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Making the screen all white.... not exactly saving the screen, are we? :)
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Thats what makes it a WTF.
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What was that unix program... x-snow? I loved that program in college. The snow would fall and accumulate on the title bar of each window. Moving a window made that pile of snow disappear. It even had varying amounts of wind and Santa flew by every few minutes.
When I graduated, my job was working in Windows NT4. Unfortunately, the idea doesn't work very well in windows because most programs are MDI and need to be run maximized. I suppose the snow could accumulate on horizontal sliders and status bars.... But one alt-tab would still wipe out all the snow. |
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Reminds me of the time when I was doing some programming for this company where I was also the only tech support. The server shared an office with one of the execs, and I kept being called in to check the server because it had "stopped working". Well, the problem was that the screen saver was set to "Blank Screen".
I got tired of trying to explain the concept of "Screen Saver" so wrote my own that displayed (in big bold green letters) "SERVER STATUS: OK" and told the exec that I had written a new monitoring system that would alert her if the server stopped working and that she should call me ASAP if the screen display ever changed! |
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Actually a white screen is a fine screen saver. A screen saver is actually used to prevent burn-in, the noticeable images that end up permanently burned onto the screen. Any solid color, or an image that never remains the same is a perfectly acceptable screen saver. Not that it matters, nobody *needs* a screen saver anymore for computer screens. People with plasma screen tv's and crt-projection tv's do though. A white screen is what is used to try and reduce the effect of burn in once it occurs.
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Reminds me of the ATI screensavers I downloaded to show of my new whizzy graphics card. These are great except ATI 9800 is displayed constantly in the bottom right - so I had to delete them !
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You missed snow?????? that is the WTF.
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Good story, thanks for sharing.
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The WTF is the techie who made the change without informing his helpless users, shame on you ;)
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A white screen saver is a VERY bad idea, as CRTs use more power when thy display bright pics than all black pics.
Not sure if TFTs show the same behaviour. |
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lcd displays actually are white "by default" (looking through the glass into the backlight) and when power is applied to cells they turn opaque.
but then, the power usage to drive the cells is negegible - turning off the backlight is what matters. |
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I did something similar. I got one of the first
compaq machines. It had a screen saver called 'peaceful night' or something similar. I put it on but when it came up I just got a black screen. I had work to do so I forgot about it. I went to lunch. When I got back I was in trouble. They'd spent the hour trying to find the cricket that had gotten loose in the building... ;) |
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:)
In the '90s, at one of my temp jobs, I filled in for a woman on vacation. Apples at the time had these neat moving icons you could use as desktop shortcuts. (Rockets launching, etc.) After the assignment was over, I got a call from my agency because the woman who came back was ticked off. Fortunately, I was able to explain to her over the phone how to reset it. |
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