i'm probably preaching to the choir, but it pisses me off that huge (multinational) corporations have successfully swindled the general public that personal environmentalism (eg recycling, going vegan, not using gasoline powered cars) is gonna save the planet when they (the corps) are the ones who've been destroying it for decades.
this is inspired by microsoft ending support for windows 10 next year despite windows 11 needing beefier specs and closing off methods for unsupported machines to run it (apple does something similar too) and 3g towers being shut down here in australia when a percentage of the population 1) lives/works in areas that 4g and 5g barely support and 2) can't afford a new phone.
How about the way that big Internet corporations fill their data centers with servers, which they get at a special low price in exchange for agreeing to destroy rather than resell them after three years?
Embodied energy rapidly begins to outweigh energy actually consumed by the servers, and the industry's own predictions call for data centers to consume more electricity within a few years than the whole world uses today. Where that's supposed to come from I can't imagine.
WD and other major brand NAS memory product companies are notoriously hoardy and childlike in defending their habits, per what custom they accept in direct sales and in what quantities past a certain mechanical magdrive's size, usually 24TB-28TB.
Any massproduced data magdrive bigger than 24TB and most 24TB and greater by capacity, don't have per cost listed on their own store site and you must inquire directly simply to ask the retail price.
I did it twice and was rejected for both request and purchase as I only wanted two, or one in the first case. Form letter, in both cases; each 21 days later with the wording being nearly identical in 'their' email response.
My father worked as a corporate division VP, four ranks short of the masterseat at a major Canadian insurance company during most of the 1980s and part of the 1990's, and whether he had never gone into finance or the work he chose to pursue, he'd have considered their reasoning flawed, legally disputable and their intent morally or practically inappropriate; and he was trusted to bear the final yay-or-nay in any major contracting sale with the company he was salaried to work for, alike those that Western Digital would have instead accepted.
Imagine where my thoughts about that have gone by now, processed through my research and personal experience, because of that. My Da and I were very close, and would teach me almost anything he knew if I reckoned interest, even though I went into creative work for my bread-and-butter rather than engineering, industrial safety systems and insurance underwriting for his.
-2Paw.
@tsukkitsune i wasn't aware that even happened and now i'm mad about it too.
I just keep thinking, what if people had access to cheap third-hand powerful data-center servers, and could connect up robust, durable terminal equipment? It would really change the household and small-business computing/electronics picture from its current orientation on short-lived, opaque-to-the-user "devices".
@ShadowJonathan@tsukkitsune @fixative_xyz this
I have a bunch of old server hardware from someone who was supposed to destroy them rather than resell them, and they run absolutely fine, and I've been able to put a ton of software in them with room to spare
There's more than enough computing power in discarded server racks to allow for communal computing to happen, for people to be able to setup their own networks, but it just doesn't happen, because of things like this, because we keep technological knowledge to some few who are then paid to use it within their domain, because it's not a communal knowledge that gets applied widely
@tsukkitsune absolutely!! relatedly, i've been wanting to have a proper server rack of my own at my place that i can just fuck around with and not have to use a vps, but even used ones are too damn expensive.
and now i know why. and i hate it.