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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."

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  1. I used to work for them by kipple · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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)