RE: Microsoft as regulator [Was Re: Government utility style regu lation]

["Eric M. Bennett" <ericb@pobox.com>]

>My Compaq (Deskpro 4000) PC used to overheat because of it.  Every few
>mornings, I'd come in and see an error message.  The CPU temperature
>alarm would go off because the indoor "high of the day" would be at 6AM,
>just before the building a/c kicked in.  The OpenGL screensaver had been
>keeping CPU usage at a steady 100%.

I doubt that it matters whether the CPU is doing anything useful or not.
NT is not exactly known for its power saving features (hence the hysterical
laughter you get from knowledgeable people if you suggest using NT on a
laptop), so the CPU probably would have been going full-tilt even with the
screensaver off.

>The Unix screensavers I've seen all have sensible default behaviour,
>though you can force them to eat up CPU (useful for stress testing...).
>I recall a version of xlock that even had an option to set the niceness
>level for you.

I presume the administrator could change the priority level of the
screensaver on NT?  Or has Microsoft managed to make that impossible for
its default screen saver (kind of like how it auto-detects and removes
certain types of user modifications of the registry)?



--
Eric Bennett (http://www.pobox.com/~ericb/), Cornell Biochemistry Department

Windows 98 is not the first product Microsoft has botched, nor will it be
the last.  But it is the last straw. . . . Users who do install it do so at
their own risk, and IS departments are not offering support.
- Scot Petersen, PC Week Magazine