Serious enough, yes - have time...well...not exactly (and to think I planted
this little seed).
>From the messages I've seen (especially this one), doing a makeover of a
school computer lab could be a very interesting problem for a group of ALE
people to attack. For a number of years I've decried the indiscriminate
dumping of computers and related equipment on schools for several reasons,
such as the lack of decent software and appropriate curricula or lesson
plans for them. When I worked for the Dept. of Energy, hundreds if not
thousands of computers got dumped in that fashion - OS-less computers. I
would love to find out where those machines are now. I have the feeling
that once the county school systems learned that it would take tens or
hundreds of dollars apiece to legally run some sort of MS OS and a typical
smattering of MS software on those boxes, they got warehoused. One of my
objections at the time (this was before Linux hit my radar) was that if they
weren't good enough for US to use, what made them good enough for anyone
else to use? I further argued that the mere presence of the donated
computers would make it harder for the schools to justify getting computers
powerful enough to adequately run current versions of [MS] desktop OS
because the purse-string-holders probably wouldn't have understood why Win95
on a 386 is a painful experience. By contrast, because I have some
"Lin-Fu," I see 386es and 486es and visualize fax/print/mail servers,
firewalls, routers, bridges, X terminals, text terminals, and nodes for
massive parallel clusters! At the DOE, right below my office was a basement
with shelves full of machines ranging from 486/33s to Pentium/100s. I bet
that at one time there might have been on the order of 100 486es, many of
them SCSI/PCI. If we had only known, we might have been able to go up
against our site contractor's Cray (ok, maybe within an order of magnitude
and only on certain types of code).
- Jeff
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Patrick [mailto:">tewkewl@mindspring.com]
> Sent: Wednesday, April 12, 2000 5:17 PM
> To: Tommie M. Jones
> Cc: ">ale@ale.org
> Subject: Re: RE: [ale] Re: Interested in Linux
>
>
>
>
> IS there anyone on the list that is serious enough about this
> to make it
> happen?
> I mean I am sure we all have at least one or two contacts at
> school and
> other orgnizations to get it rolling. We might could even
> swing talking to
> DELL or gateway. (or a penguin based company, maybe even VA)
> For a school's
> computer lab, it would be nice to have a brand new shiney
> computer running
> linux/dhcp/dns/samba/etc...... Very good publicity and hell
> it's a tax write
> off.
>
> -Patrick
>
>
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: Tommie M. Jones ">tj@psi.pair.com>
> To: ">tewkewl@mindspring.com>
> Sent: Wednesday, April 12, 2000 3:25 PM
> Subject: Re: RE: [ale] Re: Interested in Linux
>
>
> > Actually,
> > I would think if we could target Non-profit groups and
> schools that would
> > be better. That way it would:
> > 1. Make great press.
> > 2. Get a lot of different people exposed to the systems and
> maybe they
> will
> > take it back to their real jobs.
> >
> > 3. Get more volunteers. I have a hard time offering free
> services to the
> > used car salesman who ripped me off a year ago.
> >
> > As far as legal issues go. Some sort of agreement could be
> signed to
> > protect us from lawyers.
> >
> > Of course just to be safe I suggest we stay away from lawyer offices
> during
> > the Linux install Road Trip 2000 Tour.
> >
>
> --
> To unsubscribe: mail ">majordomo@ale.org with "unsubscribe ale"
> in message body.
>
--
To unsubscribe: mail ">majordomo@ale.org with "unsubscribe ale" in message body.