Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Scrounging for Fun and Profit

Posted by michael on from the five-finger-discount dept.

Guinnessy writes: "According to Toni Feder on Physics Today, scrounging used equipment is worthwhile if you can avoid the pitfalls of wasting time and compromising scientific goals. Feder interviews experimenters who have dug up everything from dewars to nuclear reactors."

50 of 145 comments (clear)

  1. Re:look smart by nmos · · Score: 2, Informative

    A few other places worth looking:

    Local universities. Ours sells everything from office furnature to autoclaves(sp) and there's plenty of power cubes and misc cables for free or cheap.

    Self storage companies: Many of the local ones have auctions on a regular basis to sell off the stuff from the storage lockers that wern't paid up. With both a jail and University near by there's lots of interesting unclaimed stuff:)

    The local thrift store is pretty worthless though since wife of another local geek works there and grabs all the good stuff right away.

    --
    Ray

  2. Re:Interesting finds in "old computing" by Pathwalker · · Score: 2

    It's never a mistake to grab an old SGI - Irix is slick, and if you don't want it, you can be sure that someone you know will swap you something for it.

    I tried to grab this one a couple of years ago when MSU was getting rid of it.
    Someone beat me to it, but later that day, I got a call offering it to me, as it wouldn't fit through the door of my friend's apartment!
    I snapped it up, as I had plenty of room, and was working at a place where I had easy access to Irix disksets.

  3. Inheritance... by Moonshadow · · Score: 3, Funny

    When Bruno Bauer inherited Zebra, a retired 2-trillion-watt pulsed-power machine...

    Man, I wish my rich uncle would die and leave me a 2-trillion-watt pulsed-power machine!

    1. Re:Inheritance... by ch-chuck · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Those power figures can be misleading, depending on the pulse duration, power being energy/second. I've plans for a 100,000 Watt Laser that runs off of a 6v lantern battery. Sure, it actually is 100,000 watts, but the pulse duration is only 10 nanoseconds, and the light pulse that comes out is only about 6 feet long, so the amount of energy is, well, what can be supplied by a 6v lantern battery, nothing earth shattering there.

      --
      try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
  4. Free Dewars? by still+cynical · · Score: 2, Funny

    Whoohoo! Count me in!

    Although...you suppose they didn't mean Scotch?

    --
    Ignorance is the root of all evil.
  5. Cyclotron by zpengo · · Score: 4, Interesting
    A friend of mine once came into the possession of an ancient and discarded cyclotron. This was a particle accelerator of the old variety, unreliable and weak by todays standards, but relatively inexpensive. It was a hunk of odd parts about two feet in diameter, and would have looked like a Doctor Who prop to anyone who didn't know better.

    He purchased it for just a few hundred dollars from the lab which had been clearing out their parts warehouse. It took him a few months to get it working again, but a few weeks ago I was present when he performed his first successful "atom smashing" in his upstate New York backyard.

    A glorious experience, to say the least.

    --


    Got Rhinos?
    1. Re:Cyclotron by glitch! · · Score: 5, Interesting

      If Microsoft or the entertainment industry were making laws, reusing old equipment would be illegal...

      After all, this scavenging activity causes lost sales for new equipment and supplies. By their reasoning, recycling old gear is the same thing as theft. Of course, if they stated it that way, everyone would just laugh, so maybe they would try to couch it in terms of public safety or "the children".

      Is this farfetched? Well, yes. But keep an eye on companies that want to lease you a product (from cars to computers) or license it (software, music, movies). The next step is month-to-month rental, with extra points if you become dependent on their service for your livelihood or well-being.

      And it must really be cool to have a home cyclotron :-)

      --
      A dingo ate my sig...
    2. Re:Cyclotron by cybercuzco · · Score: 2

      Atom smashing, bah, why back in the day we smashed atoms the old fashioned way, by hand! Or should I say, the gave us big hammers and a block of uranium and we had at it, and we liked it!

      --

  6. Whuhu, dumpster diving by Unknown+Poltroon · · Score: 2

    http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN%3D155950088 3/stephensdumpsterA/104-0517296-7823930

    --
    All Troll + "offtopic" mods are meta moderated as "Unfair", because you abused the system.
  7. Heh.... by EFGearman · · Score: 4, Funny

    Think about it for a second. A whole new season of junkyard wars... With nukes...

    Eric Gearman

    --
    Atomic batteries to power! Turbines to speed!
    1. Re:Heh.... by tuffy · · Score: 3, Funny
      "On this week's challenge, you'll have just ten hours to build a working fission reactor. Then, tomorrow morning, whoever can generate the most watts of electricity in one hour will move on to the semifinals."

      (Anyone else excited about the new season airing in the US on September 12?)

      --

      Ita erat quando hic adveni.

  8. who woulda thunk by Dambiel · · Score: 3, Funny

    research scientists scrounge around for stuff?

    It makes perfect sense, i know a few researchers who go out every weekend to scrounge for some Dewars.

  9. Go check out your physics dept's unused rooms by Prof_Dagoski · · Score: 3, Informative

    Little tip to junk lovers everywhere: Every physics department has a room or two that they don't use for anything. What happens is that equipment that no one needs gets stashed there and forgotten. I've dug up everything from high precision mirrors to fiber optic by the yard, and bits of machined metal I couldn't identify but thought looked cool. It helps if your department hasn't redecorated and refurbished its digs in a long, long time.

    1. Re:Go check out your physics dept's unused rooms by Chris+Y+Taylor · · Score: 3, Funny

      Back when I was in college I helped the physics dept. clean out their junk room. In exchange, they let me keep whatever I wanted out of the unneeded equipment. I got some really big lenses, some nice frount surface mirrors, and a tube powered oscilloscope that was originally purchased for NASA's Gemini program (and still had the appropriate labels on it). I had trouble explaining to the campus police why I was pushing a "late model oscilloscope" back to my dorm at 3am, but when they found out I was an mech. engineering major they smiled knowingly and left me alone. Among the uses I put it to was helping keep my underheated dorm room warm in the winter.

    2. Re:Go check out your physics dept's unused rooms by JabberWokky · · Score: 2
      Those old rotary phones were probably from the dorms, back when rotary phones were in fashion;

      I agree... and who says they can't be in fashion again? A terribly cool hack that I've always wanted to do is to take an old, original Bell, black and heavy and ugly, rotary phone, and turn it into a cellphone and carry it around. Bonus points if you do like I've been planning and put a socket in the bottom for a stock cell phone, and make the handset and dial work. That way, you just drop your regular cell in before you walk into Dennys, and then start making calls.

      --
      Evan

      --
      "$30 for the One True Ring. $10 each additional ring!" -- JRR "Bob" Tolkien
    3. Re:Go check out your physics dept's unused rooms by cybercuzco · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Its true, I work at a campus lab, and we have a room called the "craporium" everything that we want to get rid of but cant throw away goes there. I once found a declassified report from 1963 on the effects of all out Nuclear war with the russians (1000 megaton bombload) The report estimated that 180 days after war was beginning the US power supply would be back to 75% of prewar levels. The big assumetion the report makes is that power plants themselves would not be targeted, that only city centers and military bases would be targets. oops.

      --

    4. Re:Go check out your physics dept's unused rooms by ErfC · · Score: 2
      "Unused rooms"? Here at TRIUMF we're surrounded by ancient junk. Some of it isn't identifiable. Some of it's still functional, but often the only way to find out is to turn it on. Some of it was built for some one-shot experiment. It's not uncommon to go scrounging around the place looking for something vaguely resembling the part you need, then attaching it to your apparatus with cable ties or duct tape. (And I can honestly say parts of my MSc experiment were held together with duct tape. Other parts with electrical tape -- and I don't mean wires.) Hey, it's typically a whole lot faster and cheaper than waiting for the overworked machine shop to build you something.

      Of course, the really scary thing is the amount of ancient artifacts still in *use*... the control computers for the cyclotron itself apparently just got upgraded to VMS about four years ago...

      --

      -Erf C.
      Cthulu always calls collect...

    5. Re:Go check out your physics dept's unused rooms by wass · · Score: 2
      A terribly cool hack that I've always wanted to do is to take an old, original Bell, black and heavy and ugly, rotary phone, and turn it into a cellphone and carry it around.

      Well, you could get your amateur radio operator's license, build your own radio with DTMF capabilities. Then join a local repeater club that maintains an operable phone-patch.

      HAM's used to be hot-sh*t back in the day, before cell phones, when they could call people from nearly anywhere with their radios.

      Also cool is using HF to communicate up to thousands of miles, and sometimes you can find someone willing to phone-patch you (a collect call, of course) so you can keep-in-touch even if you're in the middle of nowhere. My uncle used to do this from his sailboat when he was going between Hawaii and San Diego. He'd be able to contact some guy in California and get him to patch the transmission and call us collect to update us on his status. Pretty cool stuff.

      --

      make world, not war

    6. Re:Go check out your physics dept's unused rooms by wass · · Score: 3, Interesting
      The phyiscs department building is brand new (it's this crazy fortess), but nonetheless I get the feeling there are tens of thousands of strange artifacts waiting to be discovered in the rooms in the basement.

      Yeah, that's pretty much true here in Bloomberg. one of the Condensed-Matter physicists retired recently, and a bunch of his stuff is still lying around. We're (C.L.Chien's group) contemplating assimilating his old MBE for our group, but there's alot of other unused stuff. Actually, one guy from our group is salvaging a good LHe dewar from an old Mossbauer Spectroscopy setup, which should save us some cash.

      There's also some crazy old electronics around the building. In the undergrad lounge/lab, there's one of the oldest oscilloscopes I've ever seen (and I've seen my share of REALLY old scopes). It's the size of a large desk, takes banana-plug-like inputs (not coax). I don't even think it could generate the horizontal sawtooth waveform, and that you had to do that externally. This thing was definitely ANCIENT, maybe one of the first commercially-produced CRT screens.

      My old school (U.Penn) had alot of old/random devices around, especially in some obscure storage closets that appeared like they hadn't been disturbed in decades. Although it gets kind of scary when you're exploring a closet and you see barrels filled with random chemicals you've never heard of.

      --

      make world, not war

    7. Re:Go check out your physics dept's unused rooms by FFFish · · Score: 2

      Just take the phone and *pretend* to be talking to someone. No one will ever know the difference.

      --

      --
      Don't like it? Respond with words, not karma.
  10. We've seen this by Moonshadow · · Score: 2

    Geeks can build some cool stuff with scavanged parts, like a nuclear reactor.

  11. God Yes! by rgmoore · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Scrounging and scavenging equipment is a vital skill for all experimental scientists. It's usually more along the lines of finding the unused goodies that somebody has stashed in the back of their lab than finding the expensive stuff described in the article, but everyone without military-class bugets learns to do it. (Actually, I'll bet that even the best funded darlings do a lot of scrounging, too) Figuring out how to use the components is sometimes a bit of a trick, but there are few things as fun as finding a pile of junk and figuring out how how those components are going to help your next project.

    --

    There's no point in questioning authority if you aren't going to listen to the answers.

  12. In my physics student days... by OmniGeek · · Score: 2, Interesting

    at the University of Maine at Portland, my favorite physics professor (and scrounging mentor), Charles Armentrout, equipped most of the physics labs from scrounge when UMP's new science building went way over-budget on a big concrete estimating error. They were able to finish it (less 2 floors that were dropped from the design), but couldn't furnish it much. Charlie's scrounging skills meant the Physics labs were fully equipped, while the chemistry labs were just so much empty space. Scrounging just plain rules.

    --

    "My strength is as the strength of ten men, for I am wired to the eyeballs on espresso."
  13. Television by cnkeller · · Score: 3, Funny

    Anyone else see potential for Laboratory Wars?

    --

    there are no stupid questions, but there are a lot of inquisitive idiots

  14. Here's a US govt surplus auction site by ch-chuck · · Score: 2

    right here. Enjoy.

    --
    try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
  15. look smart by xeno · · Score: 5, Interesting


    "If you get a 100-kV power supply built in 1950, chances are you'll be happy. There is continual improvement, but no quantum leaps. Computers are the most useless--they are right up there with disposable diapers in landfill."

    Oh, how true that is. And it applies on a personal level. I have a basement full of computer crap to prove it. I thought "Oh, I'll put them together and make some usable systems for a local charity." BZZZTT! The local charities won't even take anything less than a P5 or pm601 system. They say 486's and 040's cost more to test than they can sell them for. Frankly, it's hard to find a place to dispose of them.

    But peripherals, cable and infrastructure stuff? That's a different matter. I picked up three fiber transceivers from Value Village a month ago for $5ea. Ditto ($7) for a HP Deskjet 1600 (the big 9ppm postcript color inkjet w/jetdirect). IMHO, local thrift stores are great for this sort of stuff IF you don't get sucked into buying more stuff to fix the great deal you got.

    Looking for little stuff like power adapters, modems, printers, etc? Head for the local thrift store. Looking for wiring or shielding? Check out industrial supply places (like Pacific Iron & Metal in Seattle, where you can get castoff spools from the local telcos). Looking for bigger infrastructure bits? You can get rackmount cases, cable, sensors, and all manner of interesting bits directly from telco salvage units, places like re-pc, or if you're nearby, places like Boeing Surplus

    A little time spent doing some smart looking can save a lot of cash. Otoh, A lot of time looking can be a huge waste. You just gotta know when to stop and pay retail.

    Jon

    --
    I think not...(*poof*)
    1. Re:look smart by RESPAWN · · Score: 2

      Pfft! I would love to have a few old 486s around my place. I've still got some old software around here that doesn't like to run on some of my newer equipment.

      --

      If Murphy's Law can go wrong, it will.

  16. Scrounge -- New Tangent by behindthewall · · Score: 2, Insightful
    An important thing about scrounge is that it can push someone off into a direction they might not otherwise have taken, or even considered.

    How often has a chance encounter or off-topic exploration resulted in a true find. That dohickey may lead you to something great.

  17. Shades of Austin Powers by cnkeller · · Score: 2
    As part of the NTF, the Petawatt will be open to the wider user community. Bauer and his colleagues plan to use it for fusion energy, plasma, atomic physics, environmental, and materials science studies, as well as in research for stockpile stewardship--DOE's experimental and computational program for safeguarding US nuclear capability.

    Just once, I'd like for someone to have a sense of humor and say, "our plan is use this L-A-S-E-R to destroy cities unless you pay us one hundred billion dollars..."

    --

    there are no stupid questions, but there are a lot of inquisitive idiots

  18. (Translation) by ackthpt · · Score: 2
    A bigger hammer, even if it's used, is still a bigger hammer and OK.

    While I was a hobbyist, many moons ago, I used a lot of scrounged eq (some of it looked a heck of a lot better than they stuff they had in the college physics labs, to boot!) and did pretty well. As a result, however, I have a tendency to scrounge before I'll actually fork over the really big zorkmids for new stuff. (Hmm, could that be a problem?)

    Revealed: Jar Jar after having his ears bobbed!

    --

    A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
  19. store by British · · Score: 2

    There's a store based off this, it's called AXMAN SURPLUS.

    Need a bunch of Teddy Ruxpin heads?(just the guts) Go to Axman.

  20. Scrounging Junk - Eimac Radio Transmitter Tubes? by BigBlockMopar · · Score: 2

    Speaking of neat junk I've scrounged, anyone want three Eimac 450TH transmitting tubes? 450 watts RMS in class A mode (lots more in class C), thoriated filament directly heated. Filaments are good, no shorts with an ohmmeter, were replaced from a big Toronto radio station as part of a normal maintenance cycle.

    Want 'em? Visit my site!

    --
    Fire and Meat. Yummy.
  21. where's a good friend when you need one by nanojath · · Score: 2
    From the article...

    "Bauer landed both Zebra and the Petawatt laser through personal contacts"

    DAMN I know the wrong kind of people...

    --

    It Is the Nature of Information to Transgress Artificial Boundaries

  22. Sometimes I think... by cr0sh · · Score: 4, Interesting

    That if you don't scrounge, then, well... you are just a wannabe geek.

    Here in Phoenix, AZ - I scrounge on everything (hell, just yesterday I managed to obtain a couple of old PCs from my work - nothing of great interest in them, but the cases are nice - they were headed for the trash, from what I understand). I have several sources - both in the "pay-as-little-as-you-can" to "free-for-the-taking":

    1. My work (free old junk)
    2. Apache Reclamation and Electronics (cheap small and LARGE junk)
    3. Electronic Materials and Computers (E^3) also known as Elitech (sometimes get ripped off here)
    4. Dave's Computers (still checking this place out - owned by a guy who got shafted at E^3)
    5. Some place on 9th Ave and Madison (Westech or something - want to check this place out soon)
    6. Global Recycling (still need to check this place out - they are only B2B, so need EIN or something)
    7. Equipment Exchange (behind BOB on Grant or Lincoln - great place for strange and big manufacturing stuff)
    8. There is also a metals company off of (Washington?) across from Greyhound Park that is cool

    For everything else - late night Friday/Saturday runs through dumpsters! Behind Nortel, Honeywell, many business/industrial office parks - great fun. Just bring a flashlight, some gloves, and throw a few boxes in the truck (to tell security guards you are moving and looking for boxes - most of the time they will leave you alone, or at worst, ask you politely to leave - don't hassle 'em, don't stick around - just apologize, thank them, and LEAVE).

    I remember one time near Metro Center finding a stash of old computer equipment, another time behind a Honeywell finding some old minicomputers and terminals, and a big winchester drive (all the stuff was too big to even THINK about lifting). One time over at a Nortel my friends and I found some kind of telephone equipment rack - we grabbed that real quick. Another time we found a bunch of Narcotics Monthly magazines (funny thing, this was in a business park - not sure WHY these were there, unless some PI had an office there).

    For the rest, there is always online retailers of used/surplus junk (I have a ton of links, too many to list here). Of course, the final place to check is Ebay.

    Great fun buying and finding used stuff...

    --
    Reason is the Path to God - Anon
    1. Re:Sometimes I think... by cr0sh · · Score: 2

      No prob.

      I definitely recommend going to ARE - just wear old clothes (and depending on what you are doing and when, heavy boots, jeans and gloves). Be prepared for a VERY dirty place (as in, you go in, and the dirt gravitates toward you - I mean your hands get dirty just by being there) - but it is worth it to find the funkier stuff (I recently found this small LCD panel and control buttons - didn't know if it was dot-matrix addressable, etc - started looking into the chip, a bit of documentation from a dude in Germany (no kidding!), and had it all traced out - turned out to be a multi segment display for a piece of med equipment - a little cleaning, maybe it will be useful). Sometimes they get REALLY cool stuff in (one time, an industrial robot arm, in crate, no controller - for $200.00 - you just had to figure out how to haul it away!). Also, be careful as you look - I have seen chemicals and biostuff (well, it was marked biohazard, and it had little vials of liquid in a small case - scary) laying out/around - but sometimes you can get good deals on the stuff (currently they are selling big tubes of heat sink grease for a buck or two, and they used to have a good stash of, get this, acetone markers - yeah, that's right - magic markers filled, not with ink, but with acetone! Great for removing inks - like on address labels - paint, or cleaning small areas on a circuit board. I am sure you could use them for other nefarious things, but you would have to be more of a psycho than a geek to go that far with em).

      Equipment Exchange is cool just to browse around - they sell to the public, but most of the stuff they have is either too large to haul off (like conveyor baking ovens for wafer manufacturing), or most people wouldn't have a real use for it (they had an old Unimate industrial robot there last time I visited - big as a car). But it is fun to explore. It is situated inside a very old Phoenix warehouse, had two floors - ground level (with a 20 foot, at least, ceiling) and a basement level. The basement has all the small stuff (I found a cache of old Apple IIe software floppies there once - probably still there - included the staples, plus what looked like a complete version of Eamon). It is kinda spookie, since they don't get many walkins - just you, and the stuff. You go down into the basement, and all the windows are painted over - and it can be dark in areas. I went once near closing time - and I had to make sure to leave the basement before they closed, cause no doubt they would've locked and left without knowing I was down there.

      Global Recycling sounds promising to me, and it is just down the way from my house (it is located off of Deer Valley Rd, west off of Cave Creek Rd). It's drawback is it is B2B only, so you need an EIN or business license (maybe your employer will let you use theirs if you are buying only), but they also sell part by part, or any quantity. However, they are open only 7am to 4pm, M-F - which makes it tough for me to check them out (I am going to have to take a vacation day sometime just to do this).

      --
      Reason is the Path to God - Anon
    2. Re:Sometimes I think... by cr0sh · · Score: 3, Informative

      Oh yeah, one more - but they mostly are through a website and catalog ads (in Nuts and Volts, mostly), but they are based in Scottsdale:

      Electronic Goldmine

      --
      Reason is the Path to God - Anon
  23. Think what *I* could do with that thing... by mblase · · Score: 3, Funny
    As part of the NTF, the Petawatt will be open to the wider user community. Bauer and his colleagues plan to use it for fusion energy, plasma, atomic physics, environmental, and materials science studies, as well as in research for stockpile stewardship--

    --and nobody's yet proposed taking charge of it for the sole purpose of world domination? What's wrong with these geeks??

    The things I would do with a petawatt laser combined with, say, a small collection of orbiting satellites simply boggle the mind....

  24. Warning about scrounging by lavaforge · · Score: 4, Informative
    Be careful what you scrounge, it can be dangerous sometimes.

    When I was in high school me and a buddy of mine helped the chemistry department head "inventory" the stock during a big move. We got everything under the sun. Unfortunately, we found out that some of the containers were mislabelled, and nearly blew our heads off opening a can of ether.

    Just a warning that scrounging isn't risk-free.

    1. Re:Warning about scrounging by Johnny5000 · · Score: 4, Funny

      Before my computer programming days I worked in a biology lab.

      Not only did we find a bunch of mystery chemicals with no labels, but we found herring sperm.

      Unfortunately it was expired. Oh, the things I could have done with the herring sperm.

      That's got to be quite a job, working in the herring sperm factory.

      *wakes up in the morning*
      "Dammit, If I have to whack off one more herring, I'm going to die. I'll just die."

      "oh lord, when will you dry up this river of herring sperm I see before me?"

      -J5K

      --
      The libertarian solution to the failures of capitalism is to apply more capitalism til the failures are fixed.
  25. holy shiznuts! by Dr.+Awktagon · · Score: 2

    PETAWATT laser?? God damn! Do you hear me? God damn!

  26. Re:Computers are the most useless by KC7GR · · Score: 2, Interesting

    I cannot agree entirely with this statement. I would say that, more accurately, it depends heavily on the TYPE of computer in question.

    Example: The early-90's vintage Sun "Lunchboxes" (the SPARC IPC, IPX, Classic, and LX) make wonderful small web or mail servers. I should know; My 'net presence depends on them. Electrical-wise, you can easily run a pair of them on what a single PC pulls. Reliability-wise, they're light-years ahead of most PCs outside the big server-class systems.

    Processing power? Heck, does it really matter? They get the job done, and they get it done pretty darn quick. Remember that SPARC architecture is radically different from any PC, and NetBSD runs pretty darned efficient no matter what platform it's on.

    Best of all, I acquired a whole stack of them for less than $100.00. Beat THAT with a stick!

    The same holds true of some of the later MicroVAX systems. Right now, I'm working on cleaning up a VAX 4000/200 minitower, getting it ready for NetBSD, and to be an NIS master and boot server for my domain. Its power drain at full load (which I won't ever reach) is about the same as a mid-sized PC.

    In short: Yes, the vast majority of retired PCs are not very versatile. Then again, IBM never designed the PC to be a long-lifer. The success of the entire PC line surprised the crap out of IBM as much as it did many in the industry.

    HOWEVER -- Don't expect minicomputers, workstations, or other such equipment, ESPECIALLY in the non-PC realm, to follow the same pattern.

    --

    Bruce Lane, KC7GR,

    Blue Feather Technologies

  27. Unit II, yes nuclear, kaput :_( by twitter · · Score: 2
    Yep, the whole boiling water reactor all it's supporting equipment whent to the waste heap when the second unit of this power plant was not built. Thanks, Jimmy Carter (stupid pig, not nuclear engineer) for making the cost of building it three or four times greater than the cost of building unit I and only marginally safer! Anyone who wanted it was welcome to pay freight to cart it off. No one wanted it, and it was eventually hacked into pieces. Other large components such, as feed water pumps, suffered the same fate.

    Unit I had longes first run of it's type and has been 1GW onto the grid for 15 years. Unit II scrap and large multi million dollar hole.

    just my 2 cents per kilo watt hour.

    --

    Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.

  28. Supercomputer made of old diapers by Chris+Y+Taylor · · Score: 2, Redundant

    "Computers are the most useless--they are right up there with disposable diapers in landfill."

    One of the scientists in the article claims (and a lot of commenters seem to agree) that old computers are as useless as disposable diapers. The researchers at Oak Ridge, TN would probably not agree. There was an article in the latest issue of Scientific American describing the Stone SouperComputer that was built at Oak Ridge National Labs because they needed a supercomputer to model environmental regions, but they couldn't afford one. They cobbled together a Beowulf cluster out of a bunch of obsolete surplus PCs that the lab had laying around.

    The article can be found online at: www.sciam.com/2001/0801issue/0801hargrove.html

    The photos that accompany the article are great.

    Not bad for a bunch of "disposable diapers."

  29. Trashing? by Grendel+Drago · · Score: 2

    How come everyone calls it `scrounging' or sometimes `dumpster diving'?

    It was always `trashing' up at UConn...

    -grendel drago

    --
    Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
    1. Re:Trashing? by Chris+Y+Taylor · · Score: 2, Informative

      Dumpster diving (or whatever you call it) is a subset of scrounging. Scrounging covers a wide range of activities for aquiring items from non-standard sources including getting it from the trash, cannibalizing old equipment, calling in favors from old friends, "horse trading", etc. Great scroungers seem to be able to get unique or rare items from nowhere; like locating a Chevy small-block engine in the middle of the Siberian tundra. For a great example of scrounging, check out James Garner's character in The Great Escape.

      "Don't ask." -The best response when asked how you scrounged a particularly difficult to find part.

  30. Toni Feder in Physics Today by apsmith · · Score: 2

    I was at grad school with Toni Feder a dozen years ago, and since she got hired at Physics Today I've always taken note of her articles; we talk on the phone once in a while too. She's always finding something interesting and slightly controversial in what you would think were boring physics or astronomy subjects - good stuff!

    --

    Energy: time to change the picture.

  31. Interesting finds in "old computing" by No+Such+Agency · · Score: 2

    I saw an interesting brown-purple box sitting in the hallway at Comp Services here at U. of Guelph today. Wanted to take it. Long story short, it was a Silicon Graphics Personal Iris, weighing in at about 50 lb, and unable to run any software or OS I would have any idea how to use (I'm a Windoze luser). I liked the case though, I had visions of gutting it and sticking my old P233 in it :-)

    --
    Freedom: "I won't!"
    1. Re:Interesting finds in "old computing" by Gordonjcp · · Score: 2

      You should grab it, and learn how to use it... It could be the start of a whole run of goodie grabbing.
      In fact, the *whole point* of skip diving and gear scrounging is to get something cool that you're not quite sure what it is...

  32. heh... by rebelcool · · Score: 2

    you must be pretty young if you think a 486 and p133 are old

    --

    -

  33. Re:Computers are the most useless by Gordonjcp · · Score: 2

    That is such an arrogant position to take! What may seem cheap to you may not seem cheap to someone else.
    It annoys me when people go and spend a fortune on upgrading a computer to the latest spec, then simply use it to play Solitaire and check email. Why do you need a 1GHz Athlon to play cards?