Yeah.
Hello everybody and welcome to another episode. In this episode, Dolly and I are going to be
talking about discussing green computing. I'm Mark Rock. As you guys have been
out by now, from South Africa, we're work for open source solutions company in Johannesburg.
Dolly and 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. So 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. I'd like you to chat about,
to speak to open source stuff, we're at all.
Yeah. Well, I know over the weekend I spent some of my spare time installing a
virtual box and I was really smooth. I've put it over top of 810. I'm going to
810 and I used a 2.1 release and it went really well. I installed XP on a four
multiplied stations with Office 2003. It was kind of a hopped up machine. I had a
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 of my Ubuntu workstations, but there's one
machine which I've got, which I don't know, it's like you always get these motherboards from
hell in this machine. It's got one of them. I've had the machine for like three years now.
And it's never been able to get any district you run under the other box.
When I first got it, I had to use Gen2 on it to compile everything and get all the
raw drivers compiled and all the other distributions. Never had anything.
You don't even have the raw drivers for the hard disk and the sorted jobs and all that.
And then I switched to Ubuntu. I think it was probably about 17. I think it was.
And even then that wouldn't install a graphical mode. I had it download the text installer and
do it that way and then configure X to get it to run on the machine. And it became a bit
better, but the screen resolution is always bad. So I was hoping this time that Ubuntu would
install it and it just fine, but it never did. So eventually I just gave up and I put it in
video graphics card and they didn't use it on board one. But then Ubuntu was having problems
because it will boot up and store fine and then you would shut down the machine and bring it up
the next day and the screen resolution will be gone and it will be into log graphics mode again.
So I think one of those motherboards, you know, you get them when there's a sort of
change in technology and they have that dual things. They've got a whole lot of dual stuff that
are dual, sort of RDE and also the PCR express in PCR and so I just, I don't know, I think it's
just a confused motherboard. But eventually I had it give up on that and I just dumped open
CC11.1 on there and that's it's working fine for now. So it's, but sad, but I think I'm going to have
you really great to serve. Yeah, so have you, I mean, I think with John T, I know that we've installed
the nerve working to move our software onto the John T platform and I have a few issues like
the sweeper, the extroverts causing, you know, 100% CPU usage on it, but I just was watching my
identifying and seeing the communities coming together and they're all trying to solve, you know,
and test all the new features out in comments and wrongs. I think that's good. Have you had any
have you installed it and played with it at all? Mark? I haven't just briefly said on the, on the
one desktop at home, yeah, and that was then before I scanned it and just went with open suzer. I
didn't try, you know, my main machine is the laptop, it's always a machine. I normally upgrade it.
I mean, I went to a debut in Upgrade, normally going very smoothly, but every now and then,
I laughed at your fish and stole because, you know, I just took clean and he come far then,
you know, all that kind of stuff. But then, I got with this machine, because the work machine,
you know, you don't want to lose any data, but even if you back up home division, there's always
some project which you got sitting in a virtual, WWW or some mice your database, you know,
or something like that which you forget about sitting, there's not in your home directory.
Um, so I bit, I was a bit dubious about doing a fish and stole, so I thought, well, let me
need just try and upgrade first, because the machine's also showing sound, either of age or
something else is wrong at back. I don't know, it's just sort of far, Fox's extremely slow,
sometimes they have to click on tabs and wait like three seconds with to switch out in one of
there. So I thought I'd try the upgrade and upgrade manager. I'm going to try a data,
gave me a warning about in the ATR config, because I think, you know, I used dual screen on it.
Um, and it's, with the ATR big desktop stuff, and it's hit the wooden support there,
so I just, I just, I just, I live with the machine editors. I think it's about to die anyway,
so the Mars will just leave it in a little go and piece, you know,
rescued once it found it. Yeah, 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 could install office. Yeah. Okay. To install it on a, on a boom to, uh, distribution,
kind of hit a little bit of a wall, but we're going to change people walk work through it, and, uh,
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 had to see the research some more
forums and see what's coming up. But, um, yeah, so that's my project for the weekend to see if I can
get that to work as well. Yeah, they've been to the fund, uh, frustrated. Yeah, they've been to the fund,
right, because those, you know, I don't know, always hear people talking about crossover
office in, but quite frankly, I mean, I live in the, in the world now, because we're completely,
you know, Linux plays, so I don't even bother with any Windows stuff anymore, and you know that,
and you always hear, you know, it's a bit surprising how it always people are still trying to,
you know, like merge the two walls and when the Windows apps on the Linux,
to me, it 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 of speechy, 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,
you know, this is the main way. Yeah, I agree. Yeah, and I agree with your work, 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, um, and the
reliance or their just their mindset, you know, and I would think going into some fresh markets
that I've been working in, like, Pakistan, and I'm thinking, so if they're just going in with,
they're just getting a computer, it doesn't matter, 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'd back to what you were saying though up,
oh, 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 that you're trying to do,
you know, yeah, or let us watch that. Well, I don't know, I don't know, that's why I tried
virtual box. Yeah, I just, that's why I tried the virtual box, um, but, uh, it's at a university
and we're trying to do a showcase deployment, and, um, 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 virtual box down and they can
see that Ubuntu's actually running in the background, that's what's making it so stable,
right? Yeah, but pretty sure the education institutions, they must have like,
what you call them like educational licenses, and pretty sure Microsoft wouldn't want them running
them on, probably find the lessons hidden somewhere, it's some proof of saying they have to
run it on Windows, so. Yeah, I will see what happens. That's between them and Microsoft. Yeah,
they insist on going down that path. They can work out the, 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 dive network, but, you know, once they're there, it's not so bad. It's good, I don't understand
it, I mean, it's got tons of these people downloading Windows 7 beats and trying it out. You know,
the fact that matters for me, a lot of some are really used Windows as before, Windows are,
well, the 2000, I think, and XP, obviously, you know, and I mean, it's still the same,
you go, you don't, you know, you don't have to sort of use the machine to actually understand
what it does. In network, instead of the same place, you switch to classic view, if you're in
some plant, then once you'd be so tired, why the machine's not picking up an audio address from the
DHCP server. So, yeah, I just, I don't even, you know, look at that stuff anymore, and it's
a bit weird, how some people, even the guys at the hall call, the next people still sort of
done, what is it, and this is kind of, I would have to keep up to date with the because of our work,
and I don't, you know, whether that's completely true, you know. I mean, maybe I was living in a,
in a world of our own creation, where we completely, in a Linux based, but yeah, you know,
it's just, some of the other, do you think it's 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 apps like maybe
there's some, well, you call it financial application or something like that, but yeah,
I would have asked my joy to have things you can get about, without 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, because for me, like I 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 on open office or Microsoft office.
Yeah, not for sure, I mean, that'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 basic surface, you know, play the basic
surface tasks, you know, okay, I'll turn my monitor off every day. I'll make sure that my PC
goes into power save mode, and these kind of things, but that's not truly green computing,
and I think there's a lot more depth to it. I believe that if you need to look at something like
reduce, recycle and reuse, and then those three things will lead you to a truly a green computing
environment. What do you think, Mark? Yeah, that's what I think, I must admit, we startling,
you know, it's not really a big issue. You know, in America, up in here, you see the,
on the movies, the Hollywood movies, and the sitcoms and stuff, people always go on about
we startling and there were different color bins and stuff, you know, we just try everything
into the dustbin, and it gets quite a bit, and it gets quite a bit 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 computer sitting in the dustbin, there would be very strange certain
South Africa, you know, I've never actually thrown any piece of hardware away, any old handhold,
kind of the vast, any old cell phones, you know, so I think maybe it's also a bit of a difference
thing, you know, as much more of a sort of consumerist society in North America with, you know,
people just throw things away when I needed, you know, and that kind of stuff. Whereas, yeah,
I think people would sort of utilize the, you know, I find it useful for the hardware somewhere
along the line. I'm not saying I'm talking to a problem, you know, because you know, later,
you know, the things become old and broken and you're going to place the passing
of, because they're just not being produced. But you find that it's very, you know, yeah,
we're still sort of, as opposed to, like, you say, sort of, you know, a couple of years behind,
like the first world in terms of recycling and sort of, you know, it's really sort of putting any
attention to that and having different collection days and stuff. I know, in my suburb, I'll have,
you know, this is like a sort of a, you could have private companies trying to do that, you know,
I'm, I must admit, I don't really participate in that. Oh, I'm a hard poor recycler.
I want to pick it. I live where there was no garbage pickups. So we have 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 collect and 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.
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
and 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 bridges to program them
because they've met those computerized dashboards now on them. But other than that, they shredded
all up all the green cards and stuff, shred them all up. Put them in shipping containers, send them
to China where they melt 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. I've heard about that as well. I've heard about that as well.
It's sort of dumping of the waste and it's a third world. It's since you're especially
young Africa as well. It's often many of these programs, masquerading as we are to give computers
to, you know, children, a third world. I'm not talking about the one net up a child,
I'm talking about, you know, the second hand PCs. It's just cheaper for the corporate to
come and dump them in Africa and claim to charitable, you know, donation rather than actually
dispose of them because more expensive to actually shred them and dispose of them properly.
So that's why also you get some of these, you know, some companies bringing their all computers
out into Africa as a society because actually it's not altruistic or they must actually just
playing old economics. It's cheaper for them to ship it to Africa and, you know,
uploaded in the docks, yeah. And then, as you say, take it to some recycling plant and then
the first world where it's quite expensive to recycle. So that's sort of political issues around
this whole thing as well, you know. Yeah, and I understand that 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, you know,
what do you do with these end-of-life computers that count handle the heat and the, the humidity
and the conditions that they're actually deployed in. And a month or three later, they're just
paper weights and then people don't realize that there's lead in all kinds of stuff that's
an mercury that are in these computers and then they're leaching, leaching into the groundwater,
leaching, you know, there's a long-term side effects to these computers being dumped there.
So anyways, let's true. For me, it's epic as you've got so many other issues to worry about,
that you know, quite ten minutes underground water. If it kills you, it's not as important as
something can kill you tomorrow. Well, I think that you guys also have some stuff that's coming
down the pipeline though, and I noticed that the, yeah, 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 for the software that I work with was quite a attractive proposition.
And I believe that in South Africa, because the government didn't react when they were told
like ten years ago that there was, you know, a serious energy crisis coming, that, um,
there was obviously didn't react in time. Yeah, the thing with the energy crisis that
Africa is a couple of factors involved besides planning and competence. Um, you know,
because with the globalization and we also, you know, it's also globalization now with the economic
process that we're living with. But, um, you know, part of globalization was that I may have
come to the root country and tell me, if the privatized, all of your government owned industries
and, you know, not inefficient and not well run. And the power stations, power utility,
yes, Africa was government control. So they turned it into what's called a Paris title,
which is basically the run on private principles, but it's still only, it's still an
uply 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 control industry. And so, you know,
the idea was, okay, well, what we will do is we will devigate energy and all the other companies
are supposed to pop up and start supplying energy. But the utility is supplying, it's actually
a low price. The Africa had the lowest energy in the world, uh, for the last decade or so.
And so much so that a lot of these like aluminium smelters started being, you know,
plans to build huge factories, the answer, Africa because, you know, the use of a lot of electricity.
Um, but because the process alone, it wasn't economical for any, you know, sort of
private utility to compete with them. So yeah, so now we're sitting with the situation
in 2008, we had like rolling blackouts, um, because of the, you know, we had ran out of reserve
margin plus the head and that maintenance on all of the power stations. So yeah, that, you know,
upset a lot of a lot of, a lot of South Africa, especially when you're stuck in a traffic jam,
so it wasn't pleasant. But yeah, so it is, uh, like, well, one of the side effects of the
economic downturn, of course, is that I reserve margins back. Because a lot of the furnaces and
manufacturing in the mines, it sort of had to shut down that gone, that gone belly up. So, you know,
we got a bit of a reprieve. Um, it'll hopefully, you're going to invest enough time to, 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. I mean, you tell you he's a very asking for a way above inflation process increases.
Um, and it was like 14%. Yeah, and I think it's going to be around 25% then that, I mean,
sorry, Dick, you listen, I think it's going to be like a 50% increase in, it's just you cost
over the next two years or something. Um, and yeah, so the, besides that, how, in certain,
you know, you have to become energy conscious now, it's before, I mean, you know, I didn't
cost you anything to leave your computers running and stuff like that. So that's the, 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 sometimes it's a confusion between the green issues around energy and the energy
process, you know, so the energy costs to decrease, but I think there's green issues. You know,
it has to be specific 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 some countries like
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, you know, you have concerns
around this energy and, you know, basically that utilize the 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, 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 window just windows, but Linux, you know,
not anyways, but that's people's mindset. Yeah. Or, well, has to stay on like if you're in a
business situation, oh, has to stay on 24 hours a day because they's pushed 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'll also see us at the comment below, you know, basically people
told to leave the computers on because of the, especially in the early days, I think there'll be
power solutions when you're doing it, but I don't know if you could blow your motherboard. And
in those days, computers were horrendously expensive, you know, that went as cheap as they're
enough. So you didn't want to, you heard a lot of the public to see, then blow your motherboard.
And then have to save up another year to get your computer. But, you know, one of the
options, though, with, with, um, till the green room, we were, we were spoken about E-Waste,
just sort of recap about it. So I don't know, E-Waste was disposing of your old computers and stuff
and I think basically what I was saying is that Africa, we aren't really have a policy in place yet.
I think that we'll get there because of what happens to Africa. We tend to have the world's best
laws, but then you have to get implemented or this is not capacity to carry the mass. I'm pretty
sure, you're going to come up with a lot, 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 won't ever get implemented. And then the other thing we were just discussing now is sort of,
um, uh, sorry, actually, last time I tried to talk to you.
Well, um, oh, it was just about the energy crisis in terms of, just,
just, it was not there. So what we were discussing now then was, was the energy crisis around
electricity and then, which is a class. And also, I mean, energy also is supposed to be
used to oil as well, to agree, you know, and it's also a crisis around there. But I think
that, and then you were sort of talking about, you know, actually, the hardware that people are running.
And I think there's a couple of issues. One is that people often buy these machines with
that way, bigger, um, power supply units, and they need, you know, like it's 250 to 350,
the 350 watt in the 750 watt unit. And all these, you know, obviously, what happens is the
manufacturers, or the distributors are keen to sell you the 750 watt, because more expensive
to make more money. Um, but you like, really need that. You know, you get all these gamers that
maybe they need it if they're running one of the fancy graphic hardware and stuff. Therefore,
it's just overkill, you know, you get gas buying these cases with all these fashion LEDs and,
yeah, and it just draws more power from them, from the units. Yeah, it ends up, I mean,
I think that's an aspect of greeting computing that, you know, if you should sort of
come, uh, consume it home. And what can you do about it? And let's, you know, just make sure
that you're only bar is much, you know, the machine should have as much power as you need to to
power 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 just had to have one with that open side and
the fashion lights. So, I, uh, so there we go. There's my contribution. I can change up a little bit.
But, uh, best way, but 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 shouldn't put some of the onus on the,
on 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're going 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 at the end. But why should we have to be totally
fitting, uh, footing that cost when it should be, like I say, end of life? Or have a, I noticed that
in my research that HP has quite a good program for refurbishers. So, you can refurbish these,
you know, they've got a set of standards and people can, because I, I was a big proponent of refurbished
PCs coming out of businesses, you know, refurbing them up and then selling them to home users.
And then it was just fine for them. I actually have one right here on my desk. Nice little, uh,
HP compact, uh, small form factor that came out of an office. And it's, uh, it didn't,
done my, uh, my kids well here for three or four years. Yeah. And, um, but anyway, yeah, like I say,
just to design them with end of life and 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,
you know, on the, uh, on the hardware. Just on those, uh, they also have some of these refurbages,
they're thick, but they tend to be these brand name machines. And then, like, let's still have
interesting spins of it. 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,
are you sort of say, well, you know, why would I spend the money on this refurbishing? It's not that
much of a discount. You know, in the already lack of about like a two years old something. So,
you sort of, you know, it's just a bit bizarre. I don't know whether you find it the same
then Canada or not. No, I think they're actually they're pretty reasonable. And for the price
at pay for the base machine, if I needed to throw in an extra, you know, a hard, a larger hard drive,
or a DVD burner, whatever. It was, um, yeah, it was pretty cost effective. And, uh, 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 thin clients, right? When they were in the business area,
they didn't have a DVD writer. Uh, and they just had a basic hard drive. And, um,
yeah, so that's, that was my, my, my experience with that. And also, um, on that, on that note,
there's also another side of things like we could talk about, um, I talked about the need to
power down for updates. And Intel has this B Pro technology. Have you rid of that mark? No, no,
or it allows you. Okay. So, it started out on their laptops and on their, um,
Centrino processors. And now it's available for desktops. So it actually allows patches and
upgrades be downloaded if the, 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, uh, yeah,
so I think that's a pretty cool technology that, uh, you know, you can actually buy that in addition.
You can look for that particular specification on your processor. Go understand,
but stuff, uh, I don't know, because a lot of the, the thing that people are complaining about,
no, you know, you got some guy who worked out how much a little red light LED light on your TV screen,
how much energy it uses. And it stays on all the time with your emotes and stuff. So,
I always think this team has a good idea eventually.
Tonight, uh, tonight, once you sort of start producing one mess and a lot, and there's a mess
adoption of it. Actually, it's not, I don't quite a bit, but as far as it's still better than leaving
your machine on, you know, right? Yeah, I'm not quite sure, but it also seems like as a
nice solution for, um, you know, for the whole event as you get in on. And initially,
of course, it's going to be an event as the expense, if I don't, don't, don't, don't, don't
that, or we, you know, are the range of most people, because our sell it's business,
it's open and processing, but it should come down and feature, you know?
Well, apparently it's been out for a couple of years on top, but, uh, yeah, so it'll be interesting
to see, um, how it's chance, you know, chance, you know, bringing how they transcend over to the
desktop platform. But, uh, one of the things you also talked about, and this is what tends to
happen, yeah, I think, and, well, at least what we do with the old machines, you know, with Linux,
instead of recycling them, throwing them away, and that kind of stuff, you can, you know,
you can basically tune them into sort of embedded devices or dedicated appliances or some top,
um, you know, using as firewalls or routers or, yeah, a whole bunch of them, even as, um,
for our servers, you know, you just put something like three nails or, well, open file
on there, and the way you go, it's got to make sure, only issue, of course, is that
up to the lessons of the hardware, so, you know, if you got like, I had the e-discs and
next few years, I'm going to be in here and then they start failing, you can't really replace
them. But I think the biggest challenge there, normally is that, is all the machines, you know,
it's, it's more the cases that there's a biggen bulky, you know, because everything just gets smaller,
and it just look ugly. Yeah, so the biggest challenge there is more getting them to a smaller
form factory machine and making them look, yeah, I just had sort of refurbishing them,
and then they were able to use them as, as, as dedicated devices, or even, you know,
up Linux, terminal server, clients, that kind of stuff. So I think that's where also we're
open source and software can help a lot, you know, because everybody's customizing and building
things with different architectures, you know, you can do interesting things with them, which
you can't really do with, with local Windows-based operating system. Right. And the other thing I
wanted to talk about was, again, but it was 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, 9 out of 10 computers. And of course, that goes to less power draw.
It, again, less e-waste, less, you know, the, the lab itself, you don't have to
cool, because, you know, how older PCs generate a lot of heat. Yeah. And so you're not paying
to the air conditioning costs and so on. But I just think there's a lot of benefit to that as
well. Yeah, I'm 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 and the data center, you know, for
green computing is to use virtualization. And once again, I think, you know, Linux has the an 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, and I've got a good idea, I think it's, that's, I mean,
you know, I've talking to clients in the advising and this kind of stuff. You know, rather than
the first place to start is looking at the server room. Rather than sort of going to the,
the desktop clients and sort of changing things there, because that also, you know, impacts on people
and people on only the biggest issue and any system change. Whereas in the server,
I mean, hopefully you only got a few systems admins. You worry about that.
Right. So I know that your 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 do in all of your, your independent and fully functional and only
requiring a monitor keyword amounts of each at each station and it can result in power savings
of like up to 80%. Yeah. And the other, um, the other thing too on green computing, there's another
move, uh, um, it's a boat, I guess, and that is switching people, you know, at work instead of
everybody having a desktop, but switching them to laptops. And, uh, so because laptops now are so
much more energy efficient. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, there's a, there's a record desktop.
I'm with the whole laptop store and it's energy efficiency. Also, see, you know, with the process,
again, so much more powerful. I mean, the emergence of like the notebooks 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 speech, digital tool or, um, or process word process of documents, you can actually do that on
these, the much lower process, the much lower power machines, you know, and the whole arm processes
coming out. There's also another advantage of Linux and open source, um, opening 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, until at-and-process, I think it's, uh, we're reading some of the written arm
now, it's going to sort of start replacing the entire atom process on a lot of these notebooks.
Um, so yeah. So I think it's, you know, what you're saying there about sharing machines
is one that also goes with this desktop virtualization. I don't know, one of our clients, you know,
we virtualizing the, the work stations. Um, so then you have less PC, especially if you got,
you know, it's like a hotel system, uh, you know, like so you only have seven people in the office at
anyone time. Otherwise people aren't in class, they're kind of stuff. So they can just log in and then
launch their, they're particular virtual machine and work away at that, you know. So you get to
actually share machine, but yeah, you see, we share the operating system as such. So yeah,
you know, there's a lot of interesting things that you can do with it. All right. So Mark, let's just
recap what we cover 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, uh, the fact that
we felt it wasn't really required any longer to leave your computers on 24, 7. It was kind of,
uh, I think it's a myth now, especially with the UPSs. Uh, now, you know, empower search protectors,
like you had mentioned, that back in the day, it was a concern about getting a search for your
computer. And, um, as well, we talked about, uh, 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,
um, applications and firewalls, uh, big application servers out of them because Linux runs on stuff
it's a little less demanding. Anything to add, Mark, to that? You know, we just touched on, uh,
virtualization. Um, yeah, this desktop virtualization, which is sort of becoming sort of quite prominent
now, uh, server virtualization has been, you know, the sort of favorite topic of the day for a while now.
And I think that's sort of settling down and the technologies are maturing this and not the
desktop virtualization is just becoming quite important. Um, yeah, and then also, you know,
we talked a little bit about, uh, I think some of the advantages that open source hasn't
whole green computing field, because we run on far more architectures than, you know, Windows does
especially like the armed processes. And I think Windows or Mark's face is a big challenge there.
And not only that, that also has a big challenge and, you know, I mean, I keep in Windows
XPLR so many for the purpose of running around networks, you know, even though the one that
is killer law for 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 XPLR and it's,
you know, and clearly they've got a problem because they can't have a Linux, you can take
components out, you can add components and we can recompile the kernel and we're not worried about
people running or taking that operating system, running around a more powerful machine.
And so when there's all of these approach issues around it, that's causing it to have problems with
this whole green computing thing. And quite frankly, I think they're going to be able to
to cut it in the whole green computing market. So that's a great advantage for open source there.
And you 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. I mean, don't do your face.
You know, oh yeah, you know, in a little of a, you know, worst economic decisions that's
9, 29, you know, and the power company needs to increase tariffs was applied to the
regulator for increasing tariffs by 34%. And that's only the instrument increase because the
vehicle needs another lot of 25% or something on top of that later. You know, and it's just,
I mean, it could be frustrating because it's fewer incompetence and lack of planning on the side of
the, you know, the parasitally. And what's even worse, you know, all these economies that
truck them all out in there, you're an unfortunate we have to do this. And of course, you know,
oh, no, we need passage otherwise we have a bit like screwed, you know, it's added. But the fact
is you want to see some flipping hedge roll, you know, or some like be taken out for public
flugging, you know, the good old day that took the gas into the, into the courtyard and they've
bloody, you know, during and quartering one of them and hanging them and all of that, everybody could
look, you know, you know, you feel that's a mighty pay for the cocker, you know, sorry for
that. But no, essentially what's happening in the modern world, you know, is that the
managed on this business don't accept responsibility for the actions and the consequences
zero, but they want us to pay the costs. And I think that's where you know, the public
is really getting frustrated with that. Yeah, I still get the bonuses and I still think
they're done a good job when they talk the NBA talk and, you know, claim how, you know,
how clever they are in management and has not default. But, yeah, as you can hear, I get
me quite worked up about it because it's obviously has a major economic impact on inflation rates.
And it once power goes up for 34 percent, food prices go up, you know, everything else goes up.
So, you know, it's a major problem in the answer, Africa. I mean, that's also, it's going to be an
incentive around for cooperating to sort of start looking at reducing the power consumption.
And especially in the most cooperating, unless you like a manufacturing institution where you
got a big machine running or whatever, yeah, my scope is the service based on 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 arts industry for the next couple of years now, it's energy fishing
computing, which once again plays into the, the big advantage that it has for, 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 the, I was, we have a big deployment in Brazil
and in there they've had power rationing because 90 percent of their hydroelectric, or their
power comes from hydroelectric generation. They've had a lower rainfall, so they haven't
had the water to to maintain the system. And as well, in Ecuador, same thing. So, I think this topic
of green computing can, 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 found this
interesting list sort of technical discussion, but I think nonetheless, an important discussion
and something which, you know, needs to be considered with all an 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 I look forward to doing our next episode together. Excellent stuff.
Look at all the chats you like that. She has everybody. Yeah, bye now.
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