Re: passworded screen savers with timeouts, why?

["Geoffrey S. Nathan" <geoffnathan () WAYNE EDU>]

Jim Dillon wrote:
> Most of what has been said covers your answer, but here's one extra
> thought.
>
>
> The phosphor burn and other reasons don't apply much anymore on modern
> power managing hardware, and the ability to lock, so needed in Win95, is
> intrinsic in the only MS supported systems left.
Something that hasn't been mentioned, except in passing, is the physical
location of the machine.  My office machine is in my office, which has a
door in a corridor of a secure building.  Most faculty have private
offices, which, we hope, they lock when they leave (we have enough
problems with random thefts that most do.  But many clerks and
secretaries (who often have much more sensitive material onscreen than
faculty) have machines 'out in the open', so it's probably much more
important for them to have automatic screen locking.
> Of course this answer might have to be modified to account for the
> capabilities of other OSs, I'm mostly talking to a Wincentric crowd.
>
> Finally, and trivially, an open screen blanker policy can provide some
> sense of customization and personal expression that is valuable for
> employee morale.  A session lock is a lot less glamorous than a 20
> minute slide-show of the kids, a gee-whiz geometric sequence, or
> favorite philosophical quote of the day.  Anyone who remembers the old
> green or orange colored monochrome text only terminals back in the 80's
> knows it is much nicer to have a season based piece of art on the
> desktop and some sort of interesting activity going on the screen than
> having a dull blinking cursor or plaintext system property message
> staring at you all day.
It's certainly true that burn-in is no longer a problem, but I really
miss the flying toasters.  Especially when they could be combined with
an undersea landscape.  Alas, even legal versions of After Dark don't
run on XP.

Geoff