On Sat, Dec 12, 2009 at 11:32 AM, Teofilo teofilowiki@gmail.com wrote:
How about moving the servers (5) from Florida to a cold country (Alaska, Canada, Finland, Russia) so that they can be used to heat offices or homes ? It might not be unrealistic as one may read such things as "the solution was to provide nearby homes with our waste heat" (6).
I imagine the average Wikimedia user is more concerned with whether his requests are optimized to be fast than with whether they're optimized to be environmentally friendly. Or, to add a coat of greenwash, remember that power consumption is going to be greater if you have more latency.
If the WMF had $130 million lying around, I would rather they used it to actually serve their mission.
I think Domas hit the nail on the head in May: http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/foundation-l/2009-May/051656.html