I just hoped inkscape would look better by now. very capable, but the ui is too clumsy

but its free!! yay. A lot of effort and earns recognition

I also hope they dont complicate the program with animation an html export

I would be interested in discussing with you in depth your method for cracking this cipher as well as possibly getting a hold of the program you wrote to do so?

In any case, where I work we have about 1800-1900 PCs that are mostly left powered-on at night so that we can perform maintenance activities on them, like applying security patches, performing backups, installing software that requires reboots, etc. Our management has (rightly) asked what we can do to reduce the power consumption associated with leaving the machines on all the time. We’re just starting to scratch the surface of this, but from what I understand, the savings associated with kicking an LCD monitor into power-saving mode versus just switching it off are pretty minimal at best. The real savings come from either hibernating or powering off a PC.

If you’re curious to see what kind of savings you can expect from better PC power management, there’s a very handy little calculator at: http://pmdb.cadmusdev.com/powermanagement/quickCalc.html

We use the LANDesk tool at work to manage our systems. There’s a whole power-management feature in the latest service pack that we’re anxious to get started with, as it allows you to control all kinds of power-management features. For instance, you can do things like tell PCs if they’ve been idle for an hour to hibernate or go into standby. We think there’s a lot of promise in that for energy savings, but there are a lot of little details we need to work out first. As a few examples, we do most of our patching at night, we do backups at night, we install software that needs reboots at night, there are people who use Remote Desktop to connect from home to do work, and there are folks who leave jobs running at night that take hours to complete. We can’t just implement a global “shut everyone down at night” policy without impacting a lot of important activities. Still, it’s environmentally irresponsible to leave all the PCs on 24×7 also. Thus, we have a lot to work out, still.

In any case, getting back to your question, I think that instead of shutting off the screen saver what you might want to look at is adjusting the power settings in Windows remotely. I suspect that that what the LANDesk software is doing is using its own client to kick PCs into hibernation or standby regardless of their current settings. For instance, in XP Pro, under “Control Panels -> Power Options” you have the opportunity to specify when the monitor should be powered down, when the hard disks can be turned off, and when the system itself can go into standby mode. I think I would start there first, as these settings (I think) will override the screensaver anyway. If you look under that control panel’s “advanced” tab, you’ll see that it’s possible to force the machine to request a password when it comes back from standby mode, so that would eliminate any security implications that I can see.

It’s getting close to my bedtime, so I probably won’t post anything about this tonight, but I’ll see what I can learn about scripting something that would remotely adjust power management settings and perhaps even allow you to “nudge” a machine into power-saving mode remotely. That might be kind of fun to sort out…

I really like this artical. I am currently trying to cut down on power costs and i heard that if a screen saver is turned off it will save power.
My question to you is …is there a way to go across an AD domain and remotley turn off the screen saver but keep the password protect option automaticaly?
Thanks in advance
Linus