A Laptop, Some Repeaters, a Sailboat, And a Quarter-Ton Server

Picking up from my last post, I was part of a discussion to determine how far you could push sites such as Freecycle and Craigslist, where people give and get items for free. Would people really treasure my junk? Here's my experience; what's yours?

Let's start with a Dell Inspiron 7000 laptop that I owned for about 6 years. I don't know the exact specs, but it was running GNU/Linux and everything except the battery worked. I posted it on Craigslist - I got 15 "I'll take its" in 10 minutes. The guy picked it up the next day for his ten year old daughter to use. I felt great.

Next one; ten circa-1992 Thinnet repeaters with BNC connectors. For those not on the floor laughing, nowadays these are about as useful as shouting "One!" and "Zero!" into two tin cans with a string between them. Posted on Freecycle and gone in 30 minutes, to a guy right down the street from me. He needed then to run some old system that was still in use.

Sailboat. This is no joke; Freecycle lets people asks for items as well, so one guy asked for a sailboat for his family to cruise around in. After taking considerable flak from the rest of the group for asking for such a 'luxurious' item, he got it! A week later, a guy offered a 14-foot sailboat that needed work, had a trailer with two flat tires, and he just wanted the thing out of his yard.

Finally, a 500 pound server; this one is my favorite. This thing was huge - three feet high, two feet wide, two feet deep - and solid metal. It took three men to move it with a handtruck. There were dozens of hard drives, backup power supplies - the works - but it was old. We had tried for over a year to get rid of it; it sat in the main hallway, sometimes being used as a table. Then I posted it on Freecycle.

Gone. In under a minute, to a guy that wanted to run an Internet site. He picked it up that day.

[one more, just got rid of a broken coffee maker using Craigslist in half an hour! Mark]

Disposing of Your Computer for Joy and Profit

There may come a time where you will have an extra computer or two lying around. In fact, that time is probably now, as about 75 percent of used computers are currently stockpiled in storage (read, your basement). What to do, what to do - you don't want to turn them into eWaste. Well, here are two methods that produce good results, let's call them the 'Joy' method and the 'Profit' method.

With the 'Joy' method, you give a gift (which is fun), someone receives one (which is also fun), and you both share the joy of giving the computer an extended life (more fun). One way is to use the 'free' section of Craigslist - just post your equipment, and folks will email you if they want it. The gift getter usually picks up the equipment; it will usually be gone within minutes, no matter what it is. You can also try freecycle as well; their motto is 'changing the world one gift at a time'. Make sure you use your local group, there are a lot of them.

The second method is the 'Profit' method. Reselling used gear is not something people (or companies) often think about, but it can be very lucrative - this guy made 300 thousand dollars selling 10 used Cisco cards. For starters, you can try eBay's rethink program, which specializes in computer equipment, or you can try and sell it yourself on eBay or Craigslist. Reselling used equipment can take more work than you think - you need to take pictures, have a good write up, process the payments, etc. - and is better suited for expensive high-end gear, very new equipment, lighter items (because of shipping), and parts (surprisingly valuable). Since there's probably a few computers hidden in your basement, why not give the planet, others, and yourself a little treat today?

Powerpoint and Virtual Conferencing - A Deadly Combination

Meetings - by phone, email, in person, or virtually - are all about communication, and almost anyone that deals with people regularly, as part of their job, will tell you that nothing beats face to face communication; you establish the relationship, pick up on the non-verbal cues, etc. The problem, of course, is that hauling bodies around the world and expensive, and getting more so. So, is webconferencing or videoconferencing the solution?

Not according to James Murray, a writer for Green Business News who cranks out a lot of insightful green IT commentary. This piece on webconferencing struck home, where James probes the murky depths of what it has to offer to the planet. In particular, he wonders why so many presenters go to the trouble of using it, when most just make a Powerpoint presentation of their ideas, then run through it via virtual meeting. As James says, the only collaboration happening is on the associated phone call, and that's just to make sure he is on the right slide and not surfing the web. Ha ha, the truth hurts, and it's funny too.

Now, maybe videoconferencing is better; I have not sat in on a videoconference like the one pictured above using Cisco's Content Delivery and Digital Signage, and I'm sure that would be cool. It might even convince a customer rep that they don't actually need to fly about the world and 'shake the hand of the flesh' to establish quality relationships. But if all we are doing is following up or negotiating with well established clients, skip the virtual dog and pony; it costs money, energy and bandwidth to use it, and may turn people off entirely from the technology.

Sun Micro Both In And On The Money

Dave Douglas is the VP of eco-responsibility at Sun Microsystems and was recently featured on CNN Money as well. Sun is one of those vendors that everyone has heard about but no one outside of IT really knows what they do; this is primarily because they have not catered to the consumer market (although they do have desktops for sale, some of them using the power of a night light). It's unfortunate because they have had a great green computing program for some time.

Sun's position on green computing is well thought out and deep - read their sustainability paper to get a sense of their profound strategy. They invented novel items like the black box, a trailer full of servers that you can cart around and provide computing where you need it. Sun also bought a tape archiving company a few years ago, based on the (very practical) fact that tape is far more energy efficient than digital archiving. And 55 percent of their employees don't even have an office, which saved them 67.8 million in real estate costs in 2006. Add those items to the fact that Sun recycles 99.7 of all their returned product materials in California, and you might get the sense that they are really doing something new.

You Needa UNEDA

UNEDA is the United Network Equipment Dealer Association, a trade group that specializes in reselling aftermarket networking equipment. That's the Prez at right. Apparently Cisco is hell bent on getting rid of these 'gray marketers' - obviously, reselling used kit cuts into profits margins. Apparently You can make big money doing selling off your old network gear - one guy netted 300K selling just 10 used Cisco cards.

I'm going to look into this, but it seems like Cisco is voiding the warranty on any new stuff you purchase from them, if you either add aftermarket kit (Cisco or no), or another vendor's equipment to your network. Another hardware/eWaste cycle? We shall see.

Be Still, My Beating Heart

...while I move you across Manhattan in the middle of a monsoon. A short one from Core77 about how they had to move their servers wrapped in plastic sheets across town. A breathless near miss, and who hasn't had them? The weather wasn't to blame for this particular move, but it made me think that we might be hearing quite a few of these stories soon, with changing weather patterns and all. Save the baby! Save the baby!

Droid May Kill Ape

Apparently it's more than my coffee maker than wants a certain amount of freedom, now the US military have proposed a new set of rules for having robots engage in combat. Bottom line - they can kill other robots, but not the humans that run them.

There's gray here; weapon 'systems' might include items such as standard issue rifles, and they could be targeted, as Lewis Page (from the Register) notes:

“If people or property isn't a military objective, we don't target it. It might be destroyed as collateral damage, but we don't target it. Thus in many situations, we could target the individual holding the gun and/or the gun and legally there's no difference.”

Which seems to suggest that a robot could decide, under Mr Canning's rules, to target a weapon system such as an AK47 for destruction on its own initiative, requiring no permission from a human. If the person holding it was thereby killed, that would be collateral damage and the killer droid would be in the clear. Effectively the robot is allowed to disarm enemies by prying their guns from their cold dead hands.

Rough Type wrote this up as well. Why do always have to go for all the marbles? Can we just experiment with rights for the Roomba for a while, before we start getting into the Ape-killing scenario. I'm sure Dr. Zaius is turning over in his grave.

What The Other Guy is Doing

The Series...

IBM sees green in environmental tech - Welcome to the party...

Dell starts cranking out cheap desktops for China - only $335 bucks will get you a fairly mid-range PC. Dubbed as a move against Lenovo and the like, I'm wondering if the Chinese can afford such luxuries? But hey, I would buy one, if I needed it. HP and VIA are in on the China desktop game as well.

On a similar note, HCL announced eco-friendly laptops for India. Greenpeace is on their case, but according to the article, they are RoHS compliant.

TI is into solar powered cellphones.

Blades are better. And cell phone chargers might meet with an untimely demise.

Chime In on EPA Server Efficiency Standard

The EPA has recently released several draft task reports on data center and server energy efficiency. The reports are posted on the Energy Star Web site and make for some fine, if technical, reading. The neat thing is that you can comment on these reports.The consumption of energy in data centers is a growing concern among industry and government officials; it's a regular black hole. In 2005, for example, U.S.-based data centers consumed 4.5 billion kilowatts hours, using over $3 billion in energy. This is according to a study funded by Advanced Micro Devices that was released earlier this year.

This is real democracy in action; if you are knowledgeable about these issues, EPA welcomes you to help populate this report. You can contribute data or information to this effort by contacting Eric Masanet at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. The commenting period is relatively short (under two weeks) as the final report is due to Congress in June 2007, and according to Andrew Fanara, the program manager for EPA Energy Star, the team is not looking for a line-by-line critique of the draft. They want to know “if we missed anything significant, or caught or appreciated [all] the dynamics inside data centers that need special attention,” he said. Check it out, and see if they did.

Words From Dell

Matt James over at ecoGeek has a nice interview with Sean Donahue, spokeman for Dell, on their environmental program. There is some same old, same old here - Dell's Plant a Tree for Me program has been covered extensively - and there a quite a few 'forward looking statements' such as plans to integrate with EnergyStar 4 and moving towards 80 Plus power supplies. Ok, we're all doing that.

But there also some fresh ideas. Dell is starting to offer GNU/Linux on factory installs, which will help reduce obsolescence, and there are also some specific recommendations for the most efficient systems that Dell has to offer. These come mainly from the Optiplex and PowerEdge lines. Also, virtualization, a big resource saver, also figures in prominently to their program. Matt remained undecided on their program at the end and fell back to the 'if you don't need it, don't buy it' argument. Barring something truly groundbreaking from a hardware vendor such as, say, six year warranties on all new machines, we will probably be in a holding pattern for some time to come. It's bar raising time.

Food or Phone, Is That the Question?

The Independent has a fairly unnerving story as to how bees may be effected by the radiation given off by mobile phones and other electronic devices. The UK has already been hit hard by Colony Collapse Disorder, and there have been a few theories why this has occured.

The theory in the article is that radiation from mobile phones interferes with bees' navigation systems, preventing them from finding their way back to their hives. Sounds a little buzzy, but there is now evidence to back this up - a former German study found that that bees' behaviour changes near power lines, and this new study discovered that bees refuse to return to their hives when mobile phones are placed nearby. Note that it doesn't prove that cellphones are directly responsible for CCD, but it does provide evidence that mobile phones are implicated in the death of hives.

This might turn out to be a devil's bargain - either give up the cell phones, or give up eating as the world's harvests fail. It's hard to get excited about either option, but if it comes down to it, I would rather eat than talk.

What's He Smiling About?

That's Vyomesh I. Joshi, the senior vice president in charge of Hewlett-Packard's printing division and he's happy because revenues, profit, and margins are all up at HP. Because, you see, people are printing out things like crazy. Not just anything mind you; according to the article, about half of what is being printed out is the Internet, turning bits and bytes in oil (ink) on vegetable (paper).

And just when you thought that dog had stopped hunting; is this phase two of the redesigning the bags that that ink comes in? Guys, you're leaving me breathless - I liked the energy reduction thing better.

The Internet, It's Junk

Apparently after four decades of getting the existing Internet moving, researchers have decided it's junk, and we need to build a new one. it seems a little ominous - according to the article "Industry is playing a bigger role this time, and law enforcement is bound to make its needs for wiretapping known." - so I guess the present Internet is unable to be used to its full economical or wiretapping potential.

The biggest hurdle, they admit, is switching over from the existing Internet to a new one, a veritable pole vault over the moon. Can you really just change a system as big as the Internet, or, for that matter, the environment? For the first one, I don't know, for the second, I hope so.

Land of Fire and Ice, and Data Centers

A data center is a facility used for housing a large amount of electronic equipment, typically computers and other communications gear. Although they vary in size, a big tech company (a Microsoft, a Google) might have well over 100,000 computers in a single location. Obviously, with all those machines in one place, they use a lot of power. And as the demand for power increases, companies are now on a worldwide seek to find the cheapest, most sustainable supply of go-juice to run their operations.

Not surprisingly, there aren't a lot of places left in the world that have enough surplus energy to run an extra 100,000 computers. Iceland, with its massive amount of clean, geothermal power, has recently popped up as a potential candidate and both Cisco and Microsoft are investigating the possibility of establishing server farms in the Land of Fire and Ice. Otherwise, options are limited - forget about running a data center anywhere in the UK, energy is far too expensive there. And Manhattan is out, as there is literally no more room on the roofs for cooling. Sioux Falls, South Dakota might be an option, or maybe Winston-Salem, North Carolina - oops, Google already took that last one.

Sustaining Virtual, Virtual Worlds

A virtual world is a computer-based simulated environment intended for its users to inhabit and interact. The 'world' is represented in the form of two or three-dimensional graphical representations of humanoids, called 'avatars', and you get to control one or more of them. Some popular virtual worlds include Second Life and the Sims, to name just a few.

There's been a lot of talk about how these worlds can best adapted for business practices, and there are some differing opinions. Melanie Turek of Collaboration Loop thinks that IBM's new Codestation in Second Life, a kind of virtual place for sharpening programming skills, might turn out to be a non-starter for a pretty simple reason; Codestation might be fun, but real work is not always so. And she questions, rightly so, whether workers are going go through the hassle of getting into a virtual world and manipulating clunky avatars do their work, when they could just do their work at their desk using traditional tools.

Not everyone agrees - rebuttal here - but it does seem silly to do what you could be doing on 'Earth' in a virtual world, particularly when the latter realm uses up real world resources, such as energy. In fact, Nick Carr reports that each virtual person uses as much energy as the typical Brazilian. Let's take it a step further to a ridiculous conclusion - should we use computers in a virtual world to login to another virtual world, and do our work there? What benefits would that acheive? Seems like we should stick to keeping most activities Earth bound as much as we can.

'Vista Capable' Machines May Not Be

The environmental impact of Microsoft's Vista operating system will be large; it is projected that over 10 million PCs will be scrapped as a direct result of upgrading to Vista, and the UK Green Party thinks it will create a Vista upgrade layer that will be identifiable by archaeologists. So, based on this and the limited additional functionality the OS provides, this TH is not changing to Vista any time soon.But there's more - turns out that some systems that are advertised as "Vista capable" (with the sticker) are in fact not capable of properly running Vista. A class is now suing Microsoft over this, alleging that the marketing around Vista was designed to deliberately mislead potential customers. Microsoft has already changed their stance, citing that a 'Vista capable' machine might not be able to run all of the versions (at least five) of Vista out there.

If you leaf through almost any PC catalog, you will discover that Vista is almost the sole choice for new PC systems. I don't know about you, but as Robert Cringely points out, you might find it maddening when you buy a system with a 'Vista Capable' sticker on it then discover your graphics or sound card won't work because the driver is not ready, or that it won't run the version with the 'cool' Aero interface. And when you consider that it took 1800 pounds of raw materials to make that computer, one must wonder what the environmental benefits are of vending systems that are obsolete as soon as they are off the shelf.

Laptops that can Change, from Asus

Laptops are notorious for not supporting basic hardware changes, like installing a new hard drive or replacing a video card. What that means is that the thing usually gets disposed of as a whole. However, Asus has come out with a laptop that can change, by supporting such standards like HDMI and ESATA. Unlike other laptops, you can replace the components in the C90 yourself with a minimum of tech savvy, and that's good news for the big E as it will prolong the machine's life.

By the way, you will notice that the word 'upgrade' is not mentioned in this writeup; that's because it's the wrong term when it comes to computer equipment. Give me a piece of equipment I can change to suit my needs, not one that is an supposed upgrade to something that is better. What could be better than having full control over your machine?

Win 10000 Bucks!

by entering (and winning) this design contest sponsored by Echelon, a maker of building control technology. I can't tell you how thrilled I am - if nothing else, contests definitely put something on the map - you don't see a lot of contests for the design of the next square wheel. And I bet there will be some neat ideas coming out of this one. I had often thought that computing should be integrated into smart building technology, let's see what they come up with.

Google Goes After the Data Center

Fascinating read here on the lengths that Goggle is going to make data center operations as efficient as they can be. There's a lot of gems here that I have never seen before, such the fact that running systems at non-peak levels is very inefficient, and it costs around $10 to $22 dollars per watt to build a data center, but only about 80 cents per watt to run it.
And there's also quite a bit of info on low level stuff, like how inefficient single threaded applications are, and how shared memeory models are difficult to keep up. Worth a readie.

Prisoners Smash Computers

Did you know that inmates in the US are being afforded the opportunity to recycle eWaste? The program has been running since 1994, through an arm of the government-run corporation UNICOR which opened its first eWaste 'business' in Florida. Since then, the company’s electronics recycling program has spread to other federal prisons across the country. In 2005 the company recorded $64.5 million in profits; inmates get paid between 23 cents and 1.15 per hour for their services. Dell got nipped a while ago for supporting the practice; they have since discontinued it.

What do they do? Well, when the program began, the job consisted of raising CRTs over their heads and smashing them down on metal tables to separate the glass from the recyclables. Ultimately inmates might want to reevaluate the risks, which are outlined in a excellent joint report entitled Toxic Sweatshops. In addition, the March 2007 issue of Prison Legal News has picked up on the practice, which suggests, amongst other things, that the program to just there to provide a labor intensive activity to keep inmates quiet. And, as the article reports, inmates are dying from the exposure to the toxic chemicals in the eWaste.

What is most striking is that a baseline has not been established for this type of activity; not in a workplace rulebook, not in a federally mandated guide, but in peoples' minds. Computers are hazardous, they are filled with poisonous chemicals and materials, and need to be treated like poisonous waste. Not like something that can be smashed down on tables by inmates.