> All the discussions of nifty hardware possibilities, along with my > slightly flower-child "whole shebang" view, leads me to ask folks > about their larger computing ecology and how it has impacted your > choice of new devices, whether desktops, laptops, phones, servers, > media (tivo, appletv, ...) and so on.
If ecology in this case means the interaction of organisms with their environment, then personally I find the question excellent and my experience therewith frustrating in that ecology would dictate that I eliminate the old-school custom dual Opteron mid-tower box at home and the ageing PPC Macintosh G5 (dual 1.8's) and substitute a laptop for energy conservation/efficiency. I try to use the current white Macbook for as much work as possible for this reason. I pale at the thought of how much electricity is used on the average weekend in Santa Fe by fleets of Pentium/Core 2 Duo desktops idling at the various offices in town, to say nothing of the fact that during the week said machines CPU utilization is often < %10 while they are used largely as input devices (Excel, Word, IE7, Firefox, etc.) rather than for processing (wish they all ran the BOINC client!). I think the holistic viewpoint that you refer to Owen is wonderful in that it invites a conversation about equanimity and creativity. I struggle with the solipsistic "what do I (the human) do next to meet my computing wants/needs?" rather than "how do I make smart energy consumption choices for myself and my community (community of Life which includes everything from arachnids to zebras)?" Having worked at two places in Santa Fe replete with scientists, it strikes me that great efficiency of mentation (all for just a few calories!) frequently occurs in environments that are shockingly inefficient from a thermodynamic viewpoint; I refer to the buildings in which I've worked which are anything but "green". At lunch recently I overheard a group of people complaining that the new convention center in Santa Fe wasn't a green building, shortly after I'd reviewed some plans for another new commercial building with a miniscule server room. To return to computing ecology, I wish I had an answer, other than trying to recycle waste heat from the average server room and re-use it to heat office spaces in the winter. With bioinformatics, whether someone is performing Euler short-read assembly on 400 MB of fasta data or wondering if the Sybase database with 27 million rows is going to fall over today, it all results in lots of waste heat from computers using lots of electrical power with a number of runs failing and having to be re-worked for various reasons. If only we had a Peltier noise transducer mechanism that converted server room noise into electricity...:-) At home I've deployed the NSLU2-based file server, which albeit slow is reliable and uses far fewer watts than a mid-tower equivalent, but at the expense of the nice array of five 3.5" drives with a ZFS file system would offer (did that at my last job and left the niftier file server there). I try to use the laptop as much as possible and ignite the desktops and their 80-120mm fans only when I need them for a specific task, such as heating the garage in wintertime to keep our felines warm while the BOINC client pulls data from ClimatePrediction.net! Supposedly Google has a proprietary evaporative cooling system they are using to cool their server rooms which I find very interesting; http://www.google.com/corporate/datacenters/step2.html Anyway, I'm similarly interested in other people's thoughts about the larger question of personal, professional or otherwise computing ecology. -Nick ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org