re monitors should they be kept on hours a day stubbs hawk cs ukans edu jerry stubbs writes the electricy consumption will go down if you turn them off overnight along with heat i wonder how hard it would be i e what it would add to the cost to design desktop machines with a power saver feature built in which would reduce power consumption automatically if the machine is idle for more than some amount of time this is pretty standard in portable machines and the same kinds of tricks could be played spinning down disks turning off screens reducing clock speed etc the advantage of this over just turning the thing off would be you don t have to remember to do anything and the machine is still available over the network the tricky part might be in defining what constitutes inactivity certainly you don t want to wake up from sleep mode just because somebody pinged you but you do want to wake up at least the cpu if somebody logs in via a telnet connection i wouldn t worry too much about wasting electricity in the winter months that energy is just getting turned into heat it may not be as efficient a way to heat a building as the central heating plant but it s not too bad in the summer though it s a disaster not only are you wasting that power but you re probably also running the air conditioning to get rid of the waste heat roy smith roy nyu edu hippocrates project department of microbiology coles nyu school of medicine first avenue new york ny this never happened to bart simpson
