hardware recycling

[Jamon Camisso]

Paul Nash wrote:
>> ! The folks in Haiti (or Rwanda, or Chile,
>> or) would ROCK with a network made outta dat !
> 
> 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").

Not useless, see below.

> 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.
> 
> 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.

Perfect, 100mbit or gigabit is important.

> 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.

But they are not when you use them as thin clients or with xdmcp. They 
are as fast as your server and network.

Jamon
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