Cocktail, or Leave Computer On and Global Warming?

KN
Posted By
Ken_Nielsen
Oct 6, 2006
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629
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14
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< http://news.independent.co.uk/environment/article1813589.ece>

The article says its bad for the environment to leave the computer on all night. Does Cocktail do everything that the Mac OS does in early morning hours? If so, isn’t it redundant and a waste of the environment to have this self-maintenance feature built into the OS?
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R
Ram
Oct 6, 2006
Sure, Cocktail does all that and more.

On the other hand I’m more concerned about the effects of repeatedly powering the computer on.
B
Buko
Oct 6, 2006
I’m more concerned about the effects of repeatedly powering the computer on.

same here. I think you do more damage letting the computer cool down then heat up

Plus here in the Portland area we are generating electricity with water and wind from the Gorge.
AS
Ann_Shelbourne
Oct 7, 2006
I prefer to run Cocktail last thing at night and set it to automatically shut-down the machine when it has done its stuff.
KJ
Kathryn_Jenkins
Oct 7, 2006
I’m more concerned about the effects of repeatedly powering the computer on.

Since 1986, I have shut down my Macs at the end of the day (whenever that happened to be). Somehow, they ALL survive this brutal regimen of being powered on and off. The oldest machine that I have subjected to this torture will be 15 years old in December. So I don’t lose any sleep about shutting them off. If they’d actually DIE from being turned off and on, there’d be fewer of them here, taking up space.
SW
Scott_Weichert
Oct 7, 2006
I turn my TV off when I’m not watching it.
L
Lundberg02
Oct 7, 2006
If a TV is in the forest and no one is watching it, is it on the Fox Channel?
EH
Ed_Hannigan
Oct 7, 2006
Only when the foxes are watching. Otherwise it’s on the Bear channel.
B
Bernie
Oct 7, 2006
If we can’t leave everything on all the time,
the terrorists win.
CC
Conrad_Chavez
Oct 7, 2006
If the overnight maintenance scripts are missed, the Mac should run them at startup. This is because the cron jobs are no longer cron jobs. In 10.4, they were moved to launchd < http://www.macdevcenter.com/pub/a/mac/2005/11/15/terminal5.h tml?page=3> which is supposed to take care of the maintenance scripts better than cron did.

Even if the maintenance scripts don’t run every day, you probably won’t see any ill effects unless you miss a large number of runs, but that takes a long time: If the scripts haven’t run in 10 days, you’ve only missed 9 daily, 1 weekly, and 0 monthly runs. No big deal. And thanks to Tiger, you won’t miss 10 days of maintenance unless you haven’t shut down in all that time.

If you’re concerned about the stress of steep changes to temperature and power level, then you’ve got to disable sleep mode in addition to leaving it on all the time. Avoiding both sleep and shut down isn’t very realistic for a notebook, and notebooks are becoming more popular than desktops. I’ve had the same experience as the others: letting my computers power down hasn’t shortened their life. Every computer I’ve owned still works.

Bottom line: Sleep or shut down whenever you want. Don’t obsess about the scripts, 10.4 runs them at startup if they were missed, they aren’t that important in the first place, and it will take a long time for missed scripts to cause problems. Instead, save some energy and reduce your thermal output. Even areas served by hydro and wind power are importing electricity as power demands grow faster than power generation capacity. There is no need to run a computer at full power for 10 or more unused hours just to run 1 to 3 unimportant jobs for 5 minutes.
L
Lundberg02
Oct 7, 2006
I’m going to get Safari Extender for ten bucks, after I’m convinced that the tabs are actually performing per design. Right now, cmdclick puts tabs in the tab bar, but there are serious problems with keeping them. I hope I mentioned that Ann’s suggestion to empty cache allowed the tabs function to put more than one tab in the bar, but only five are visible and the newest one replaces the last one.
I’m going to use the Firefox browser for the work site to see if tabs actually do reduce the time for each case by a factor of six as I suspect it will. There are about 25 cases per day on average, but there are usually fifty each the first two days of the week. Without tabs the time is 3-4 minutes each. Tabs reduce the number of clicks for this web app significantly and pages come up instantly.

BTW, the terrorists have won. Vista.
L
Lundberg02
Oct 7, 2006
Thanks for the headsup, Conrad.
AS
Ann_Shelbourne
Oct 7, 2006
I hope I mentioned that Ann’s suggestion to empty cache allowed the tabs function to put more than one tab in the bar, but only five are visible and the newest one replaces the last one. >

I think that this has got into the wrong thread and was meant for this one instead? Ann Shelbourne, "10.4.8?" #104, 7 Oct 2006 9:39 am </cgi-bin/webx?14/103>

I have posted some suggestions for you in that thread.
S
SteveV
Oct 8, 2006
LOL Tom, good one.
L
Lundberg02
Oct 9, 2006
I probably posted that in every forum

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