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I'm a software idiot, but why couldn't you do the Goodwill of Cloud Infrastructure? Build affordable cloud services out of "junk" electronics?

• crote 2y ago
  Total cost of ownership. First you need to spend an absolute fortune on sysadmins to hack together functioning machines from heaps of mostly-broken parts. Then you need to deal with an admin nightmare as every machine will be different, so you need to manage them as individual machines rather than hundreds of identical clones who all behave exactly the same. Then you need to deal with tons of random hardware failures, none of which can be easily solved by hotswapping a standard fan or harddrive you've got lying on the shelf already. And to finish it off, you're also using 5x - 10x more power for the same compute. Whatever money you're saving on hardware purchase, you're spending many times more on all the other stuff. Free junk electronics are just too expensive.
  • blitzar 2y ago
    Total pollution of ownership would likely be lower with new hardware vs old when you take into account the higher power usage vs lower performance.
    • paulryanrogers 2y ago
      This cannot be true forever. Transistors are still shrinking yet we're fast approaching physical limits. Hence the ever larger and hotter and more power hungry GPUs and CPUs. There's also the waste involved in continuously producing those more efficient models. Their lifetime emissions, including manufacturing, may actually be worse compared to certain older generations.