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Reduce, Reuse, Recycle
An Anonymous Coward writes "Out in Oakland, CA a group is taking donated PC's and breathing new life into them with Linux. They turn around and donate the computers to schools, build POVRAY render farms (with MOSIX) and generally promote Linux."
Linux cluster is 30 Athlon 850MHz PCs and up to 350 recently refurbished PCs that are Pentium 166 or better
I sure hope the 850 MHz Athlons weren't donated by anyone....until this week my main home machine has been an PII 300. If the Athlons were rescued from landfill that makes me feel _really_ inadequate.
before I had to go back to italy to serve the army. It was an excellent opportunity to learn, I was taking care with other people of the beowulf cluster - and the rendering speed was impressing, around 12 seconds to render the 'famous' pvm x-vase when the cluster was around 60 nodes.
:)
the interesting part was that there were little optimization on the network and on the linux - it was a standard redhat 6.2 kernel, and the computers were just put on a shelf, connected, booted with a floppy that got the image from the network and self-installed the machine, rebooted, and you had a node ready for rendering.
on the other hand, the people working there were the most easy-going and honest I've seen so far - there were no hypocricy going on, and basically there was a place for anyone in it - still without too much trouble.
just wanted to share that with you guys, in case you wondered if such a non profit company was really working - it is. definitively.
anyone wanting to start something like that in norther italy?
cheers
-- There are two kind of sysadmins: Paranoids and Losers. (adapted from D. Bach)
2: "Naked" - So? You need an OS.. it's your business what you do with the hardware you purchased.
3: "exposes them to the possibility of unwittingly purchasing pirated software": Which has more pirates... those for linux or windows?
4: Technical troubles: I'm not even going to comment, after all this is MICROSOFT saying this.
5: Upgrade problems *cough* *splutter*
6: Viruses. I really can't believe microsoft, #1 willing (outlook?) distributer of viruses is saying this
7:
8: I'll translate the last bit: Tell them to buy windows or we'll stop supplying you.
Three cheers to this group and their efforts to promote Linux. I hope they convert many people to the Power that is Linux. This article has impressed me so much that I'm going to donate towards this scheme: It's a hell of a lot better than paying the annual M$ tax. Cheer's to an organisation that is 100% Microsoft Free
Move faster
You hook up 10 486dx2's to make a povray render farm. It consumes 10 times as much power to do the same job as a modern intel chip. Not only did you waste your time, energy, and networking hardware; you just contributed to the fact that you local nuclear or coal power plant has to chug that extra electricity,
just to help you "reduce, reuse, and recycle".
Does that make any sense?
Some time ago I thought about taking older computers from the University and turning them into machines for the unfortunate in my town. The only problem I had was that Windows 95/98 costs money and normal people might not be able to use a Linux box. However, with the features X has nowadays and the idea of maybe giving them to schools instead of (or in addition to) just people/families in the city, I think it could work. Now if I could just get startup money... HAH!
(this is the correct story for this reply, btw)
2+2=5 for extremely large values of 2
They're called Computer Angels
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