Posts by Andrew Fraser

It's all about the incentives...

I think it should be the IT departments responsibility to *investigate* / measure / monitor power consumption, but the bill should come at the feet of the department that is profiting from its (whatever the equipment is) use.

For example, every 6 months you adopt a new company desktop PC standard - instead you offer 2 types: one for performance and one for energy saving (although with todays processors you can make very good compromises). You charge the cost centre more for the 'less green' machines, or you charge them a higher service / support / facilities monthly fee.

e.g. Quad Xeon CAD workstation - £1500, £100 /month

e.g. Core 2 Duo slimline desktop PC - £600, £50 /month

The point is that you must move the incentive onto the end-users (well, their managers, etc.) otherwise if put on the IT department it will not work - you reduce costs so they reduce your budget as others have already commented.

@Tawakalna - it's not difficult to monitor workstations that are left switched on; even if you accept that there's legitimate reasons for doing it so you don't want to automate a shutdown, you _could_ charge the originating cost centre for the extra usage. I'm sure managers that were getting £10-£50 penalties per head per month for PCs being left on would soon be screaming at their staff to switch them off (and probably going round at 5.30pm and forcing them off).

Possibe location?

I found a possible location here :-

38.855209,-119.324570

It certainly looks plane-shaped and it's about the right size (according to Amazon's guide)

Public Disclosure

Whilst I accept that he may not feel it sufficiently rewarding to run-up a phone bill calling each of the embassies, he could have simply emailed them all to say A) You have a security exploit, and B) This is your password : 1234 to prove it.

I think that would have been more helpful than what he has chosen to do.

@ lansalot

"simple solution

By lansalot"

...you say you have it working, but it needs a little polish; care to share?

If you use them for the pipe, and not the services, then fantastic...

I just wanted to re-iterate what others have said, in that if you use PlusNET for their connection only, not the additional services like email, then they really are fantastic value for money. I've been with PlusNET for nearly 7 years now, enjoy a full 8mbps (even at peak times), fantastic packet shaping (so that my gaming on one computer is not affected by activites on another computer) and a clearly stated usage policy - simply schedule your big downloads for the off-peak time and you have no problem - I regularly go over 100GB a month, but <10GB during peak hours. Oh, and all this with a static IP as well.

A few words of caution, however: don't use their email !