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Where Does Google's Hardware Go to Die?
An anonymous reader asks: "I was talking with a co-worker today about how Google is so big, and how they make such great use of commodity hardware to do their business, and one of the topics that came up is what Google does with its old hardware. Google has been around for many years now, they have more machines than any sane person would own, and they are continually expanding. At some stage they have to push out old equipment, either when it starts entering into its MTBF limits or it's been depreciated down. Searching (using Google of course) wasn't particularly fruitful. Has anyone seen where Google's hardware goes when it dies?"
Well, as soon as you find the billions of dollars it would take to clean all of this old hardware up, package it, transport it to and American port, ship it to an African port, transport it to a new site in Africa, unpack it, set it up, and actually teach people how to use it, you should be able to convince all these horrible American businesses to do so. Don't forget about finding power and offices/data centers to use the computers in--after all, they aren't going to last long in dirty third-world hovels. And you'll also need to find food for all of the people you expect to use the computers, because most of those poor Africans are going to be subsistence farmers or war/AIDS orphans who need to spend their days trying to eat, not learning to use Windows 98 on old Pentium boxes.