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Junk Super Computer Assimilates All
VonGuard writes "The ACCRC is the relatively famous computer recycling non-profit in Berkeley that builds clusters out of old hardware. Make Blog has an article about the Center's plans to build a cluster out of the equipment people bring to recycle at Make Faire later this month. The ACCRC geeks are now able to integrate PII's or better into the cluster, which will be powered by Vegetable Oil and run Parallel Knoppix."
...was that they want money to take your stuff. If you don't mind a drive, Video Only will take monitors (and TV's) for FREE! And displays are the hardest things to get rid of.
As for PC's, there is a charity in Berkeley that takes donated PC's, refurbs. them and gives them to families that can't afford a computer.
The City of Albany (next door to Berkeley) had a day where you could take almost any kind of electronic device and dispose of it for free (no large applicances). They plan on doing this yearly during the summer - the program runs for a few weeks. If you have a friend who lives there (ID required) - ask them to help you take your stuff.
JUST DON'T PAY SOMEONE TO DO IT!!!!!
State-of-the-art computers are probably about 15 times as fast as Pentium II-based computers, and consume maybe twice as much electricity.
Or take Pentium M-based computers, they consume less electricity than Pentium II-based computers and are probably about 10 times as fast.
Just my 2 cents.
Dedicated Linux servers (root access) $45 p.M.
The biggest problem you can run into with older machines is the lack of support for things that make building a cluster easy. The two biggest things I ran into were:
-Wake On LAN support is huge, so that rules out the old machines with the clicky power switch.
-Trying to do anything with less than 32 megs of RAM is a PITA.
On top of that older machines don't always have a NIC, so you're stuck scrounging for parts. Plus who knows what kind of cryptic Acer-Packard Bell-eMachines crap hardware you're going to get via donations (so building a boot image can be a pain), so you're opening youself up to tracking down odd bits of unsupported yet essential hardware drivers (PCI Controllers stand out.)
Clustering gets way easier when you can stick to at least the same general system brand (e.g. Dell) or even better, identical systems.
There are some people that if they don't know, you can't tell 'em.
The ACCRC is a charity based in Berkeley, California. It is not affiliated with with the University of California at Berkeley.
Or 3) is sustainable.
The big problem with coal and oil power is that they use a resource that effectively does not regenerate on a human scale. While there's nothing *really* wrong with digging up oil and burning it (except pollution, which you mentioned), it's kinda dumb to be dependent on it, because it *is* going to run out at some point. It doesn't take a geologist to do the math there.
Bollocks. You're still taking energy out of the system when you burn them as vegetable oil, plus you have to add nutrients back to the soil somehow (preferably not in the form of some nasty chemical fertilizer).
All of these energy transform methods are negative sum (by definition), plants aren't any better than coal or oil in that respect. In fact, they're worse (or were worse, depending on how you feel about peak oil). The coal and oil are already there; we should use them since all we really have to do is burn them to extract energy [1].
The best things anyone can do further the cause of using energy here on Earth are
[1] It's ridiculous how much some of these places are allowed to pollute. Instead of making companies pay credits for pollution, they should be forced to put out zero emmisions. If we had nuclear energy, the loss of efficiency wouldn't be a problem.
[2] When it's done right, nuclear energy is free of emmisions with known effects on the environment. What's going to break when the energy of every wave or every puff of wind is taken out of our weather patterns? Scientists can't predict weather patterns on the scale that we need in order to start taking massive amounts of energy out of the systems. It's criminally foolish to start putting up windmills and expect it to solve all of our problems.
[3] I'm proud to live in the United States of America.