3 ms·
Why not? When we recently opened our Hackerspace a friendly e-waste dealer gave us 10 SFF Pentium 4 1.8Ghz Compaqs. He said they're not worth the effort of sell
by angusgr 15y ago
Why not? When we recently opened our Hackerspace a friendly e-waste dealer gave us 10 SFF Pentium 4 1.8Ghz Compaqs. He said they're not worth the effort of selling any more, and to let him know if we need more. He had palette-loads.
Last week my coworker bought an ex-government ultra-small-form-factor Dell PentiumD 3Ghz for $30 in an auction, they were selling dozens that way in single quantities for between $20-$40. 3Ghz PC with 1Gb of RAM!
A friend showed me the disposal tunnel at the local unversity, they have palettes stacked 1m high with old Pentium4-era computers and old CRT monitors waiting to be picked up for recycling. The university pays for them to be taken away.
I'm in Australia, but I expect if you look around most developed countries you'll find this is the situation - old computers all over the place scrapped, resold or shipped off-shore. The developing world is where a lot of those computers end up, so in those countries a $25 USB-stick-computer with no excess shipping cost may still be a better option than paying for shipping a crate of old machines. However, I guarantee you there is no shortage of old hardware out there.
- greendestiny 15y agoThere are many, many thousands of school kids. Once you started putting those kind of demands on the market they wouldn't be going for free anymore. Not to mention the quality control problems.
- angusgr 15y agoI think you've missed my point a bit. My point is that if all that is needed for schools to expand CS education is cheap commodity computer hardware, it already exists. If educational "demands on the market" don't exist for P4-era used PCs now, are they necessarily going to exist for the USB stick PC?
- greendestiny 15y agoThe availability of hardware on a completely ad-hoc basis gives nothing for developers of software and curriculum to target. The potential deployment of thousands of these devices to children at once and the awareness and cooperation of the education department would completely change what you could do with it.
- pbhjpbhj 15y agoPerhaps the problem with a big black box P4 is the infrastructure requirements. Mind you they're not a lot smaller if you still need a flat screen and keyboard but I can see it being easier to find space in a school ... you also get a system that is going to be usable at home/library for a lot of children in more developed countries/regions.
- technomancy 15y agoWhat you're describing works great on a small scale if you've got a few interested geeks to help out, but as soon as you have to support it in the large, homogeneity becomes very important.