hpr-knowledge-base/hpr_transcripts/hpr0365.txt

Episode: 365
Title: HPR0365: Green Computing
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr0365/hpr0365.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-07 19:02:39

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Hello everybody and welcome to another episode. In this episode, Darlene and I are going
to be talking about discussing green computing. I'm Mark Clarke, as you guys have been
here from South Africa where I work for an open source solutions company in Johannesburg.
Darlene, how are you today? Thanks Mark for having me and for those of you who don't know.
I'm from Calgary, Alberta, Canada, and I work for a Linux-based development company.
And the green computing is something that we focus on at my business. This particular topic
again is very topical for me today and hopefully I can share some of the insights that I've
gathered from around the globe on the different challenges people are facing with their
computing.
Okay, and we had any experiences this week as you like it, chat about the open source software
at all.
Yeah, well I know over the weekend I spent some of my spare time installing a virtual box
and it was really smooth. I've put it over top of 810. I'm going to 810 and I used
the 2.1 release and it went really well. I installed XP on four multiplied stations with
Office 2003. It was kind of a hopped up machine. I had a phenom quad core processor in there
and it handled all four instances really well. How about you, Mark, what have you been
playing with this week?
Well, I was planning to do my upgrade with my Ubuntu workstations, but there's one machine
which I've got which I don't know, it's like you always get these motherboard from Hull
and this machine's got one of them. I've had the machine for like three years now and
it's never been able to get any destroyer to run on it out of the box. When I first
got it, I had to use Gen 2 on it to compile everything and get all the right drivers compiled
and all of that because all other distributions never had anything, you never had the right
drivers for the hard disk and the sorted drives and all of that. Then I switched to Ubuntu,
I think it was probably about 710 I think it was. Even then that wouldn't install a graphical
mode, I had to download the text installer and do it that way and then configure X to get
it to run on the machine. It's kind of a bit better but the screen resolution is always
bad. So I was hoping this time that Ubuntu would install it and it's just fun but it never
did. So eventually I just gave up and put in a video graphics card and they didn't use
it on board one. But then Ubuntu was having problems because it would boot up and store
fun and then you would shut down the machine and bring it up the next day and the screen resolution
would be gone and it would be into low graphics mode again. So there has been a, I think
it's one of those motherboard, you know when you get them when there's a sort of change
in technology and they have that dual thing. So it's got a whole lot of dual stuff, dual
sort of RDE and also you know the PCR experience and PCR and so it's just, I don't know, I think
it's just a confused motherboard. But eventually I had to give up on that and I just dumped
OpenSus311.1 on there and that's just working fine for now. So it's a bit sad but I think
I'm going to have to relegate it to server. So have you done anything with Jonti? I know
that we've installed it and we're working to move our software onto the Jonti platform
and had a few issues like this week we had the X server, it's causing you know 100% CPU
usage on it but I just was watching my identity and I can see the communities coming together
and they're all trying to solve, you know, and test all the new features out and comment
in arms. I think that's good. Have you had any, have you installed it and played with
it at all Mark?
No, I haven't just briefly decided on the one desktop at home, yeah. And that was then
before I can then just went with OpenSus3. I didn't try, you know, my main machine was
the laptop. It's always a mission. I normally upgrade it, you know, the Ubuntu and Debian
upgrades normally go very smoothly but every now and then I like to do a efficient
store because, you know, just to clean any gun fart and all that kind of stuff. But
the problem, I got with this machine because of work machine, you know, you don't want
to lose any data because even if you backup home directory, there's always some project
which you got sitting in or W-W-W or some MySQL database, you know, or something like that
which you forget about sitting, there's not in your home directory. So I was a bit dubious
about doing a efficient store. So I thought, well, let me just try and upgrade first because
the machines are also showing signs either of age or something else as well on it Mark.
I don't know. It's just sort of Firefox is extremely slow. Sometimes you have to click
on tabs and wait like three seconds for it to switch out and all of that. So I thought
I'll try the upgrade and upgrade manager. When I tried that, it gave me a warning about
the ATR. I couldn't think, you know, I used dual screen on it. And it's with the ATR
big desktop stuff. And I said, it wouldn't support that. So I just said, ah, stuff. I just
know, work with the machine as it is. I think it's about to die anyway. So a model will
just leave it in, let it go in peace, you know. It's good once it finally dies.
Yeah. And the other thing I'm working on over the weekend, actually, I just had a young
fellow in Ecuador. We're trying to do the crossover Linux install so we can install
off the office. Yeah. Okay. To install it on a boom to distribution. It kind of hit
a little bit of a wall, but we're going to see if we can work through it. And I don't
know. I wish I knew if somebody had actually been successful with it, they must be because
these guys are selling licenses and, you know, maybe I decided research some more forums
and see what's coming up. But, yeah. So that's my project for the weekend to see if I can
get that to work as well. Yeah. They're really fun. They're frustrated. Yeah. They're
fun. Yeah. Because those, you know, I don't know. We always hear people talking about
crossover offers. But quite frankly, I mean, I live in the world now because we're
completely, you know, Linux based. I don't even bother with any Windows stuff anymore
or anything like that. And you always hear, you know, it's a bit surprising to hear how
these people are still trying to, you know, like merge the two walls and run the Windows
apps on the Linux. To me, this doesn't make sense. You know, if you're going to switch
one out to switch. Okay. I mean, obviously, I understand some situations is some switch
sheet, which they absolutely need. You know, everybody thinks that they can't live without
Excel or something like that. I mean, in my situation, it just seems bizarre. You know,
I mean, I don't know. It's just maybe it's just a way. I agree. Yeah. And I agree with
you, Mark, because you know, I tried to get to most people that work with me to put on
open office and Thunderbird and Mozilla and not even look, go back, you know, but I just,
I don't know. This last two weeks has been particularly frustrating, trying to bring
people over from the dark side, but and their reliance or they're just their mindset, you
know, and I would think going into some fresh markets that I've been working in, like
packstown. And I'm thinking, so if they're just going in with, they're just getting a computer,
doesn't matter. Like, you know, if they've never been exposed to Microsoft and, but, you
know, they, yeah, there's all kinds of stuff that goes on in the background that we're
maybe not aware of. But I back to what you were saying, though, about trying to get Windows
apps running on Linux. I really don't support that either. I know they want to use Visual
Studio. And I think that's one of the reasons they're trying to do it. Yeah. Oh,
well, the other one, I don't know. I don't know. That's why I tried VirtualBox. Yeah, I
just that's why I tried the VirtualBox. But it's at a university and we're trying to do a
showcase deployment. And I don't know, I just said, you know, if we had four stations running
Linux and two running Windows, that would be the best showcase. I think, you know, and
then you could always slide the VirtualBox down and they can see that Ubuntu is actually
running in the background. That's what's making it so stable, right? Yeah. But I'm pretty
sure that education institutions, and they must have like what you call them like educational
licenses. I'm pretty sure Microsoft wouldn't want them running them on. They probably find
the license hidden somewhere. It's some proof. You're saying they have to run around Windows,
so. Yeah. We'll see what happens. That's between them and Microsoft. Yeah. Yeah. And
it's just not going down that path. They can work out the nitty-gritty details in the end.
But yeah, no, I just wish that people would just, I don't know, just give it a try. It's
like jumping off the diving board, but you know, once they're there, it's not so bad. Yeah.
So I don't understand. I mean, it got tons of these people downloading Windows 7 Beater
and trying it out. You know, the fact that matters for me, last time I really used Windows
before Windows was 2000, I think, and XP, obviously, you know. And I mean, it's still the same.
You go, you don't have to sort of use the machine to understand what it does. The network
is still in the same place. It's such a classic view. If you're in some clandestine, I want
you to sort out why the machine's not picking up your address from the DHCP server. So,
yeah, I just, I don't even, you know, look at that stuff anymore. It's a bit weird how
some people, even the guys at the hall call Linux, people are still sort of done. What is
it? You know, this is kind of, oh, we have to keep up to date with it because of our work.
And I don't even know whether that's completely true, you know. I mean, maybe I was living
in a world of our own creation, where we completely, you know, Linux based. But yeah, you
know, it's just something I do think is a bit of exaggerated the need to sort of have
some Windows, you know, software in there because it is, I kind of said, a critical app
like maybe there's some, what would you call it, financial application or something up there.
But yeah, with the vast majority of things, you can get bar with art using any Windows software.
Yeah. And so, my next challenge has been to try to find the open source equivalent. So,
when they come to me and say, I need, I absolutely need this program. Then I go out and find
the open source equivalent and say, Hey, how about you give this a try? And a lot of times,
you know what, it really does, it's not that bad. And I think they're just, they're much better.
And yeah, anyways, it's just a learning curve. And it's just being able to present that option
much better. And it's sometimes frustrating, you know, for me, like in, say, for Pakistan,
as I mentioned, the government itself endorses the move to open source software. But at the end,
the Ministry of Education is still insisting on bringing in a Microsoft product. You know,
and I'm just, they'll do well in the workforce, whether they learn an open office or a Microsoft
office. Yeah, I'm sure. I mean, it's just, it's just bizarre.
Anyway, so that brings us to our topic of green computing and how we can, how we can help make
a difference a little bit. So, so green computing, you want to give a definition of what you understand,
green computing is, and maybe just highlight the issues around green computing.
Sure, I believe that there's a lot of what we call green washing around green computing.
And I feel that people, you know, they just do the, the basic surface, you know, play, they,
basic surface tasks, you know, okay, I'll turn my monitor off every day. I'll make sure that my,
my PC goes into power save mode and these kind of things. But that's not truly green computing.
And I think there's, it's a lot more depth to it. I believe that if you need to look at something like
reduce, recycle and reuse, and then we'll, those three things will lead you to a truly green
computing environment. What do you think, Mark? Yeah, yeah, it's a difficult, I must admit,
recycling, you know, it's not really a big issue. You know, I know in America often you see the,
on the movies, the Hollywood movies and the sitcoms and stuff, people always go on about
recycling and there were different color bins and stuff. You know, we just throw everything into
the dustbin then. And it gets caught up. And it gets caught up to the dump. But, you know, I haven't
said that. I mean, I must admit, I think I ever in my life, you know, if I went to the dustbin
and I saw computers sitting in the dustbin, there'll be very strange sartons at Africa, you know.
I've never actually thrown any piece of hardware away, any old handheld kind of device,
any old cell phones, you know, so I think maybe it's also a bit of a different thing, you know,
it's much more of a sort of consumerist society in North America where, you know, people just throw
things away when they don't need it, you know, and that kind of stuff. Whereas, yeah, I think people
sort of utilize the, you know, I find it useful for the hardware somewhere along the line.
Not saying I was not going to become a problem, you know, because you know, later, you know,
the things become old and broken and you're going to replace the parts anymore because they're
just not being produced. But you find this is very, you know, yeah, we still sort of, I suppose,
we're like, you say, sort of, you know, a couple of years behind, you know, the first world in terms
of recycling and sort of making it really sort of putting any attention to that and having
different collection days and stuff. I know in my suburb, all of, you know, there's like a sort of,
what you could have probably company that's trying to do that, you know, I must admit, I don't really
participate in that, yeah. Oh, I'm a hardware recycler. I want to pick it, I lived with it,
with no garbage pickups, so we had to recycle and actually now in this, I've moved to the city,
we have collection bins and it happened to be very close to me, so it's not a big issue
to, to feel like they go sorted out. And now I actually got home yesterday and there's a recycling
bin sitting in my front yard that they will pick up with my garbage, so that makes it even more
convenient. They actually, you can put garbage in one bin and your recyclables and another bin.
But back to the PC recycling, I know here in Alberta, you've just recently, I would say in the
last three years, really came up with a concrete e recycling program. Some for people don't know
the in-depth behind the scenes what goes on because it's kind of one of those things where the
first world does these things to make themselves feel good. But it goes to a plant, the things like
the e recycling, they get all gathered up, go to a plant and they dismantle everything. And I
believe they probably use some of the parts I heard that they use it for things like some of the
boards and ships can be used in stoves and fridges to program them because they've got those
computerized dashboards now on them. But other than that, you know, they shred it all up,
all the green cards and stuff, shred them all up, put them in shipping containers, send them to
China where they belt them down, extract whatever gold there is in the traces and then they
burn it, do whatever in China and all the pollution is over there. And it's kind of, I don't know,
I don't know if that's true recycling, if you just kind of hide it in another way.
But I've heard about that as well as sort of dumping of the waste into the third world,
essentially, especially yarn Africa as well. You know, it's often many of these programs masquerading
as we are to give computers to children in the third world. I'm not talking about the one
letter of a child project I'm talking about, you know, the second hand PCs. It's just cheaper for
the corporates to come and dump them in Africa and claim to charitable, you know, donation rather
than actually dispose of them because it's more expensive to actually shred them and dispose
them properly. So that's why also you get some of these, you know, some companies bringing
the old computers out into Africa is precisely because actually it's not altruistic or they
must actually just play in old economics. It's cheaper for them to ship it to Africa and,
you know, offload it in the doxia. Then as you say, take it to some recycling plant and the first
world where it's quite expensive to recycle. So there's all those sort of political issues around
this whole thing as well, you know. Yeah, and I understand that the EU has some pretty strict
regulations regarding computer recycling and that's leading to more of that dumping into Africa.
I know that this e-learning conference, that's one of the topics is how do you know, what do you
do with these end-of-life computers that can't handle the heat and the humidity and the
you know, the conditions that they're actually deployed in. And a month or three later,
they're just paper weights and people don't realize is that there's lead and all kinds of stuff
that's in mercury that are in these computers and then they're leaching, leaching into the
groundwater. You know, there's a long-term side effects to these, to these computers being dumped
there. So anyway, that's true. For me, it's Africa because so many other issues to worry about,
you know, contamination of the groundwater, if it kills you in lactic use time, it's not as
important as how they can kill you tomorrow. Well, I think that you guys also have some stuff that's
coming down the pipeline, though, and I think that the there hasn't been any long-term planning
for power, especially in South Africa. I actually looked at two cases, one in South Africa and one
in Brazil because we actually had a big deployment in Brazil and reducing the power usage in the
computer system, the software that I work with was quite a detractive proposition. And I believe
that in South Africa, because the government didn't react when they were told like 10 years ago
that there was, you know, a serious energy crisis coming, that they, of course, they didn't react
in time. The thing with the energy crisis in Africa is a couple of factors involved besides
plain incompetence. You know, because with the globalization, and we've all seen the results of
globalization now with the economic process that we're living with, but, you know, part of globalization
was the army if I come to the real country and tell me if you privatize all of your government
industries and not inefficient and not well run. And the power stations, power utility,
South Africa was government control. So they turned it into what's called a parasitital, which is
basically is run on private principles, but it's still only, it's still a monopoly and it's still
owned by government. So you get the worst of both worlds. You get the worst of the private industry
and you get the worst of government controlled industry. And so, you know, the idea was, okay,
well, what we'll do is we will devigulate energy and all the other companies are supposed to pop
up and start supplying energy. But the utility is supplying a such a low price. South Africa had
the lowest energy in the world for the last decade or so. So much so that a lot of these like
aluminium smelters started being, you know, a plan to build huge factories in South Africa because,
you know, they used a lot of electricity. But because the power was so low, it wasn't economical for
any, you know, sort of, private utility to compete with them. So, yeah, so now we're sitting
in with the situation. It's nothing 2008. We had like rolling blackouts because of the, you know,
we had ran out of reserve margin plus they hadn't had maintenance on all of the power stations.
So, yeah, that, you know, upset a lot of a lot of South Africa especially when you start going to
traffic jams, it wasn't pleasant. But yeah, so it is a luck. Well, one of the side effects of
the economic downturn, of course, is that a reserve margins back because a lot of the furnaces and
manufacturing and the mines have sort of had to shut down now. They're gone, they're gone,
billy up. So, you know, we've got a bit of a reprieve. I'm actually hopefully going to
give us an alternative to rebuild the factories. But what's going to happen for sure is that the
process of energy is going to go to the roof and the utilities are really asking for a way
above inflation process increases. And it was like 14 percent? Yeah, and I think it's going to be more
than 25 percent. That, I mean, it's so ridiculous. I think it's going to be like a 50 percent
increase and electricity costs over the next two years or something. And yeah, so there's
besides that, how suddenly, you know, you have to become energy conscious now. There's before,
I mean, you know, it didn't cost you anything to leave your computers running and stuff like that.
So that's the one thing. And then obviously, there's the green issue as well. So there's two thing,
you know, because I think some is a confusion between the green issues around energy and the
energy crisis. You know, so the energy crisis, to the degree, I think you're the green issues.
You know, it has to be positive energy because basically it's not enough to go around,
which is leading to a lot of these energy saving initiatives. And then obviously, there's
in some countries that most of us in the first world, where there's sufficient power, but it's just
producing too much pollution and contribute to the greenhouse gases and all of that. That's,
you know, you have concerns around this energy and, you know, basically that leads to green computing.
Right. And I believe that because, you know, we've been conditioned, I don't, and it's everywhere,
that we need to leave our computers on 24-7 because oh, well, you know, if you turn your
computer off every day, that's hard on, it's hard on, you know, on the machine, or it'll corrupt
your windows if you shut down every day. Well, we're not talking windows, just windows, but Linux,
you know, not, anyways, but that's people's mindset. Or, well, it has to stay on, like, if you're
in a business situation, oh, it has to stay on 24 hours a day because they push through all the
updates and everything overnight out of peak hours, right? Okay. So people think they have to have
this 24-7 thing running with their computers, but I believe there's lots of other ways to get around
that. Yeah. I mean, you also, you know, basically people are taught to leave the computers on because
of the, especially in the early days, I think there'll be power surge in your turn, I don't know if
you could blow your motherboard. And those days, computers were horrendously expensive, you know,
they went as cheap as they were now. So you didn't want to, you know, throw out the paper, just see,
then, then blow your motherboard. And then you have to save up another year to get your computer.
But I mean, you know, one of the options though with, with, um, to the green company, I mean,
we've spoken about e-waste, just sort of recap, but you're talking about e-waste, which is
the supposing of your old computers and stuff. And I think basically what you're saying,
the, in South Africa, we don't really have a policy in place yet. I think they will get there
because of what happens to Africa. We tend to have the world's best laws, but they never get
implemented. Oh, they're just not capacity to carry them out. So I'm pretty sure you're going to
come up with like this law that's going to end up costing us money. We're going to say,
I'm in a taxpayer. And, you know, but it will be one of the best in the world, but it will never
get implemented. Um, and then the other thing we were just discussing now is sort of, um,
sorry, actually, trust my trainer thought that way. Um, I was just about the energy crisis in terms
of, just, to start there. So so what we were discussing now, then was, was the energy crisis
around electricity and electricity is a car. And also, I mean, energy also is supposed to be
raised to oil as well, to a degree. You know, there's also a crisis around that. But I think
that, and then you started talking about, you know, actually, it was a hard way that people are
running. And I think there's, um, a couple of issues. The one is that people often buy these
machines with like way bigger, um, power supply units than they need, you know, like you get
250 to 350 watt in the 750 watt unit. And all these got, you know, obviously, what happens is
the manufacturers or the distributors are keen to sell you the 750 one because it's more expensive
to make more money. Um, but you don't really need that. You know, you get all these gamers that
maybe they needed to run in one of this fancy graphic hardware and stuff. Therefore, it's just
overkill. You know, you get guys buying these cases with all these flashing LEDs and, you know,
it just draws more power from the, from the unit. So yeah, it ends up, I mean, I think that's
the aspect of green computing that, you know, if you should have a comb, uh, consumer at home.
And what can you do about it? It was, you know, just make sure that you're only bar as much power,
you know, the machine should have as much power as you need to, to power all your peripherals,
basically. Yeah, I call that SUV computing in Canada or North America. We have SUVs, right? So
instead of a smart car, a smart car, kind of computer, you got an SUV, which has way more power
than most people need. And so I agree with you. But unfortunately, I have a disco computer because,
yeah, I just, I decided to have one with that open side and the flashing lights.
So, uh, I, so there you go. There's my contribution. I can change up a little bit.
But back to, back to what you were saying, Mark. Also, I think to back to green computing and
end of life of PCs, is that we, we should have put some of the onus on the, on the, the
manufacturers, like to design with end of life in mind when they're, when they're designing these
PCs, and that it shouldn't, the onus shouldn't be on us as taxpayers to pay for disposal.
We've got to hear an Alberta. We have to pay $10 for every monitor we buy and so much for every
PC we buy to pay for the e-recycling program in the end. But why should we have be totally
fitting, uh, footing that cost when it should be, like I say, uh, end of life or have a,
I noticed that in my research at HPS, quite a good program for refurbishers.
So you can refurbish these that, you know, they've got a set of standards and people can,
because I, I was a big proponent of refurbish PCs coming out of businesses, you know,
refurbishing them up and then selling them to home users and it was just fine for them. Actually,
I have one right here in my desk. Okay. Nice little HP compact, small form factor that came out
of an office and it didn't, uh, done my, uh, my kids well here for three or four years.
And, um, but anyway, yeah, like I say, just to design them with end of life in mind and how to
expand their capacity. But by using Linux, you know, you can, you can extend the lifespan even
longer because less demanding on the, uh, on the hardware. Just on those, uh, they also have
some of these refurbishers, they've got to be these brand-new machines. And man, like, like,
they're still very interesting expensive. I don't know what the processing is like in Canada, but,
you know, you can get a generic machine brand-new cheaper than a refurbished brand-name
machine. So you sort of say, well, you know, why would I spend the money on this refurb machine?
And it's not that much of a discount, you know, and they're already like about like two years
old or something. So you sort of, you know, it's just a bit, a bit bizarre. I don't know,
whether you find it the same there in Canada or not. No, I think they're actually, they're pretty
reasonable and for the price I pay for the base machine, if I needed to throw in an ex, you know,
larger hard drive or a DVD burner or whatever, it was, yeah, it was pretty cost-effective.
And so that is usually the only thing I had to upgrade was either the size of the hard drive,
because remember, they came out, they were almost like fin clients, right? When they were in the,
in the business area, they didn't have a DVD writer. And they just had a basic hard drive. And,
yeah, so that was my experience with that. And also, on that note, there's also another side
of things like we could talk about, I talked about the need to power down for updates and Intel has
this B-Pro technology. A favorite of that mark? No, no, it allows you. Okay, so it started out on
their laptops and on their Centrino processors and now it's available for desktops. So it actually
allows patches and upgrades to be downloaded, even if the PC is powered off or unresponsive,
so that eliminates that need for leaving the PCs on all night in order to get their upgrades.
And yeah, so I think that's a pretty cool technology that, you know, you can actually
buy that in addition. You can look for that particular specification on your processor.
You can understand my stuff, I don't know, because a lot of the things that people are complaining
about now, you know, you've got some guy who worked out how much the little red lights, LED lights on
your TV screen, how much energy it's using, and it stays on all the time with your emotes and stuff.
So I always think to see my good idea eventually.
Until now, once you start producing one mess and there's a mess adoption, I would actually start
edit quite a bit, but it's not better than leaving your machine on, you know,
right? Yeah, I'm not quite sure, but it also seems like it's a nice solution for,
you know, for the volume and the industry get in on it. Initially, of course, it's going to be
a rendersly expensive, I don't think that will be, you know, out of the range of most people,
because our sell it to business is always in the process, but it should come down in the future,
you know. Well, apparently it's been over for a couple of years on the laptops, but yeah,
so it'll be interesting to see how its chance, you know, chance, you know, bringing how the
transcends over to the desktop platform. But one of the things you also talked about, and this is
what tends to happen, yeah, I think, well, at least what we do with the old machines, you know,
Linux, instead of recycling them away, and that kind of stuff, you can basically turn them into
sort of embedded devices or dedicated appliances or some type, you know, using as firewalls or
routers or a whole bunch of them, even as file servers, you know, you just put something like
three nails or open file on there, and the way you go, you just got to make sure, only issue,
of course, is that, obviously listen to the hardware. So, you know, if you've got like RDE discs
and next few years, I'm going to be in your round and then they start failing, you can't really
replace them. But I think the biggest challenge there normally is that it's all the machines,
you know, it's more the cases that they're just big and bulky, you know, because everything just
gets smaller and they just look ugly. Yeah, so the biggest challenge there is more,
getting them to a smaller form factor machine and making them look, yeah, I just sort of refurbishing
them and then able to use them as dedicated devices, well, even as, you know, Linux terminal server
clients, that kind of stuff. So I think that's where also where open source and software can help
a lot, you know, because everybody's customizing and building the things with different architectures,
you know, you can do interesting things with them, which you can't really do with, with like a
Windows-based operating system. Great. And the other thing I wanted to talk about was, again,
about desktop virtualization, because that allows for the elimination, I believe that's a very
green practice, because it allows for, you know, the elimination of, say, nine out of 10 computers.
And of course, that goes to less power draw. It again, less e-waste, less, you know, the lab itself,
you don't have to cool it, because you know how older PCs generate a lot of heat. And so you're
not paying for the air conditioning costs and so on. But I just think there's a lot of benefit
to that as well. Yeah, no, sure. I mean, we did a podcast earlier on virtualization. I think that's
one of the biggest benefits, at least in terms of the server room in the data center, you know,
for green computing is to use virtualization. And once again, I think, you know, Linux has the
and open source community has the has a lead and advantage there of being the half of us,
and which all these other virtual machines actually run. So yeah, now I've got to agree with you there,
I think it's, that's, I mean, you know, if I'm talking to clients and you're advising them on this
kind of stuff, you know, rather than the first place we'll start us looking at the server room,
rather than sort of going to the desktop clients and sort of changing things there, because that
also, you know, impacts on people and people are normally the biggest issue in any system change,
which in the server room, hopefully you only got a few sister admins to worry about.
Right. So I know that you're strong, your strength is in the server room and my strength is
in the desktop side. So I do have to say that I think that with the, you know, there's numerous
Windows virtualization clients now and there's numerous, you know, Linux ones, one that I
particularly work with that allows for, for these desktop, you know, where you can have an individual
station and it works, you know, you're doing all of your, your independent and fully functional
and only requiring a monitor keyboard or mouse at each station and it can result in power savings of
like up to 80%. And the other thing too on green computing, there's another move. It's about, I
guess, and that is switching people, you know, at work instead of everybody having a desktop,
but switching them to laptops. And so because laptops now are so much more energy efficient.
Right. Yeah, that's the idea. I mean, that's the regular desktop.
I mean, with the whole laptop story and energy efficiency, you also see now, you know, with
processing, it's so much more powerful. I mean, the emergence of like the netbooks and the
lower part PCs that basically can, you know, if you're sort of just an office user of opening up a,
you know, a spreadsheet tool or a process with process a document, you can actually do that on
these much lower process, much lower part machines, you know, and the whole ARM process is coming
out. There's also another volunteer Linux and open source operating systems have is that they run
on all these architectures and I know Windows doesn't. So it's a big threat to Windows because I mean,
the Intel Atom process, I think it's, we're reading somewhere that Eric and Omnars
going to sort of start replacing the Intel Atom process a lot of these netbooks.
So yeah, so I think it's, you know, what you're saying there about sharing machines as well,
and they also goes with this desktop virtualization. I know one of our clients, you know,
we virtualizing the, the workstations. So then you have less PC, especially if you've got,
it's like a hotel system, you know, like so you only have seven people in office at any one time,
otherwise people aren't in clients, they're kind of stuff. So they can just log in and then
launch their, their particular virtual machine and work away at that, you know. So you get to
actually share a machine, but you only see the share operating system as such. So there's a lot
of interesting things that you can do with that. All right, so Mark, let's just recap what we
covered today in our, in our episode. So we talked again about reduce or recycle reduce and reuse.
And so some of the key points that we had covered included the fact that we felt you didn't,
it wasn't really required any longer to leave your computers on 24-7. It was kind of, I think,
it's a myth now with, especially with the UPSs. Now, you know, Empower Search Protectors,
like you had mentioned, that back in the day, it was a concern about getting a search through
your computer. And as well, we talked about the fact that you could take, you know, if you're
moving out your fleet of computers that are your business, you could actually use those other
applications and firewalls, big application servers out of them because Linux runs on stuff
that's a little less demanding. Anything to add Mark to that? Yeah, we just touched on virtualization.
You know, there's desktop virtualization, which is sort of becoming sort of quite prominent now.
Server virtualization has been, you know, the sort of favorite topic of the day for a while now.
I think that's sort of settling down and the technologies are maturing there. So,
you know, desktop virtualization is becoming quite important. You know, and then also, you know,
we talked a little bit about, I think some of the advantages that open source hasn't
hold green computing field because we run on formal architectures and, you know, Windows does,
especially like the ARM processes. And I think Windows or Microsoft has a big challenge there.
And not only that, it also has a big challenge. And, you know, I mean, I keep you Windows XP
allows 30 for the purpose of running around neckbooks, you know, even though they want to kill it all
for a while ago. Then they have these ridiculous licensing terms that you can only use so much
memory and the screen must be of the size if you want to run Windows XP on it. You know, and clearly,
they've got a problem because I can't, like Linux, we can take components out, we can add
components in, we can recompile the kernel. And we're not worried about people running with
taking that operating system running around a more powerful machine. And so Windows has all of these
proprietary issues around it that's causing us to have problems with this whole green computing
thing. And quite frankly, I don't think they're going to be able to cut it in the whole green
computing market. So that's a great advantage for open source there. And you had sent me an article
about the increase in power rates that you guys are facing in South Africa. Do you want to
elaborate? I think we talked about that earlier in the episode, but just to recap, that they're
facing like a 35% increase. Don't you face me now, you know? In the middle of a worst economic
recession since 2009, 29, you know, and power companies needs to increase tariffs was applied
to the regulator for increasing tariffs by 34%. And that's only an interim increase, but the
reckons needs another like 24% or something on top of that later. And it's just, I'm just
incredibly frustrating because it's pure incompetence and lack of planning on the side of the
the parasitally. And what's even worse, you know, all these economists that trust them all out
and they're, hey, you're an unfortunate, we have to do this. And of course, you all know we need
part of it otherwise, we have a bit of luck screwed, you know, it's hard, but the fact is you want to
see some flipping hedge roll, you know, or some like be taken out for public flogging. Yeah,
the good old day that took the guard into the into the courtyard and they bloody, you know,
during and quartering one of them and hanging them and all of that, everybody could look
and you know, feel that sort of pay to pay for the cock up. Yeah, I'm sorry for
but yeah, but no, essentially what's happening in this modern world, you know, is that
the manager of this business doesn't accept responsibility for the actions and the consequences
zero, but they want us to pay the costs. And I think that's where the public in Africa is really
getting frustrated with that. Yeah, I can still get their bonuses and still think they've done
a good job in there. Talk the MBA talk and, you know, claim higher, you know, I agree with that
all in management and has not default. But yeah, as you can hear, I get quite worked up about it
because it's obviously has a major economic impact on inflation rates and once power goes up
with 34% food prices go up, you know, everything else goes up. So, you know, it's a major problem here
in Africa. I mean, that also is going to be an incentive around for corporates to sort of start
looking at reducing their power consumption. And especially in the art, most corporates,
unless you're like a manufacturing institution where you've got big machines running or whatever,
you know, most corporates that are service based on like banks and that main energy usage comes
to your computers. So, I think it's going to be a major defining force in the in the RTE industry
for the next couple of years now. It's energy efficient computing, which once again,
praises into that big advantage that it has for open source software.
Yeah. And just, I guess, my final note today then is just that, so it's not just South Africa,
it's happening around the world. And we have a big deployment in Brazil and there they've
had power rationing because 90% of their power comes from hydroelectric generation.
They've had lower rainfall, so they haven't had the water to maintain the system. And as well
in Ecuador, same thing. So, I think this topic of green computing can be applied pretty much anywhere
around the globe. So, I think it's a pretty topical discussion.
Okay. I think that's it. Hopefully, listeners find this interesting, less sort of technical
discussion. I think nonetheless an important discussion and something which, you know,
needs to be considered with all the open source projects and how we can start using it as a way
to advance open source in the world. Okay. Well, thanks for having me today, Mark,
and look forward to doing our next episode together. Excellent stuff.
Michael Oli, chat to you later. Cheers, everybody. Yep, bye-bye.
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