Save the planet… or tick off those that want to

My buddy Mike Dopp sent me a link to something that’s been done many, many, many times before… but I figured I’d give it a shot.

The concept is simple: You’ve got a computer that’s spinning a disk drive (or two); powering a CPU, chipset, GPU, and RAM; and lighting up a monitor with flying toasters… even when you’re at lunch, even when you’re off-the clock.

Modern OSes have had “power saving” tools built-in, but not all hardware supported “resuming” from “sleep” or “hibernation” and have been “less than friendly” to configure.

Windows Vista attempted to change that by setting power saving as enabled by default, but configuring it is even less friendly than before.

Various companies (usually with saving money, or “saving the planet” in mind) have come up with front-end interfaces to these power saving options to make it easier for end-users use their OS’s power saving options.

 Edison is one of these that looks really cool… but fails miserably.

Edison is a free desktop application that is written by Verdiem to try and get corporations to buy their power management “stuff” (software, services, hardware, I’m really not sure). You download and install their app, then you get the screen to the right. “Simply click here and you’ll be sent and activation email. Then, just open the email, click ‘I’m Activated,’ and you can start using the application.” Basically, clicking the hyperlink opens a web browser at their site, passing a unique token to them in the process. You supply your email address (probably so they can spam you send you marketing literature about their products later) and you’re supposedly sent an activation link or something, and ta-da, you’re running.

I say supposedly because I can’t get past the “click here” process; their site never responds.

What does this tell me? Verdiem makes a nice looking UI, but their servers are unreliable. Since they’ve been down for a week or so, it also tells me that they don’t monitor their stuff much.

Of course, I could be wrong. This might not be a problem with their servers, it could be something on my corporate firewall that’s blocking traffic. In that case, Verdiem’s advertising tool isn’t doing a very good job wooing corporate customers.

Naturally, I’m hoping that someone on the Edison team at Verdiem sees this post and addresses the issue. If you see a follow-up to this post, that means they have… if not, well… you decide.