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What To Do With Old USB Keys, Low-Capacity Hard Drives?
MessedRocker writes "I have at least a few USB flash drives around that I haven't needed since I got my 16GB flash drive, a 40GB external hard drive which I haven't needed since I upgraded to 500GB, and a couple of SATA hard drives I have pulled out of laptops which are either as large or smaller than the one I have in my laptop now. Furthermore, I don't really know anyone who needs any hard drives or flash drives. What should I do with my small, obsolete storage devices?"
Scrub the data then donate it to charity or a school. If they can't use it they can give it away to a client or resell it.
I'm sure some /.ers have some 5 or 10MB drives in their closets.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
FreeGeek.
Advice: on VPS providers
find a local charity to donate them, or if nothing else then just freecycle it, somebody will take you up on it!
Ignotium per Ignotius!
Do what I did to my old printer that kept telling me to "PC load letter".
for the last time people, I am "frodo from middle eaRTH", not "middle eaST".
With the higher energy consumptions of older drives it's just more economical to recycle.
Older flash drives will be unreliable soon.
So I suggest the obvious: just recycle or find someone locally, who wants the stuff (poor student etc...) But do not send to Africa because I feel it's just shifting the problem and the cost of shipping is not worth it for whoever does it.
Load them up with porn and give them to random people anonymously. They will thank you for it!
Monstar L
This should about double the /. server storage space.
You'll need to throw in ISA SATA and USB cards though.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Mail them to me.
http://www.yellowchrome.org/1com/galaxytribune/sos.html
Whats better than whipping it out and playing some starcraft?
Don't just chuck them. Look for a high-school that has a proper computer engineering program, and drop them off there. Whether you give them to the teachers or the students directly, they'll love you for it.
I remember building and disassembling many a computer in my class before I was able to install windows 95 (and subsequently, starcraft) on them.
What's the value of information that you don't know?
Putting a live XP or Linux distribution onto it makes it a fine rescue disk.
Give 'em to your church.
Use them for backups of small things.
Add them to the internal usb ports on your pc or pci card for some hidden always-available storage.
S
I can't speak for small hard drives, but a great thing you can do with a 40 GB external hard drive is to install a persistent live linux disk to it. One of the best seems to be portable linux. That way, you always have a bootable OS around which will work with just about any hardware that can boot from USB, which is really valuable for troubleshooting, etc. I use mine to do things like fix grub problems, or use gparted to resize partitions, etc. With a persistence-capable live distro, you can customize all your settings and install any tools you like which aren't included on the default live disk, and even treat it as a mobile home when you're traveling.
I use sub-GB sticks like floppies of yore when I don't have a LAN available. They are more convenient than a CD-R.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
You could ebay them, if your time is worth nothing. To prep them, you'd have to mount them on a machine and securely wipe them (on a windows box download sdelete for free from sysinternals.) Use the -z option to wipe free space (critical for cleaning flash drives.)
Old drives are not as energy efficient as modern drives, so they cost more to spin -- a RAID would just be an expensive storage container. So unless you have a need for old, small drives (say an old, small machine) the safest advice would be to destroy them.
I like playing with neodymium magnets, so I take my drives apart and harvest them. Bending and flexing the platters will render them unreadable by almost anyone but the NSA, so unless you're protecting treasonable secrets, it's probably not worth the effort to do much more damage than that. (Be careful, glass platters don't flex - they shatter.) If you are that paranoid, heating them beyond their Curie point will absolutely destroy any stored information.
John
Take them to a recycling center, so they can be loaded onto container ships and sent to China so they can have their precious metals reclaimed over a charcoal fire.
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
Its only really fun if they've burned you. If they've served you faithfully, what kind of treatment is that? I say take them out viking style : take a toy ship to carry them into the afterworld, set it ablaze with a flaming arrow while chanting some nordic verse.
Valhalla awaits:
, Platter sure, heads swift
glorious memory
failed us not.
Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.
Explosives + Old Hardware = Good Times!
You say you want a revolution....
Go back in time to 1960 and sell them for several hundred million each.
You cannot have too many backups. Old drives are perfect. Mount 'em, fill 'em with your configs, docs, etc. and put 'em away. Just make sure you always have the appropriate hardware and kernel support to read them if necessary.
Mine are ATA/IDE, and these interfaces will be deprecated very soon, I hear. So keep at least one IDE/ATA-to-USB housing around if you need their data.
We've seen the awesomeness of floppy drive RAID. Memstick RAID will blow that away!
ART!!!
for(b=(a=0)+1;;b+=(a+=b))print(a+"\n"+b+"\n");
Wait, high schools have computer engineering programs?! My high school seemed to be interested in finding the least qualified teacher possible for our computer-related classes, even though I found a professor from a prestigious university who was willing to teach the computer science classes. So not fair. :(
Blend it!
If I seem short sighted, it is because I stand on the shoulders of midgets
Or just do
dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/disk bs=1k
It hasn't been successfully recovered from, to my knowledge
Check out my sysadmin blog!
try this http://www.bigbruin.com/reviews05/thumbraid_1
For massive media, maybe 512MB is small. Movies and such, no way, I agree there.
On the other hand, my 512MB card has massive amounts of e-books, saved web pages that have since disappeared off the net, tiddlywikis of my personal information, backups of gnucash files and web sites I've developed over the years ...
A small SD can be functional too. I write my NaNoWriMos on one and carry it around with me along with a keychain CD card reader. Any time the inspiration hits me, I can plug in to any computer with a free USB port and add to my word count.
You'd be surprised how much can fit on 512MB when you go beyond movies n' music.
or salvation army or whoever in your city will take them (Austin TX has a very active Goodwill Computer Store).
Full format them first (not perfect, but there are so many drives with data on them that it is unlikely that someone will go to great lengths to read the edges of formatted tracks). If they don't format then break them down (cool magnets and platters that are better for target practice than CDs - they don't shred as easily).
Keep a few around, especially USB keys - better than burning something to CD is you need to hand data to someone.
Like most geeks, Computer hardware just seems to be magnetically attracted to me. When I bought my house, I decided I needed to get rid of a lot of my old useless hardware. In the end I threw out 15 desktops, 3 old craptops, and 1 dumb terminal. I put everything beside the dumpster. It was all gone by the next morning. I hope someone got a lot of use out of all that old hardware.
If I were God, wouldn't I protect my churches from acts of me?
You forgot to tell him to stand in front of it to make sure it cooks properly.
Hard drives are a lot like hot dogs, you don't wanna cook them without your face right there next to the glass.
You can't take the sky from me.
Given that most (if not all) flash drives use wear leveling, can flash drives be wiped by software?
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
I build all of my rack machines from the same ISO image (well, images. One for Linux, one for OS X).
Within this image, there is a script that runs at boot time that checks for the presence of a USB Drive. If there is a USB Drive, the script will place machine specific configuration files from the USB Key onto the machine in question, so that the machine no longer holds a vanilla install, but instead a completely unique version.
This is great for replacing a down machine on a network -- if 'node1.example.com' goes down, just grab a waiting, fresh machine from the stock pile, insert the usb key labeled 'node1', and start the machine, and watch as the machine takes on the persona of 'node1' without user interaction. Kind of similar to a kickstart script, but with the versatility of being able to change an already configured machine.
Yeah but he was not in the teachers union. Can't have non-union teachers running around out there causing problems.
A) Install USB linux on one of them. They come in handy when repairing computers. B) Pass them to close friends, or colleagues at work, they'll give it to their children. C) Give it to your neighbor.
With the very low cost of storage nowadays, I would not bother reusing or donating the drives. Take out the platters of the HDD, or the whole USB key, and go smashy smashy with a hammer. Collect the pieces and take it to a electronics recycling center. One nice side effect, is the smashy smashy bit is a great stress reliever, just wear safety glasses and perhaps gloves.
Hard drives have strong (and small) magnets in them which are fun to play with, useful on your fridge, useful in woodshops (hanging tools), and probably useful just about anywhere.
Little flash drives, even 8MB ones, can be useful for students and library users. Donate those puppies, please.
Put something on the USB key which you deem important to know (hear, see, read etc.), then 'lose' it somewhere. Someone might find it and check what's on it.
OK, there's the internet. Hm.. But I'd guess that people value a found piece of hardware higher than some arbitrary web page.
Say out loud: I'm an Aspie and I'm somewhat proud, I guess. Uh. Can I write an email in all caps instead? Hm...
Libraries, especially school libraries, often have a need for portable storage devices to help patrons move files around, for instance from one computer to another. Big drives get stolen, but old small ones don't so much. And if an old obsolete drive is taken, then it was free to the library.
Other public or semi-public computer labs probably could use them too. Think job centers, state-funded computer training groups, underfunded K12 schools, et c.
sdelete -z works by creating random-filled temporary files on a drive until all space is filled, then it deletes the temporary files. The concept should work equally well on a flash drive.
John
It hasn't been successfully recovered from, to my knowledge
It can't be, on any drive made this century and most drives from the last decade of the previous one. If you've got confidential data stored on old drives that use MFM recording (not necessarily an MFM interface) then you might need to worry.
Why are you relying on sdelete instead of something like DBAN?
USB keys can be quite useful, even in small - think backup (PGP, SSH, etc) keyring, a convenient way of putting anti-malware software onto an infected computer that has been pulled off the network, etc. Despite having several multi-gigabyte flash drives, I keep a 32 meg drive around just for copying MBAM and friends onto infected machines for doing cleanups.
I had a computer that crashed on me one too many times. I threw it into a river near the ocean. This river was a mix of fresh and salt water. A month or two later I fished the computer out and took it home. I did have to evict a few crabs that were living in it. I let it dry outside. My computer room is the basement. I put down a tarp and put the old computer on this tarp. The seaweed and other things that had started to grow in/on it. I said a loud to my other machines, to behave or a fate worse then this awaits you.
That was 10 years ago. Other then 2 hard drives failing. I have not had a bad motherboard, RAM, or any other failed computer part. Threatening the computers worked.
Old drives are not as energy efficient as modern drives, so they cost more to spin -- a RAID would just be an expensive storage container
Exactly -- which is why I'm right now in the process of doing just that. I'm building a RAID 6 on my five old 250GB drives, and when I'm done, I'm going to remove them, individually vacuum-seal them and silica gel packets with my food sealer, duct tape the bundle together, and ship it off across the country as an offsite backup. ;)
Are there better things that could be done with them? Probably. Is there a better way to do offsite backups? Probably. But I have them and I need an offsite backup, so why not? Certainly seems a better use than dissecting them for fun.
Stale pastry is hollow succor to one who is bereft of ostrich.
I bought this nice cable for 15$ that allows you to plug any SATA or ATA IDE harddrive to a USB port. Basically, any HD becomes a portable USB drive!
I use it for backups or large data transfers that would split on multiple DVDs. Best 15$ I ever spent.
s/([a-z])([A-Z])/${1}_$2/g
Real geeks don't strip spaces - they use underscores :P
(Unless you're a JavaScript programmer in which case I'm terribly sorry...)
For the hard drive, disassemble one in front of them and get their interest and curiosity.
I did this with a floppy drive one time - it had died, nothing I could do was going to bring this thing back so...why not? Why not just open the thing up and show what's inside, pointing out the magents and the drive heads etc.. I'm not going to say it instilled a lifelong wish to become computer scientists or electrical engineers in them, but it held some interest for a few minutes, gave a bit more understanding and broke down one more piece of black-box mystique.
Cheers,
Ian
My first programming classes were supervised (not taught) by the guy that ran the Windows computer lab. He was Mac-only, and hadn't written a line of code in his life. Basically, he handed the 5 of us in the class books and said "Just show me something cool at the end of the day every day, and I'll pass you".
It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
For the flash drives, fill them with your favorite MP3 songs, hundreds of them. Then trade them with other people who are doing the same. Trade a 512Mb drive for one the same size with someone in your office or class. If you are a student, try setting up an underground library where other students contribute flash drives filled with various genres of music, like alt-country or 19th-century German classical. Trade or 'check out' these flash drives from this underground library instead of doing file downloading. This way you can get hundreds of songs at one time without exposing yourself to the RIAA extortionists.
For SATA and IDE drives, get a USB-to-IDE/SATA interface for about $20. These drives can now be used as unplugged backup of things like movies, music libraries, and huge data banks. This is for things that you access several times a year and don't need to always be on your main PC/laptop hard drive.
Free Geek organizations (I can't speak for others) have a comittment to destroying data on donated drives before they go out again. If you don't want to (or are not allowed to) trust that, then you can download a copy of DBAN and nuke your drives for a few hours (or days) before you donate them.
For most civilian uses, 'dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hdX' is sufficient (with today's drive density) to make the data on the drive effectively irrecoverable. --- but, if the NSA is after you for violating the Nuclear Secrets Act, all bets are off.
Free Software: Like love, it grows best when given away.
I am collecting old USB flash drives for the Center for Victims of Torture's 2009 Sneakernet Campaign.
If you are looking to get rid of old Flash drives you can go ahead and send them to:
Beth Wickum
Director of Volunteer Services
The Center for Victims of Torture
717 E. River Parkway
Minneapolis, MN 55455
After hearing about a lack of networks in many places where CVT operates we discussed the use of flash drives to transfer information. At this point my inner geek jumped up and screamed: "It's a sneakernet!" My co-workers hadn't heard the term before and thought it catchy enough to make part of the marketing for a campaign to solicit used flash drives to send to CVT locations overseas as well as partner organizations. The idea is simple, send CVT your tired, poor, and old flash drives. I'll scrub them and clean them up and make them ready to give away. No personal information will stay on a donated drive.
Dixi et salvavi animam meam
The funniest thing about this comment is that it shows up immediately after an anonymous coward listing several things he'd like to do with the old equipment.
I'll second that. And, if you are worried about it, wipe the data using something like dban's boot-n-nuke software, then donate to a local charity. I help with one myself, and we always need more hard drives, as a lot of companies will strip 'em out before donating their computers.
True, too, although the equipment described here isn't really "junk". Anything over about 4GB can take an Ubuntu install and still have enough for quite a few documents. A 40GB drive would be welcome almost anywhere. To give some idea of the numbers, right now in the Geeks Without Borders warehouse, we've got about 200 motherboards that are P-3 or better, and only 6 drives that are over 20GB.
If the masses can keep you down, you're not the Ubermensch.
Donating, schmonating. We're at the start of Depression #2, and every penny counts. I earn around $300 each month just selling old stuff like videos, books, and gadgets. Amazon is good for earning a higher price, but it does require patience. Ebay is better if you want to get rid of stuff right now:
- List it for 99 cents and $5 ship/handling
- Or 1 cent and $6 ship/handling
Please note I said S&H not postage. Shipping is for the ~$3 postage, but the "handling" covers your personal labor (you don't work for free) and the outrageous fees ebay charges (they don't work for free either). Someone will buy your item because there's always someone looking for old items, and you'll make around a dollar profit for each flash or hard drive sold. Possibly more if the demand is high.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
Build yourself a HERF gun (from the old microwave you need to recycle) and use the drives to test EMP resistance measures.
In a lot of ways, that might have been the BEST possible way for him to teach that class! Since anything you're taught about computers is mostly obsolete in a few years, learning how to learn on your own is THE most critical skill in the industry, IMHO. Second is learning how to troubleshoot/debug...
My daily carry piece (with CCW permit) lives in a fanny pack held closed with the magnets out of a couple of old 17gig Maxtor 3.5" drives. I ditched the zipper in favor of that setup, and it's a lot faster :).
In both cases (IDE/SATA and most modern SCSI drives which actually all do maintain an internal badblocks list (and a finite store of reserve blocks - i.e. high-capacity magnetic disks have been doing internal levelling for a while too), and wear-levelled flash drives), there is some risk of data recovery from blacklisted sectors that won't ever be wiped subsequent to their blacklisting. i.e. just because the drive can't/won't use the block anymore, even to write random data to it, doesn't mean the appropriate scanning microscope or whatever tools can't recover data from the "bad" blocks.
That almost certainly doesn't matter to anyone remotely normal, but if you're feeling maximally paranoid, thermite is your data-erasure friend...
I was gonna say harvest the magnets too - nothing like a hard drive magnet to keep stuff from falling off of your fridge! Plus they are weird shapes so they look odd and artistic on the fridge.
If you feel the need, but so far, no one has even done zeros.
http://16systems.com/zero/
Check out my sysadmin blog!
Why not load up photos of the family's last vacation and take it with to the next Thanksgiving dinner? I'm sure everyone will be glad to see a slide show.
Normally I ascribe all life to intelligent design, but in your case I'll make an exception.
Then use TrueCrypt to create an encrypted partition
You mean if I fill a disk with 0's, I should TrueCrypt all the zeros.
- List it for 99 cents and $5 ship/handling
- Or 1 cent and $6 ship/handling
Personally I'd much rather buy a $6.01 item with free shipping than a 0.01 item with $6 shipping. It just feels more upfront and honest.
I despise "1 cent item plus $20 shipping and handling listings". If you want 20 bucks just fucking come out and say so. Do you think I'm going to be so stupid as to latch onto the 1 cent item because its such an awesome deal, and my brain will cease functioning before I figure out what the actual final cost is?
Out of curiosity though... is this to game ebay's commission structure? ie... if I pay 1 cent plus 20 shipping and handling does the seller get to keep more money than if it was 15.01$ plus $5 shipping?
If that's the case I don't really blame the seller for doing this. But it still annoys me because the stuff I buy on ebay is usually based on price, and if everything is 1 cent, and then I have to go and read what the shipping is, and whether the seller will combine shipping on multiple items... wastes my time and makes ebay less useful.
During my senior year (1997), my high school created an Intro to C Programming class. Since I had pretty much mastered TI-BASIC during various boring math and english classes, and had been lazily self-teaching myself C at home for a year or two, it seemed like a good idea.
They gave the calculus teacher a dozen 8086s (to be honest, you don't really need anything more than DOS at 8MHz to compile and run Hello World) and had him take night classes at the local Vo-Tech. He set up the curriculum so that he was teaching us about a week behind what he was learning in his own class.
I spent most of the semester helping my classmates learn what he was trying to teach, and yes, sometimes correcting his mistakes directly. I was so bored by the time the final project rolled around, I had to do SOMETHING to make it challenging. So, I wrote my final program for my TI-85, by setting up a cross compiler under a PC emulator on my Amiga, and loading the executable using ZShell. Easily the most fun I've had for a school programming project.
Work to convince the big distros of the world -- I'm looking at you Ubuntu -- to switch from using CD Rom Images as their prime mode of distribution to bootable flash/usb/ide disk images. Once you've tried it this way you will never go back, and you will now have a use for little drives.
Of course there are scripts that will turn the CD images into usb stick images, but they are time consuming taking away some of the time you save booting from a quicker medium. Instead of releasing a CD and a script to convert it, release a drive image and a script to turn that into an ISO, or release both.
(Plus, with writable media, it's easier to add a 2nd partition where the user can stuff drivers, localization scripts, answers to install questions etc.)
Then you could also donate all these media to linux distros who could fill them up with linux live disks and installs, and mail them out to people for postage.
Has it been over a year since you last donated to the Electronic Frontier Foundation
Ebay double and triple dips when it comes to listing fees. Depending on the listing you are charged for: base listing cost + some percentage of starting bid/reserve price; additionally you are charged for a percentage of the ending price.
Ebay does not charge more for listings based on the shipping fees, which is what encourages sellers to gouge so much.
"And we have seen and do testify that the Father sent the Son to be the Savior of the World"
1 John 4:14
Since Perl is pretty loosely typed, Once it overflows its int type, it'll become a float type, then it'll just keep growing till it hits infinity.
Or until, in float, you run out of precision in the mantissa so that you can't fit 1 and the number in the same range. The proverbial 3000000000000000 + 1 = 3000000000000000.
For IEEE754 32 bit float, that's about 24 bits worth of float, so about 16,777,216 is the biggest for single precision float.
#include <stdio.h> int main(void) { int i; float j = 16777210; for (i = 0; i < 10; i++) { printf("%f\n", j); j = j + 1; } return 0; }
16777210.000000
16777211.000000
16777212.000000
16777213.000000
16777214.000000
16777215.000000
16777216.000000
16777216.000000
16777216.000000
16777216.000000
Note the saturation at 216.
--Carlos V.
"Thumb Drive Drive - Do you have old thumb drives (otherwise known as USB Memory Sticks) at your office or home that you don't use anymore? We're collecting these drives to share with the organizations we work with. They can be used in hundreds of useful ways by: * Teachers * Students * Relief Camp Workers Please keep sending them in to Inveneo here and we'll make sure they get out to people and organizations who can use them well: Inveneo 972 Mission Street 5th Floor San Francisco, CA 94103"
A positive attitude may not solve all your problems, but it will annoy enough people to make it worth the effort.
Really.
You could, for example, hold one in your hand and imagine a Beowulf cluster of 'these'.
FreeBSD bounties
True, I forgot about that.
According to this, Perl's floats are stored in 64, 96, or sometimes 128 bits, depending on how it was compiled. My system reports using 64 bits, so it will run out of precision before hitting 2^53, it seems.
Also, even if Perl went all the way to infinity with "x++", the rate of new files being made would slow down considerably once you started hitting scientific notation.
So really, if you wanted to fill the disk in this way, you want to make sure you append to the file instead of overwriting, as I said in my other reply. Otherwise you may go into an infinite loop without filling up the disk.
Convert FLACs to a portable format with FlacSquisher
Hmm... the link didn't work.
http://www.mail-archive.com/dbi-users%40perl.org/msg29840.html
Must be because of the "at" symbol in the original URL. I've replaced it with the hex value.
Convert FLACs to a portable format with FlacSquisher
Yup. And it's prohibited by their rules, so the best way to get rid of it is to report it.
No. The best way to get rid of it is to change the rules.
So... looking at the fees;
Right now its 8.75% on the first 25, and 3.5% on 25.01 to 1k and 1.5% on 1k+
Fee on an auction that was $20+$5 is $1.75
Fee on an auction that was $1+$24 is $0.09
Fee on an auction that was $3+$3 is $0.26
Fee on an auction that was $0.01+$6 is $0.00
No wonder people gamed the system.
Solve the problem trivially:
Charge 5.75% on the first 25$ including shipping. (For categories like books, games, dvds, toys, collectibles, etc, etc)
Under this regime:
Fee on an item that is $20+$5 is 1.43.
Fee on an item that is $1+$24 is 1.43.
Fee on an item that is $3+$3 is 0.35
Fee on an item that is $0.01+$4.99 is 0.35
For people who were playing by the rules it amounts it changes things a bit, price goes up 9 cents on a cheap item; but goes down around 32 cents for items closer to 25. Overall, its a pretty fair change.
But for people who were gaming the system, well, now they can't.
And now there is actually an incentive to combine shipping on multiple orders to a single buyer, as their ebay fees would go down accordingly, and their profit actually goes up slightly. Under the current regime where people are taking their profit in shipping, they actually either lose money when combining shipping or piss off buyers by refusing to do so.
And by removing all the gaming and improving the customer experience, ebay will easily come out ahead.
The solution is to change the rules.
"All recently made hard disks have a built in secure erase function that erases on the disk level."
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
http://www.freecycle.org/
I have taken apart many 2 to 10 gigers, those magnets are STRONG.
Stick them on the fridge ask someone to get one off and give it to you. Its fun trying to see them try.
http://www.computer-hardware-explained.com/images/hard-drive-magnet.jpg
Well, when I was in high school (this was 1987 mind you), I took the only offered computer programming course at my school. We got to code up a payroll program in COBOL. Really prepared me for life as a modern day programmer.
"But this one goes to 11!"
Screw Ebay, put them on Craigslist.
Line up all your current hard drives and USB drives, and force them to watch as your slowly destroy one of the obsolete drives. Then tell them this is what will happen to them if they EVER give you write errors or get bad sectors!
Fear can be a powerful weapon!
No Sig for you!
"is mostly obsolete in a few years,"
False.
The information I learned about computers in 1980 is still valid. Is there MORE stuff? sure.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
This is what I did with a leftover USB key:
http://blog.boogly.net/2008/10/diy-cow-usb-flash-drive/
"Windows in old buildings have glass which is thicker at the bottom than at the top because of the glacial migration. "
False -- try again.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
"Since anything you're taught about computers is mostly obsolete in a few years..."
You're not a programmer, are you? I ask because no programmer would ever say that.
The C programming language came out in 72, and C++ came a few years later. Both are in the top three most popular programming languages "based on the number of skilled engineers world-wide, courses and third party vendors" and they make up 25% out of the top 20 languages in the list. Although the number one language, Java, makes up 19%, it "derives much of its syntax from C and C++" and Java came out in 1995.
Other sources say C is still responsible for nearly 50% of new open source projects, followed by Java with 28%.
So even if you took a programming class 30 years ago it would still very much apply today.
my karma will be here long after I'm gone
I remember reading somewhere that the "glass is a liquid that flows" thing was a myth; unfortunately, I don't have the URL, so moving on...
I've heard a figure of something like 10 years for reliable storage of data on flash memory. Again, I don't have the **** link, and this may change as the technology advances anyway. But it doesn't sound like a fantastic long-term bet.
Somewhat grudgingly as someone who dislikes waste, I have to agree with you; a lot of this stuff isn't worth the hassle of keeping and trying to use unless you actually have some interest in and affection for it (e.g. wouldn't dream of throwing out my old 8-bit Atari computers). Giving it away to someone else to offset one's guilt when the hardware is *really* obsolete isn't necessarily doing them a favour either (unless you're quite clear what they're going to do with it).
Part of me wonders what would happen if some unspecified shit hit the fan in a few years time and we'd be grateful for all this "old" and "useless" computer stuff we're throwing out. And there's the similar "some people would be grateful for this".
But that really brings the discussion round to what "old" is. The 40GB drive described above is small by modern standards, but not uselessly so and certainly not obsolete.
OTOH, there are likely still so many genuinely *really* old computers (better part of a decade) out there in yellowing beige boxes that anyone who wanted one would probably be able to get them for free, simply for taking them as many of them as possible off the owners' hands.
Using them you'd realise that you could get a much newer secondhand computer that was miles better for very little. Or upgrading the old computer would be way more expensive than doing the same with a modern PC. (Example; my Dad has an old PC. The graphics card and a hard drive recently failed. AGP 4x cards are pretty rare nowadays- fortunately an 8x one worked, but even AGP in general is quite rare now. Meanwhile, it was surprising how small the selection of readily-available IDE drives was, and how much more expensive the larger models were than their SATA counterparts. He got them anyway, but he kind of understands why I said that past a certain point it makes more sense just to get a new computer).
Keeping old computer equipment is supposedly useful for testing and diagnostics (swapping parts to find out which one is faulty), but even old IDE drives can't be used to test a modern SATA interface!
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
Nonsense, when it comes to software engineering there's no such thing as obsolescence, and mostly not within a matter of years.
You just got troll'd!
However, be advised that this may affect the resale value.
Even worse, they could randomly come together and create something worse like kidde porn or Windows ME.
A friend of mine loves old harddrives. They have a lot of super heavyduty magnets in them. To my knowledge he just dismantles the drive and then sticks'm to his fridge but ... either way, ubermagnets are fun!
Strip out the screws/magnets (always good for the hardware bin), and throw the rest away?
-- 73 de KG2V For the Children - RKBA! "You are what you do when it counts" - the Masso
A 1gb USB drive is big enough to make a live CD type live USB disk.Ubuntu and Fedora have a nifty utility that allows you to make a live USB disk from a live CD image. The live USB has the big advantage over a CD in that you can save data and changes. Great recovery tool that you can carry around in your pocket. Most computers built in recent years can boot from USB by hitting F12 at the first bootup screen. If you find a machine riddled with malware and virus, a live USB Ubuntu can be used to save documents, photos etc without fear of cross contamination. I use a 4gb drive with Ubuntu 8.10 and ClamAV installed.
Just because we don't consider it worth our health to use nasty chemicals to reclaim metals from scrap boards, doesn't mean no one should want to do it.
Actually, it does, given that here in the 1st world, we have the technology and knowledge to reclaim the metals without putting hundreds of thousands of people in immediate danger, and with probably far greater efficiency in terms of recovery amounts and emissions per quantity recovered. That's the first piece of the pie.
The second piece of the pie: in case you hadn't noticed, we all inhabit the same planet. Those nasty chemicals, smoke, etc...they don't magically go away just because they were created on a country far away by people who look different.
Come back when you've read Silent Earth, please.
Please help metamoderate.
I'm reasonably sure that if they have a serious interest in the contents of your hard drive, the NSA will be able to decrypt it by using a $5 wrench and some duct tape to persuade you to help them.
Rampant carbon sequestration destroyed the Dinosaurs' tropical paradise. I'm here to help repair the damage.
Open 40 MB harddisk
Carefully take out read/write head
File off some material off said read/write head
Carefully insert read/write head
Close 1 TB harddisk
Profit