I had the same thought when I read this. I used to turn off my computer every night, until I switched from Windows (98) to Linux. In grad school, my roommate and I had uptime contests with our Linux boxes, which he won with something like 6 months of uptime. The most common causes of lost uptime were electrical power outages and moving apartments.

Now, like you, I mainly run OS X, but it's on a laptop, which wreaks havoc with my uptime. Ah, well. I guess you can't have it all.

I'm always amazed by this. Why would you keep your computer running if you're not using it? just for comparing lengths?

Laptop:

10:56 up 83 days, 1:50, 7 users, load averages: 1.05 1.32 1.12

I don't reboot - but I do close the lid to let it sleep. My main reason for not rebooting is I generally have 100 things open at any time and that 'state' is important.

As memory and bulk storage become faster and faster and gain more and more capacity I think that the idea of losing application state just because your PC shut off will become a horror story to tell our children. Eventually it will become one large memory space backed by a variety of local and network stores.

I do the same thing, but even with sleep sometimes my machine gets hosed (the technical term) and requires a reboot. That never happened with my old Linux box.

If you're running a server on it, or just want it ready to use whenever you need? There's always sleep/power saving modes anyway.

I'd turn it around: Why would you turn your computer off if you don't have to? The power consumption is roughly $0/year, and by keeping it on you don't have to resurrect your editors, terminal windows, and browsers every morning.

I let my computers sleep. But that still counts as uptime ;)

I generate a lot of torrent traffic on my machine. Im seeding something like 50-60 torrents.

-sh-3.00$ uptime 08:36:21 up 254 days, 10:28, 1 user, load average: 0.00, 0.00, 0.00