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

["Norm" <normanmo@clark.net>]

On Tue, 21 Jul 1998 20:18:42 -0400, Elvey, Matthew wrote:

>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%.


     Yeah the OpenGL modules are real resource pigs.  NT itself handles
resources bad enough (I run OS/2, Linux, and NT on the same box and NT
is by far the worst), add to that a cpu intensive graphics like OpenGL
and there's nothing left.


>Thankfully, no one had ever run it on our server (Compaq 5000R).  One
>day I noticed, while adding add'l processors, that one of the heat sinks
>hadn't been properly installed-there was an air gap between the CPU and
>the heat sink.  It also didn't have the monitoring software installed.
>Woulda been completely fried.

     You're lucky someone didn't try it, especially since many people
tend to ignore something like a screensaver when troubleshooting
performance problems


>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've never noticed any problem under Linux, but it usually depends
on how many bells and whistles you want.  IMO it depends on what the
machine is being used for.  If it's only a single user box running
limited number of background processes you can usually indulge yourself
with pretty graphics, but if it's a server you're better off using a
straight blanker.  Hell, I usually disable any screensavers and turn
the monitor off on our servers, the only time it's on is when I need to
do some admin tasks.

--
 ...Cheers,

 ...Norm

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