Re: [Fsfe-uk] ZDNet Carbon-neutral PC runs Vista (not Free software)

[Alex Hudson]

On Wed, 2007-09-12 at 00:49 +0100, Philip Hunt wrote:
> On 9/11/07, Dave Page <address@hidden> wrote:
> > > Does it really need re-stating that real environmental benefits come
> > > much more readily from _not_ throwing things away? E.g.  taking the 3
> > > million PCs chucked in UK landfill last year and using for LTSP (or as
> > > GNU desktops). :-/
> >
> > To be honest, I've not seen anyone run the numbers concerning the energy
> > cost of building new machines vs. the savings from more efficient
> > hardware, better ACPI etcetera. Is it better for me to use an old
> > Pentium as a firewall, or "sponsor" the manufacture of a lower-powered
> > embedded device?
> 
> It's when people ask questions like this that make me realise that the
> way to reduce CO2 emissions is for the government to tax them 

I don't think that answers his question, actually - whether or not it's
economically cheaper or environmentally cheaper to run older hardware
rather than upgrade to newer is an interesting one, and increasing taxes
only answers the question by mooting it. Taxes are a terribly blunt tool
for making people make the "right" choice.

Running old hardware is not without expense. While solid-state
electronics is reliable, hard drives, power supplies, cooling fans, etc.
etc., all are not. Is it better to keep trying to replace those parts? 

We're also a lot better at designing environmentally friendlier hardware
than we used to be, too, e.g. Ndiyo (http://www.ndiyo.org/), an
ultra-thin client which could conceivably have a useful lifespan of many
tens of years with only PSU replacement required. 

And we're at the stage where we can run many useful services on
low-power hardware, witness the NSLU2 "Slug" and the various other
commodity hardware solutions which are doing things previously only
"servers" could do. The free software community in particular has the
software which makes this feasible.

In many circumstances the taxes on the new would have to be extreme to
make it a worse deal than re-using the existing. 

Cheers,

Alex.