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Online Hardware Swap-Meet
ShadowRayven wrote to us about a cool service called freeboxen: "Freeboxen is an online community for sharing computer hardware. Many of us have old, unused PC hardware sitting around. Why not give it to someone who wants it? Freeboxen makes it easy to post your hardware and give it to a thankful recipient. You can also use Freeboxen to claim the hardware that people are giving away."
yeah -- i suppose it'll remain to be seen whether hundreds/thousands of new users will serve the purposes of such a site well (depends, really, on how generous the /. demographic is...) see, we have a website sorta like this locally -- most likely, many of you living in the bay area have heard of it (craigslist) with increasing volume from the local "hip" weeklies and whatnot... turns out the folks reading these weeklies are just a bit *too* hip to take a model based on community/sharing and turn it into a minature antique market -- where prices on whatever you might want to purchase were of the "take it away, i don't need it, variety" we're now seeing the "my junk is gold" user, (not to mention the college kids who are taking furniture off the street and selling it as "used" to fund beer runs, etc -- a cute idea, but shameful abuse of craigslist.)
what i'm saying here (ie, how it's applicable) is that services are only going to benefit from a greater user base if that base matches a balance necessary to such a model -- meaning, that there must be people who want to get stuff, and others who want to give.
as the internet lately seems to have been overtaken more and more by some mad mob mentality (post-93, 94, anyone?) obeying the theory that "people on computers in great numbers are infintely stupider" (don't believe it? go witness collective stupidity that overruns holzer's original "truisms" in her Please Change Beliefs work.) I have little hope for such a site to survive as a useful resource given greater numbers of traffic.
sorry, the glass is half empty, and the fuckers getting drunk on paper profits are pissing in it.
fisfhcuerk.
what? i can't say fuck?
Inspired by the free yellow bicycles of Amsterdam (which you can just pick up on the street corner and ride around), the YNC takes donations of hardware, mostly old 486's, fixes them up, installs linux on them, and gives them away for free for use either as NAT servers and firewalls (so people may have multiple machines of any OS on a single network connection) and as Linux user workstations.
I gave my venerable old 486 to them. Like George Washington's axe, it started life as a 386, then got a new microprocessor, motherboard, CPU, case, memory and hard disk before finally going to the YNC.
Note that unlike some operating systems out there, Linux runs just fine on a 486 - I was using it as a web server on mine and could run the server and XWindows at the same time and never noticed any performance problems. Windows 95 was a dog on the same machine.
They also plan to build free internet kiosks in neighborhoods. You'd just be able to walk up to a weather-sealed machine and start browsing at no cost. I've heard the founder has one of these outside his house. What they'd do is hang off the DSL connection inside neighboring homes and businesses, perhaps through wireless.
They also give lessons on setting up firewalls and such, and go around giving public talks on their activities.
They have chapters in Santa Cruz and San Francisco, California, as well as Japan. I'll probably set one up in Maine if my home purchase there comes through.
-- Could you use my software consulting serv
Modems (2400 to 56K)
486 motherboards
Toasted 486 cpu's (from overclocking just a bit too much!)
Monochrome monitors with patterns long burnt into 'em
even 14 or 15" color monitors
Buttloads of old network cards
network cable with just a few too many kinks...
keyboards with sticky keys (but no one knows why...)
Mice with encoders that skip every other count
old copies of DOS or Windoze 3.1/95/95SE.
and the list goes on.
Feels like a walk through a computer museum! But it's really cool, 'cause somewhere out there is someone who really wants or needs this stuff!
--
Vote Homer Simpson for President!
If you haven't been to one, you are missing out. You can get great deals on computer and electronics junk. Last time I was there I bought all the cables I needed at the time and a really nice case for my laptop and spent less than $30 total. Some people like to hang around towards the end of the day when vendors reduce their prices or give stuff away to get rid of it.
I wil be there manning the booth for my company. We have a ton of old equipment to get rid of. If you see a stack of 150 mac classics, stop by and say 'hi'!
Okay, they have a website where you can get free hardware if you don't have some. But without a computer, how do you access their website? How do you send an email to the guy offering it? Maybe we need another website to ... uh, wait ...
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