Something else to consider is that presumably, in some of these cases, the work would eventually be done 'in-house' anyway. So by contributing to a distributed project, you might be helping to prevent the procurement (and therefore manufacturing) of many new 'in-house' servers - thus making a significant net resource/energy saving.
Additionally, for the likes of fold...@home, there are further significant moral and practical considerations - the energy/resources saved if we could prevent or cure conditions such as Alzheimer's disease, cystic fibrosis, cancer, etc would be immense, and would surely dwarf the computing power used by the distributed clients. And the ethical justification for contributing to potentially life-saving research is obviously quite strong. Personally, I wasn't running such a client before coming across this thread, but will now give fold...@home a try, so thanks. PS - as someone speculated earlier in the thread, I am one of those people using an old, comparitively inefficient box as a server. Is there any kind of consensus on whether it's more environmentally friendly to buy a new 'green' machine and trash the old one, or to keep the old one going while it still works? I've been suspecting the latter, but not really sure. Thanks. -- oktup ------------------------------------------------------------------------ oktup's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=1117 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=63681 _______________________________________________ discuss mailing list discuss@lists.slimdevices.com http://lists.slimdevices.com/mailman/listinfo/discuss
