hardware recycling

[Evan Leibovitch]

Paul Nash wrote:
> Umm, I hate to burst your bubble, but ...
>
> I come from South Africa, and have done a lot of work in underdeveloped areas there and in the rest of Africa.  People there do not appreciate being used as a dumping ground for useless junk ("here, Windows '95 is good enough for your needs").
>   
The obvious desire to not want someone else's hand-me-downs needs to be 
balanced with the fact that, with so few resources around, the choice is 
often old hardware or no hardware. And Windows95 (and its class of 
hardware), while far removed from the bleeding edge of the developed 
world, is still often better than no computer at all. The nice thing 
about using open source is that you don't have to totally make do with 
old technology, as current versions of open source software often run 
fine on older hardware. Boxes that may not be able to run anything from 
Microsoft newer than NT can use the most current Linux just fine.

> There is a lot of pretty advanced work going on (I build the first 3G cellular data network there long before anyone had deployed it in North America).  The first mobile WiMax network rollout is going on in Ghana.
>   
Sure there's some work going on. But there are still plenty of schools 
with no computers in them -- then again, the electricity to run them can 
be overly expensive and not available everywhere. I have good hopes for 
the OLPC program, which strives to provide current technology at low price.

> Schools with computer labs need (and have) up-to-date systems and software, usually WinXP (yetch), Win2003 (yetch), Ubuntu (guess where that effort is based?).  They have 100M or gigE networks.
>   
How many schools have computer labs?

> Folk there are also throwing out p2 and p3 machines as obsolete and useless.  It's just aging hackers like me who see them as potential FreeBSD servers, firewalls, or furniture.
>
> Of course, Haiti and Chile might be different ...
>   
Paul, even within Africa there are countries that do better than others, 
and you sure as heck can't compare South Africa with the rest of the 
continent.

- Evan

--
The Toronto Linux Users Group.      Meetings: http://gtalug.org/
TLUG requests: Linux topics, No HTML, wrap text below 80 columns
How to UNSUBSCRIBE: http://gtalug.org/wiki/Mailing_lists