8 Jul
2004
8 Jul
'04
9:58 a.m.
On Jul 8, 19:10, Jules Richardson wrote:
I believe the laws are changing fairly soon here so
that it costs
money
to dispose of unwanted computer equipment. I'm not
sure how such
charity
organisations will be hit when they have to pay to
dispose of any
bits
which are donated and they find to be unsuitable or
non-working.
It's hitting now. We have too many monitors (anyone want a
not-very-good mnonitor?) and some crap even the charities don't want.
Therefore we have a skip (dumpster) outside. In years past, we had an
ordinary skip once every year or two -- the "topless" sort you see full
of building rubble and garden refuse -- and CompServ staff used to
place things in it carefully and watch people removing things from it
to reuse. This was a good thing; it kept the audience amused, it
preserved some interesting "stuff", it let things be recycled instead
of putting them in landfill, and it saved a lot of space in the skip so
CompServ only had to hire one instead of two :-)
On one occasion, when I was still finishing my degree up the hill at
CompSci, my tutor (now a senior professor), his colleague, myself and
two other students , emptied the entire skip, spread the contents
across the car park, and spent a couple of hours sorting it. We had
quite a large audience most of the time.
Now, alas, that's illegal. There are too many regulations about
disposal of electrical waste, electrical safety testing, and
liabilities, so we are required to have a totally enclosed skip that's
padlocked. Nowadays we would have to rely on the grapevine to let
interested parties know in advance so they can intercept items of
interest between the back door and the skip. Not that we would be so
irresponsible as to allow any dangerous items, eg terminal servers,
hubs, or PCs to go astray, of course.
Bringing this back to what Jules mentioned specifically, we're not
allowed to put monitors in the skip. They have to go somewhere else to
be properly disposed of, at ?15 a pop (pun intended).
Uh huh! Personally I'd find 100Mbit to be handy
between a couple of
my
modern machines just because I shift a lot of large
images around -
but
the 10Mbit serves me quite well otherwise.
Same here. Indeed, some of the older machines in my collection that do
have 100baseTX (or in a couple of cases 100baseFX, 100Mbps FDDI, or
155Mbps ATM) can't drive the network at much more than 15-20Mbps. And
since only a couple of devices at home use wireless, 802.11g is more
than adequate for any practical purpose.
--
Pete Peter Turnbull
Network Manager
University of York