hardware recycling

[James Knott]

David J Patrick wrote:
> On 9/12/06, Paul Nash <paul-fQIO8zZcxYtFkWKT+BUv2w at public.gmane.org> 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").
> 
> I recently blogged about a local school teacher who went to Nigeria,
> this summer, to help out with the schools there. They were using 286s
> and their "big gun" was a 386 ! for their "computer class, the
> students had a sheet of paper with a computer keyboard printed on it !
> linuxcaffe, when we first opened, was running (smoothly !) using all
> PIIs, and although we were lucky enough to be able to upgrade past
> these humble boxes, I know from experience that this level of
> technology is far from junk.
> I don't believe that this scholl in Nigeria would see a fleet of PIIs
> and a P4 host, all configured with the latest and greates linux, would
> be seen as "dumping". A single PII laptop would have revolutionized
> the entire operation, and here in toronto, you could pick one up at a
> garage sale for $30.
> I, for one, do not think that efforts to revitilize and deploy our
> "junk" computers, in less fortunate parts of the world, would be taken
> as an insult.
> djp
> 
> PS. bubble not yet bursted

One concern would be power line voltage.  Many computers sold here only
run on 120V power.  What's the line voltage in Africa?

--
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