{"id":169,"date":"2005-11-29T09:26:01","date_gmt":"2005-11-29T16:26:01","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/wp\/?p=169"},"modified":"2005-11-29T09:26:01","modified_gmt":"2005-11-29T16:26:01","slug":"kill_all_screen","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/?p=169","title":{"rendered":"Kill all screensavers"},"content":{"rendered":"

Combine an overabundance of computing power with the natural inclination of corporate functionaries to launch useless \u201cinitiatives,\u201d and you\u2019ve got a toxic recipe.<\/p>\n

Case in point: the company screensaver. Yes, I\u2019m serious.<\/p>\n

I was talking yesterday with the CIO of a pharmaceuticals firm. We were discussing grid computing\u2019s potential for supporting the heavy-duty number crunching required in modern drug development. He said that while grids were theoretically attractive as a cheap means of harnessing lots of processing power, he faced a big roadblock: his company’s official screensaver. It turns out that the corporate communications department created an elaborate screensaver, complete with video clips featuring the CEO, to promulgate a \u201ccorporate values\u201d program. Installed on all the company\u2019s PCs, the screensaver sucks up the processing cycles that might otherwise be put to a productive use \u2013 like finding a cure for cancer.<\/p>\n

Isolated problem? Apparently not. A second CIO, overhearing our conversation, said that his company, too, had a screensaver problem. The human resources department had put together a similarly graphics-intensive screensaver that was running on all the company\u2019s PCs. By preventing monitors and processors from going to sleep, it was sucking up a ton of electricity. He also mentioned that a recent problem with sluggish server performance had been traced to geeky screensavers being run in the corporate data center.<\/p>\n

I did some quick research on the electricity issue. A PC with a screensaver going can use well over 100 watts of power, compared with only about 10 watts in sleep mode. An analysis<\/a> by the University of New Hampshire indicates that if an organization has 5,000 PCs that run screensavers 20 hours a week, the annual power consumed by those screensavers \u201caccounts for emissions of 750,000 pounds of carbon dioxide, 5,858 pounds of sulfur oxide, and 1,544 pounds of nitrogen oxide.\u201d Considering that there are something like 600 million PCs in use today \u2013 and that it\u2019s not unusual for people to leave screensavers running all night \u2013 we\u2019re talking some big, ugly numbers.<\/p>\n

So turn off those damn screensavers. The life you save may be your own.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Combine an overabundance of computing power with the natural inclination of corporate functionaries to launch useless \u201cinitiatives,\u201d and you\u2019ve got a toxic recipe. Case in point: the company screensaver. Yes, I\u2019m serious. I was talking yesterday with the CIO of a pharmaceuticals firm. We were discussing grid computing\u2019s potential for supporting the heavy-duty number crunching […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-169","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/169","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=169"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/169\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=169"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=169"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=169"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}