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The Costs of Making a DRAM Chip
Anonymous Coward writes "Researchers at the United Nations University in Tokyo studied the physical and environmental costs to produce one 32-megabyte DRAM chip. Their conclusion? The UNU team found that to make every one of the millions manufactured each year requires 32 kg of water, 1.6 kg of fossil fuels, 700 grams of elemental gases (mainly nitrogen), and 72 grams of chemicals (hundreds are used, including lethal arsine gas and corrosive hydrogen fluoride)."
Those numbers may be "used to make" a single microchip, but it doesn't say those numbers are what is CONSUMED. That's what's important... how much of that material is consumed in making a single chip.
I suspect that 32kg of water is reused for many, many chips. Same with the other material. Obviously, you'll have SOME material consumed when making a single chip, but I find it difficult to believe all that is CONSUMED when creating a single chip.
More info needs to be presented about the consumption of materials to make a chip that what is "used" to make a chip.
Not to flame, but I felt the following points relevant.
;-)
You do realise that you are talking from the perspective of someone from a developed country, where any school can afford to use a PIII/500?
You do realise that there are countries where all that a public school would have is probably ONE computer which all the students get to SEE and not work on?
A school isn't going to teach word processing on anything less than a 500 Mh PIII.
I think Office 97 did indeed run very happily on an 133 Mhz system? My dear friend, applied computer use does not necessiate the use of the latest bleeding edge graphical OS with the latest bloated word-processing app.
A school teaches applied computer use, not CS, so an account isn't much help.
Don't be too sure. Hell, I learnt Basic and Dbase in my 4th and 5th grade in school. That would again depend on your school.
let alone figure out how to install Linux on an old PC.
Here in India, the use of Linux is being spread in several small schools without enough funds.
What are the benefits? You have 8th grade kids who are familiar with the command line and 10th and 12th grade kids who can whip up Perl scripts. They have an environment to explore. And they are learning a technology that is here to stay.
A school isn't going to use a linux firewall.
Duh! And why not?
Is it because its too complex? If it helps, my high-school project for my final CS paper was an Parallel Operating System.
Is it because its not widespread? If you are talking about a school without resources, hell they'll take just about anything you give them.
In MANY schools that I know of with a single dial-up connection being shared by many computers, guess what OS runs the machine connecting to the Internet?
This still doesn't address the long term problem. What do we do with the old PCs in 5 more years (when all the schools have old PCs)?
Well, don't you know? We would have a BEOWULF CLUSTER of those!!!