[RULE] Sell RULE computers on ebay?

[Marco Fioretti]

On Sat, Jan 04, 2003 17:28:22 at 05:28:22PM -0600, Josh Miller (joshdmiller at earthlink.net) wrote:
> What about digging up old computers, installing RULE, and donating them or
> selling at a nominal price to the target audience, people who can't afford
> computers in the first place.  I've seen old monitors and printers at

As stated in my other reply, this is not a task for the RULE project
as such. There are already plenty of organizations doing this that one
can join, and of course other can be created, or it can be done
privately. I do hope to see RULE actually used to give away or sell
computers soon, of course.

> places like goodwill for anywhere from 5-20 dollars.  Unfortunately we
> couldn't provide anything like internet access or video gaming, but for
> kids that need a computer to do school work, it might be an interesting
> idea.
It is what made the discussion start, see RH7.2 archives, jan/feb
2002: to provide the tools to make this happen. One last note: video
gaming was never in our radar, and it cannot be, as it requires
powerful hardware regardless of the OS. OTOH, Internet access is
definitely possible and very useful with a text email program and a
simple graphic browser. Especially for education: of course, you
cannot run that Flash5 animation to rebuild a Neanderthal skeleton
(www.becominghuman.org) (**), but research and much much more is still
at hand.

The idea that you need the latest HW and SW to learn (before college,
at least) is like saying that you need a Mont Blanc gold-plated pen,
and the money to buy it, to cross the right squares on a multiple
answers test. Sad, misleading, dangerous: it's one of the things that
make schools accept proprietary SW donations, and perpetuate the
dependance.

Older HW can do Internet research, it just "filters" flash ads and pop
ups, and forces the student to turn off the SW mp3 player until the
homework is finished: all very good things for educational use, if you
ask me, all functions quite hard to add with more featured SW.

Sorry for this last rambling, you just triggered something that really
bothers me: there are several of those organizations already giving
away computers to schools that pretend "PCs with at least Win98,
otherwise our students can't access the internet to study" (/catch
viruses/etc...)

	Ciao,
		Marco Fioretti

(**) which, by the way, runs just fine on this "old" PC (350MHz CPU,
128 MB RAM) because it runs latest mozilla on a RH 8.0 without GNOME,
KDE, Bluecurve, and some other ton of gadgets


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