon -- or to my S3 storage, which is also hosted by Amazon -- therefore, it is Amazon's connection, and it is directly relevant. Amazon is somehow managing to spend less than that amount for their connection, because they are reselling it to me at that amount.
If not, they are playing a very risky game -- for instance, they would be making assumptions about how many times a given file on S3 is accessed, and a particularly popular one could end up costing them a fair amount of money.
I apologize if I wasn't clear, but I did mention that this price per gig is something I am paying to Amazon, and I mentioned it several posts up.
Things like asset tracking, system/firewall upgrades, application software install and upgrades, disk optimization, etc.
Things that, all told, will take something like 2-3 hours, at most, right?
Wake-on-LAN. Shut down when done. If boot time is really having an impact, send a wake-on-LAN packet a set time before everyone is supposed to arrive.
It's like the problem with unplugging TVs when not in use. You can't use a remote control to turn it on if the remote sensor is not getting power first.
Actually, there are solutions to this problem -- after all, RFID tags don't need to be powered, they're powered by the signal itself. But even so, no one would argue that the TV wastes more power waiting for a remote signal than when simply turned off.
So yes, with wake-on-LAN, you need the switches to either be on themselves, or have some small part that's awake enough to be triggered automatically by somewhere else. Ultimately, you end up with very little power being used beyond the servers, which are always on anyway.
Instead of shutting machines down, just measure when they're on. Anyone whose machine is still on outside business hours, dock their pay by some small amount to cover the wasted power and AC.
Better yet, monitor the entire cube (or office), not just the computer.
The first time some manager gets "slammed" with a few dollars docked from their salary, honestly, the manager is likely well enough paid that they don't care. If the problem is people working overtime, pay them enough overtime to compensate.
Is there an obvious reason this would fail, if actually implemented?
Most users are going to have to click one thing to connect to the VPN, and another thing to connect via RDP, unless RDP got some decent crypto while I wasn't looking.
So, either add a script to the VPN system, or have them click three things -- one to start the VPN, one to send the packet, and one to connect via RDP once the system is up.
Or, yeah, just have a terminal server. Or laptops. Or route actual services (like SMB) through the VPN, and let them run the app on their home machine.
Your users weren't born knowing how to use RDP. This is not the end of the world.
Another solution is to just shut it down once in awhile.
But I would also say that new hardware purchases should be evaluated on how well they hibernate.
Three little words: Wake On LAN.
What would be wrong with hibernating? That uses exactly as much power as shutting down.
Saving money out of our power budget just constricts our budget for the next year.
Does it constrict it beyond what you save?
Otherwise, you pretty much have no reason not to save energy. Of course, it would help to have some incentive to spend the effort to save it...
A relevant quote from TFA:
Myth No. 3: Turning my PC on and off will reduce its performance and useful life. There may have been some truth to this once upon a time, the report notes, but today's new and improved modern hardware can handle it.... some studies indicate it would require on/off cycling every five minutes to harm the hard drive.
I realize you're probably being sarcastic, but I don't feel like underestimating the stupidity of the average person.
No, then it'll just use twice as much power or more, if it's a modern computer capable of clocking itself down when unused.
The only time I'd use a boinc project, or a SETI project, is on a server that I don't directly pay for power usage (or CPU cycles) on, but which also isn't shared in any meaningful way. For instance, I might do it on Amazon EC2, but I wouldn't do it on Slicehost, because other Slicehost users would be pretty directly hurt by it.