Call for salvaged hardware!

[Christopher Browne]

On Fri, Jun 11, 2010 at 2:13 PM, Matt Price <moptop99-Re5JQEeQqe8AvxtiuMwx3w at public.gmane.org> wrote:
> It would be nice to know what to do with genuinely old computers.
> There's also an environmental question -- when you can buy an embedded
> system with the same processing power, it's not obvious that running
> big fat p2 desktops is really a green alternative.  i would very much
> like to hear others' ideas on this subject.

Throw in a "cost of production" analysis, too, to muddy things further.

If you discard the old machine, there are some environmental costs to
building the new one.  Of course, it's possible the new one's smaller
and, in some relevant ways, more efficient.

Analysis of junking automobiles has similar issues:

- The new one will be more efficient (with the computer, likely wildly faster)

- The old one may be more expensive to power than the new one.

- But we don't know for certain what costs (beyond the surrogate of
evaluating the amount of money charged) there are in constructing the
new one.

It seems as though, notably with computers, it's easy for it to be way
too much effort to try to reclaim old ones, unless you somehow have a
surplus of free highly skilled labour with nothing more valuable to do
with their time.
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