Everybody has one. At least one. Collecting dust in a closet somewhere; waiting to be thrown away. It’s not a time capsule per-se, but if you looked at it now it would probably show you a snapshot of a life you lived not that long ago. It was once a source of pride, entertainment, accomplishment or perhaps comfort. Maybe it was a status symbol. Now you would call it useless, worthless, junk.
We’re not talking about the photo album from your dormroom party days, although it might still contain a copy. We’re talking about your old PC, laptop, netbook, or computer. That thing you spent hundreds or thousands of dollars on to sit in front of for hours doing whatever it is that you do. Maybe it helped you get a degree, or maybe it was your primary source of income. Doesn’t matter now anyway. Your smart-toaster does more MIPS and FLOPS with half the power! There’s no value in an old computer, right?
Wrong! If the commoditization of computing hardware and the steady marching of Moore’s law has done anything to old computers it has been to breathe new life into them. How, you ask?
Putting old hardware to new uses is one way of recycling – I tend to give away my “old” smartphones as I buy new ones way too often. Often, a friend’s phone stopped working or a family member needs a new one – so I just give them mine.
All the solutions you mention have the following issues:
1. You need to manage all those and make sure they are up to date, secure, work as intended.
2. You old computer at home will get a lot less usage than the shared infrastrucutre the cloud provider has, meaning a lot of wasted energy.
Most of the older devices that are not servers are much bulkier than todays generations, they provide a considerably worst user experience in term of the quality of their screens, speakers, etc.
So this has 2 sides:
1. Backend, the cloud can do all of this much better with less impact. There is a great value in consolidation.
2. Frontend, the devices available today are much better than those from a few years back.
Edited 2018-10-26 20:51 UTC
But the point is you’re not going to use them as your primary machine. This is about having a pretty good primary machine, but you have some hardware that can still be used.
It doesn’t matter if the cloud exists. They can’t use your old hardware. So if you have old hardware that still works, why not use them instead of throwing them away?
I don’t care if the Cloud is 100% more efficient.
My data is not going anywhere near a cloud system.
I have the investment in my own kit yet you want me to pay a monthly or annual subsription to keep my data AND you want me to pay per bit for the data as it goes to and from the cloud?
And how often do we hear of a cloud service going TITSUP?
Sorry, not going to bite and go cloudy.
{My photo library is just under 5TB with close on 500Gb added this year}
As a developer, it helps to keep older machines around. I far prefer compiling and testing my programs on real hardware, in the native OS. Recycling older desktops and laptops to have separate Linux, Windows, Mac, and BSD machines is great for this, especially because I can just nuke one if things go wrong, and I don’t have to be careful about how I reformat.
VMs are fine for some development work, but they are NOT the real thing. They can easily be detected (check out the talk about finding undocumented x86 opcodes from blackhat a couple years ago for some really simple tests that all VM software in common use fails, as an easy example), their performance is not even close in any way to the real thing (different things are fast/slow), and since the kernels usually need special drivers (excluding Qemu) to run under those VMs, you are explicitly running with different code paths in the system than will ever be used by a vast majority of your end users.
I also think that testing on much weaker hardware than a normal developer machine is extremely important. I don’t want simple programs to work fine on my 6 core developer desktop with a great NVidia GPU, but then be super slow when run on a Core 2 Duo with embedded graphics because I simply never tested.
It’s a case where the hardware being weaker is actually a help.
FlyingJester,
Can’t +1 you enough! Too often, developers use overpowered high performance computers for themselves, but they don’t have an appreciation for how lousy their software runs on average computers. It’s not just desktop software either, the magento web based ecommerce package I’m working with right now is the worst performing web platform I’ve ever used. I personally consider it unfit for purpose, alas, I still have to support customers who use it. You can buy high end hardware to run magento, but the same hardware would easily handle 8X the traffic with a well written site. How I wish those developers had developed initially on a core2duo!
It’s useful not only to devs, also a user using older machine for a while makes you appreciate the “normal” faster one
(In times when Athlon XP 1700+ was my main machine, I often stayed in a place with only dual Pentium2 266; what a pleasent feeling it was to go back to Athlon 
)
While reading today StanisÅ‚aw Lem “Non serviam” story about artificial/mathematical worlds I had a thought / I wonder if such test could be constructed for the universe (via quantum computers?), to check simulation hypothesis.
While I understood what you meant, what you are doing is not recycling… You are reusing or repurposing. The 3 green arrows each stand for Recycle, Reuse/Repurpose, Reduce.
That being said, I’m a big proponent of reusing and repurposing, myself. I still own a Compaq laptop with a Sempron 1300 processor that I bought almost 10 years ago as a beater to install alternative OSes on. It still does what I bought it to do, despite very slowly. Like someone else mentioned, I also like to install software on real hardware, not VMs.
I use a mix of old and new hardware. However there is a definite limitation on benefits in reusing.
For example, I have a “hand me down” server at home. It still has lots of juice in it, with a E5-v3 processor. Yet, if it had been an older generation, like E5 v1, there would be little use in keeping it alive. Older servers will use at least 100W at idle, if you are lucky. Their workload can most likely be handled by a Raspberry PI, or a cheap $100 computer at much lower power consumption levels.
I also had some older 10GBe cards. However they also waste a lot of energy. At PGE prices (which can go over 40c/kWh), there is not much sense in keeping them active.
Same can be said for many 100mbit hubs, non-HD security cameras, and many older laptops.
That being said, I “saved” several older laptops (with still energy efficient processors), by replacing the HDD with an SDD and upgrading the RAM. That trick will work on most up to 5 years old hardware.
So there is a tradeoff. Older generations (more than 5 years older) are very inefficient in power usage, and has little use other than being museum pieces. This can be said for PSUs, GPUs, CPUs, and even printers and hard drives. However most things that were 5 years old or younger can easily be repurposed.
Edited 2018-10-26 23:00 UTC
5 years seems too short to me – I’m writing this on an almost 7 year old laptop, it’s still perfectly fine (also for some Steam indy gaming) …even with HDD and its original amount of RAM.
Yep. This is being written on a 2012 MacBook Pro (i7 CPU). It has just had a new KB as two keys went U/S. Apart from a RAM upgrade and 2TB of SSD I’ve not spent a penny on it since I bought it. It has been used to write countless specs, hundreds of thousands of lines of code and more recently three full length Novels.
I clean the fluff and dirt out of it every 6 months or so and it shows no sign of going ‘phut’.
Sure it was expensive but it has stood up to being taken all over the world with me on business and pleasure.
I’ve never had a laptop last as well as this one.
(doesn’t have to be expensive – my case is of a budget AMD E-450 APU based machine
)
After a rough start in ~2006 I made myself a xmas present last year and finally got my #t2sde finally running mostly stable on my Sgi Octane https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AU_RV8uoTIo and somehow is such an warm majestic feeling continuing to hack on it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gTCPg7NF0_g