13 Oct
2000
13 Oct
'00
12:09 p.m.
Rumor has it that John Foust may have mentioned these
words:
Around here it's pretty hard to get 'em to take anything less than a
high end box for the schools. A friend said Intel donated a pile of
PII's to their local Catholic school as part of some project.
At 10:07 PM 10/12/00 -0700, Sellam Ismail wrote:
Unforch, you seem to forget not everyone lives in sillycon valley...
Our local *high* school is still 75% 486 based... they'd *kill* for some
tossed Pentiums, no matter what RAM/HD/CDROM/etc... As much as I hate having seemingly useless crap
like this, I still refuse
to throw it out. It's useful to SOMEONE.
Probably not. I'd collected most of these older PCs from the
trash from a local computer dealer. That doesn't mean they were
broken, it means he didn't want them and the customer didn't
want them. If I really need a new firewall or new utility PC,
why shouldn't I
spend $400 and get a new whiz-bang disposable eMachine from Best Buy?
I'm not
truly reformed, though. I saved a couple known-working
486/66s to revive for my three kids. They're sharing an eMachine
now, but it would be fun to have one in each kid's room. But I'm
sure that ten minutes after installation, I'll be asked by a
five-year-old why he can't get to ToonDisney.com, which requires
a browser with Flash and who knows what else.
And my answer to my 10 year old son is "because
you don't need it." Just
like my father's answer to the snowmobile use was "if you can't start it or
help fix it, you can't ride it."
If you've got people willing to prowl the net and hit companies with
requests, there's a ton of places with low end pentiums (and even some
PII's to donate). The problem is getting them to trust you to get the
internal data off.
I can't donate anything at work -- because they're afraid someone's
hi-tech prototype will end up either a science fair project for a kid or
MS will find someone with some software that got left behind on a disk
and sue.
Two weeks ago, the school superintendent asked me
where *he* could
dump old PCs. They've got too many, and their technology director
would never allow such mutts in the classroom. Have you been to a
school or a library lately?
This morning. It was *ahem* pitiful, what the kids around here are forced
to "learn" on. Oh, and our (Michigan's) Govenor just *cut* technology
funding for hardware for schools. :-(
[[ And if you don't think this is your problem (in the U.S.) - he was in
high consideration for running for President a few years back... ]]
Please.... the politics in NJ is just as bad.
Anywho, just my other side of the coin...
Roger "Merch" Merchberger
--
Roger "Merch" Merchberger --- sysadmin, Iceberg Computers
Recycling is good, right??? Ok, so I'll recycle an old .sig.
If at first you don't succeed, nuclear warhead
disarmament should *not* be your first career choice.
Bill
--
bpechter(a)monmouth.com | FreeBSD since 1.0.2, Linux since 0.99.10
| Unix Sys Admin since Sys V/BSD 4.2
| Windows System Administration: "Magical Misery Tour