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Wood PCs For A Nepalese School
An Anonymous Coward writes: "The BBC runs a story about a Nepalese teacher who collects
old computer parts to set up the first computer-equipped school in
Nepal. They assemble the parts into wooden boxes! If you have old parts left, maybe you can donate something, too."
Wooden keyboard, wooden ram... looked nice. The only problem was....it wooden work!
I don't. However, I may have some wooden boxes.
Sig (appended to the end of comments I post, 54 chars)
I'd suggest:
(1) Gathering your stuff to send
(2) Packing carefully
(3) Finding out how much shipping will cost
(4) Send that amount of money
Reports of my deaf have been greatly exaggerated.
So I just read the article, I come back and saw a few comments had been posted at they were all a bunch of wise-ass remarks about the wooden cases. WTF!?!
Ok, check it out people, this guy deserves props of the highest magnitude. He's out in the middle of no where. His home is poorer than the poorest part of the US, hell, they didn't even get a phone until a few years ago, now they have one.
Did he let that stop him? No!
HE went out, got a bunch of old computers and began building working units.
He hit a roadblock, namely the fact his village didn't have any power, so you know what. This TEACHER went out and set up his OWN POWER generators in a nearby stream.
This guy's improving his home. He's single-handly turning in into something from our 1700's into something from the early 1990's. That a big freakin' technological jump and something he should be commended for. All you assholes need to show a little admirination (and respect) for what this gentleman and his village have done.
If I had the cash (read: not a poor student) I'd buy this guy a GSM hook-up myself.
I was really surprised: a lot of stupid jokes in comments. Probably you -- people who enjoy self-made wooden jokes about wooden cases -- do not unserstand what is really poor country. I'm Russian (thanks God I live in Finland now working for Nokia) and -- believe me -- 95% of people in Russia think that $100/month (one hundred dollars per month) is very good salary. Most of these people cannot hope to get even half of this. And I guess: Nepal isn't as rich as Russia :-) :-(
When I read this, I couldn't help but think of all the inevitable comments that come up about bloat/speed in KDE/GNOME/Mozilla/StarOffice/Whichever piece of software hits your hot button.
Someone always belittles the complainers and points out how cheap memory/processors/HD is these days.
Something like this reminds us of how fortunate we are and how spoiled we have become.
It's also a pointed example of why monopolies whose software must run on the biggest and newest hardware cannot be left to own the entire computing field.
Way to go guys. If I wore a hat, it would be off to you.