Kermit always sends, receives data, always did with my Tandy and 300 kbps modem and later 1200 baud US Robotics. Do you think a competent NASA engineer or contractor would let a server running NT with MS TCP, RADIUS, etc. loose in space? Seriously, now. Lives are at stake.
One time I got so worked up about zany IT bosses I wrote a story about greed and cleverness in the corporate workplace. I got the novella published on portlandwriters.com
If Jackson does manage to direct The Hobbit he should have fresh, younger faces this will add an element of age with respect to the trilogy. Instead of Ian Holm as Bilbo maybe someone half his age (remember Bilbo turned 100 in Fellowship. Instead of Ian McKellan as Gandalf maybe...<insert actor most resembling Gandalf here>
In many ways kermit and its ymodem/zmodem counterparts are better then TCP/IP. Kermit is fast for BBS style transactions, simple and has no exploits! (L4m3 deprecated DOS stuff notwithstanding)
Who's down for developing a ppp-centered, kermit-over-IP protocol for places communicating by telephone only? I wrote a whitepaper on this and sent it to the Redhat/K12 newsletter.
Does anyone have easy to decipher conversion specs for baud xfer and UART? I've speculated most of the work is in hardware translation at the local level (send/receive from users end). I'd say bring in existing codes but projects like CKermit are too encumbered by Columbia elites or whatever school it is with their own agenda. Engineers and phreakers alike drop me a line. I'm in NW U.S.
Not enough young folk are included in the "traditional" venues so they form their own ad hoc coder groups which is partly normal because nobody but them can keep their pace. Yet the schools aren't adopting open source like they should because schools are still selling out to Microsad. "Can't fight against the youth." Indeed.
Inveigling. Yep that's a word. Too much "on the take" or proprietary software design is pissing off too many talented developers. Granted for the true open source enthusiast there's an acceptable amount of proprietary interface at the Application Layer a group may wish to utilize if they want to protect a substantial amount of their interests. The problem is some software like SuSE linux (8.1) or Redhat linux (Valhalla) gets too complicated for its own good. Not just too many bells and whistles but spyware everyone publicly denies is spyware like kde's.DCOP-server and aspects to ncurses.
In summary the ways and means to open systems technology like nfs, autoconf and cvs to name a few is getting old and younger strains of software both original and invigorating in scope are peaking around the corner to flush the crap down the drain so to speak. Ultimately those youth who communicate their development deeds via the Web means more/. sites! Yea!
"The only features required would be a blog of sorts and a photo album"
It's also constant dialogue with the LAN/site administrator(s). I spoke with a local representative about setting up a registered site with blog and Web/CVS update abilities. The resident tech was hesitant to divulge information to me every step of the way despite my having prior volunteer relations at this facility. Understandable given network security. Not so understandable from the perspective of 1) I'm a contributing volunteer and have contributed code before. 2) I want to identify existing comm protocols like TCP/IP and proper session handling (that's not MS TCP, sorry folks). One primary goal is to get content delivery to patrons of this facility with known data sets of origin and delivery.
They're running CITRIX/Windows 2000 with a Linux back office.
Content management or the settling of processes and accounts for developers and organizations is a multi-step process arrayed or tiered across many departments. My math background says this is degrees of separation between ppl who make decisions (a.k.a. poltics) and comes heavily into play.
Conversation on the table and off the record cannot be ignored even by the developer more interested in technology who wants to make a competitive product with collaborative inputs wherever a group decides they're needed yet this very developer shouldn't every time need to be the cog in the middle or broker or attache-type person who does all the thinking and engagement of a proposal. From my experience it centralizes and exposes too much of a developers hand.
What we need are more pre-standardized, pre-certified work templates or codesuites that are partially a result of shared code and part in-house proprietary approaches.
"Murky, unexplored legal quagmire or RIAA influenced revisionism?"
No, this isn't a quagmire. It isn't unexplored legal territory. We've been reading about this for years. The lawyers have been interpreting and representing for existing laws surprisingly well. Pro bonos and non-sell outs are getting ready to form new rules that take many of the old rules into account. Competitive, P2P type music industry is just around the corner. Everyone wants it. The RIAA will apply maximum litigation wherever they think copyrights are being infringed. The RIAA hawks have done just about all the revising they can.
Why did they shut down M.I.T.? It's a small group of supply-side elitists, aristocrats (bourgeoisie) and government oligarchs who don't want things to change. TOO BAD. The methods of delivering music mainstream are changing and for the better. This is a temporary setback and students, programmers, hackers etc. will find legitimate, copyright-compatible ways to deliver music sooner or later.
Technological excerpts:
"Nothing was said in the press about the secretly programmed computer chips inside the "Shouptronic" Direct Recording Electronic (DRE) voting machines in Manchester, the state's largest city.
These 200-pound systems were so easily tampered with that the integrity of the results they gave -- and George Bush was the beneficiary of their tallies -- will forever be in doubt. Consider these points:
1. The "Shouptronic" was purchased directly from a company whose owner, Ransom Shoup, had been twice convicted of vote fraud in Philadelphia.
2. It bristled with telephone lines that made it possible for instructions from the outside to be telephoned into the machine without anyone's dear knowledge.
3. It completely lacked an "audit trail," an independent record that could be checked in case the machine "broke down" or its results were challenged.
4. Roy G. Saltman, of the federal Institute for Computer Sciences and Technology, called the Shouptronic "much more risky" than any other computerized tabulation system because "You are fundamentally required to accept the logical operation of the machine, there is no way to do an independent check."
A year later, in June of 1989, Robert J. Naegele, who had investigated all computerized voting systems for New York State, warned: "The DRE (which the Shouptronic was) is still at least a year and possibly two away from what I would consider a marketable product. The hardware problems are relatively minor, but the software problems are conceptual and really major".
A source close to Gov. Sununu insists that Sununu knew from his perspective as a politician, and his expertise as a computer engineer, that the Shouptronic was prime for tampering."
IEEE, IETF, IANA... These standards groups have been around a long time & have earned major credibility for making crucial decisions at the right time.
That's really what it's all about when developing & setting standards and henceforth establishing standards groups, no? The subsequent credibility of a standards group follows the standards the group signs off on. If it had been a proprietary group like Wintel instead of J. Postel back in the early 80s we wouldn't have gotten TCP/IP and the RFC system when we did.
Therefore I think standards groups for the standards groups are needed, now more than ever. It's like oversight for oversight. We don't have a lack of standards. Far from it, we have a lack of central, accountable organization bodies made up of counselors or commissioners who transparently decide on standards. With time it is this transparency that will earn respect in the international online standards community, not bags of cash and not closed-door meetings seeking out the highest bidder we've been thru that before it doesn't work for the majority commons.
Jack Corliss theorized a lot of this stuff in the 1980s after being part of the crew that accidentally discovered the first signs of underwater thermophilic life off the Galapagos coast while on a geochemistry expedition in 1977.
8. So, to the first question: What did NSA know prior to September 11th?
. Sadly, NSA had no SIGINT suggesting that al-Qa'ida was specifically targeting New York and Washington, D.C., or even that it was planning an attack on U.S. soil. Indeed, NSA had no knowledge before September 11th that any of the attackers were in the United States.
In brief: you're being lied to by the GOP-bought, U$ media. Read the international internet newsfeeds and get the facts straight. Whether it was SIGINT or another source CIA/NSA/FBI/FAA/NORAD/awacs knew in advance and so did Bu$h's advisors. They knew as early as 2000 when the terrorists met in Malaysia and possibly prior to that.
Why/how did 9/11 happen? Because a small group of people wanted and still want to rekindle the military-industrial complex and WWIII and make money with mercs and defense contractors. Follow the dollars.
are there written protocols & procedures for this activity agreed upon by the community?
where's the oversight? who made the decision that changed the root zone? A *.int (intl. exchange) entity should mandate or govern root zone oversight, not some U$ corporate shill.
why not goto FreeGeek if you're in portland, ore. area
Re:A quick run-down of what ORBZ is (i.e. was)
on
ORBZ Shuts Down
·
· Score: 1
ORBZ never came into as widespread use as it perhaps deserved
So move on. What's stopping a person or organization commissioning policy on spam? Then they can set up a centrally managed system with pre-agreed permission hierarchies or trust metrics for continuous operations, audits, and compliance over the system?
Spam is a big problem so businesses will eventually get to their senses and put money and logistics into/dev/nulling spam in a systematic organized fashion. ORBZ (is/was it a non-profit 501(c)3?) had good protocols and HOWTO "templates" for dealing with *($^%^&!!! spam.
So basically we need clones of ORBZ at various points of presence to stop spam servers short of nuking user mailboxes, an undeniably constant problem. instead of centrally policing it should be central policies for open mail relays. In an open design model they basically sit upstream of participating organizations checking bandwidth and share results with ISPs.
the trick is how do you successfully sysadmin and manage such ORBZ clones in distributed environment?
"AltaVista was my weapon of choice until Google came along and was so much better that most net users jumped ship."
Can you cite benchmarks or code audits that validate this?
How does google get current stuff faster than altavista? Smarter webcrawlers? More efficient backend organization of xml? Better knowing when and when not to replace cached copies?
"At not even 28 years old, I'm already a lead developer and have people with twenty years more experience looking to me for coding hints and tips."
I say a lot here but I mean it concisely and sincerely because I've dealt with this and felt this way before--
Get ready to start relearning yourself. My experience primarily as an architect tells me kids in the middle school range and higher (grades 6,7,8++) are the fastest learners and come up with the best new ideas in CS.
You must mentor and apprentice to loud-mouthed or reserved but very bright kids because you were once one yourself. You should do this even if your instinct is to fear, reject or deny teaching for whatever reasons. Perhaps someone or several people took time to teach you principles of coding when you were first starting out?
The apprenticing and mentoring is very important because young people shouldn't always have to relearn & reinvent ideas the older & more experienced pretty much know but instead incorporate their own ideas. There's doing something yourself and not telling others about it (prima donna) and there's working with others.
I guess you're working in a corporation and might be comfortable there but from my perspective corporations really don't care about any of the learning stuff because they're all about bottom-line profits right now--maybe they'll change their financial tables when they learn integrating support makes money in the long term, not costing it.
Your challenge (all of ours if we wish to get out of a bad recession) as I see it is to form something independent of a corporation, bypass them entirely because they're owned and operated by shareholders, not stakeholders of opensource.
In the medieval age blacksmiths, tailors and bakers had guilds and trained apprentices and journeymen. It can't be that different from today?!
Start a guild and draft an agreement with a corporation to get paid but don't enter into a contract with the corporation or let them proscribe the standards and practices of the guild because they're only interested in supply-side economics where you get very little. If you work on an opensource project you're a guildmember in some capacity demonstrating your craft.
What, are you claiming women need a "simple visual object-oriented programming language"?? What kind of sexist bullshit is this?
I don't know. You started this one with the word sexist. I said "could ease" but it wasn't a fixed and immutable clause in the statement or an implication of anything.
This topic doesn't seem that important to/. moderation, re: "Score: 1". That's too bad since it's going to be a serious topic in the next few years.
"Most software design is lousy... if it were a bridge, no one in his or her right mind would walk across it."
The U.S. workforce is still 90+ percent male in software and network design.
Women think differently then men. According to some scientists they have more serotonin transmitters so some think they are smarter then men but do not quote me on this, verify it elsewhere...
I attended FreeBSDCon '99 in Berkeley and nowhere since then have I seen such a disproportionate ratio of women to men versus the average population (women at 50+ percent?). I think there were five women at the convention with hundreds in attendance.
These numbers are highly indicative of either a great reluctance on women's part to get into software design because it doesn't work the way they think or men who discriminate/harass them, or both. I'm tired of it and I don't think I'm alone.
A simple visual object-oriented programming language (successor to LOGO?) and a top notch GUI for Linux could ease this needed transition. Maybe a proportionate group of men and women working together cooperatively will develop this.
"good way for people to understand the difference between Open Source and Free Software."
Perhaps it is time to evolve beyond this very old argument. Others besides RMS and ESR need to define what opensource and free software is in addition to the current definitions. We need a bot/service provider to output stored definitions whenever multiple interpretations of a word come up. Print it as a local or global def. list. Wouldn't this be better then arguing about opensource and free software defs. over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over license arguments too and over and over and over...
There are places all over the country that have almost no technology and are ready to have stuff donated to them.
The key is establishing open protocols for the distribution of the used hardware. Many businesses want to let go of their old hardware but want it received by legitimate accountable districts with documentation for records. Sometimes suppliers will do the transporting at their own expense. Schools and churches can fill out requests for used hardware. There's places like FreeGeek in Portland, Ore. and Foxhill in Staten Island, NYC that are ready to go for this. Both teach classes on how to take apart, repair, and rebuild old computers. At Foxhill after certification they can sell them or put them to work in the community. Foxhill has a local area network with DSL access that members of the community use and it consists almost entirely of used 486s and Pentiums with dusty keyboards, smeared monitors, and mice with no mousepads running Debian.
I think donating used hardware is a tax write-off for businesses so they'd rather send them to the legitimate organizations then send them to the dump and get fined by landfill/DEQ/EPA for toxic disposals. I've heard the warehouses are overflowing...
Used hardware doesn't impress those that have lots of new stuff but to a district of people where many have never even used a computer or only surfed once or twice they're amazing! They eventually realize it is educational and profitable for them to fully access and build what they use. There are definitely underserved communities all over the U.S.--real victims of the often described digital divide.
My sources for information come primarily from experience as a developer.
Disclaimer: I'm affiliated with Foxhill but not with FreeGeek.
Slashdot Mirror
Kermit always sends, receives data, always did with my Tandy and 300 kbps modem and later 1200 baud US Robotics. Do you think a competent NASA engineer or contractor would let a server running NT with MS TCP, RADIUS, etc. loose in space? Seriously, now. Lives are at stake.
http://www.portlandwriters.com/Writing/nicholas_wi nlund/Flukes_Of_Nature.htm
If Jackson does manage to direct The Hobbit he should have fresh, younger faces this will add an element of age with respect to the trilogy. Instead of Ian Holm as Bilbo maybe someone half his age (remember Bilbo turned 100 in Fellowship. Instead of Ian McKellan as Gandalf maybe ...<insert actor most resembling Gandalf here>
Who's down for developing a ppp-centered, kermit-over-IP protocol for places communicating by telephone only? I wrote a whitepaper on this and sent it to the Redhat/K12 newsletter.
Does anyone have easy to decipher conversion specs for baud xfer and UART? I've speculated most of the work is in hardware translation at the local level (send/receive from users end). I'd say bring in existing codes but projects like CKermit are too encumbered by Columbia elites or whatever school it is with their own agenda. Engineers and phreakers alike drop me a line. I'm in NW U.S.
Not enough young folk are included in the "traditional" venues so they form their own ad hoc coder groups which is partly normal because nobody but them can keep their pace. Yet the schools aren't adopting open source like they should because schools are still selling out to Microsad. "Can't fight against the youth." Indeed.
Inveigling. Yep that's a word. Too much "on the take" or proprietary software design is pissing off too many talented developers. Granted for the true open source enthusiast there's an acceptable amount of proprietary interface at the Application Layer a group may wish to utilize if they want to protect a substantial amount of their interests. The problem is some software like SuSE linux (8.1) or Redhat linux (Valhalla) gets too complicated for its own good. Not just too many bells and whistles but spyware everyone publicly denies is spyware like kde's .DCOP-server and aspects to ncurses.
In summary the ways and means to open systems technology like nfs, autoconf and cvs to name a few is getting old and younger strains of software both original and invigorating in scope are peaking around the corner to flush the crap down the drain so to speak. Ultimately those youth who communicate their development deeds via the Web means more /. sites! Yea!
"The only features required would be a blog of sorts and a photo album" It's also constant dialogue with the LAN/site administrator(s). I spoke with a local representative about setting up a registered site with blog and Web/CVS update abilities. The resident tech was hesitant to divulge information to me every step of the way despite my having prior volunteer relations at this facility. Understandable given network security. Not so understandable from the perspective of 1) I'm a contributing volunteer and have contributed code before. 2) I want to identify existing comm protocols like TCP/IP and proper session handling (that's not MS TCP, sorry folks). One primary goal is to get content delivery to patrons of this facility with known data sets of origin and delivery. They're running CITRIX/Windows 2000 with a Linux back office. Content management or the settling of processes and accounts for developers and organizations is a multi-step process arrayed or tiered across many departments. My math background says this is degrees of separation between ppl who make decisions (a.k.a. poltics) and comes heavily into play. Conversation on the table and off the record cannot be ignored even by the developer more interested in technology who wants to make a competitive product with collaborative inputs wherever a group decides they're needed yet this very developer shouldn't every time need to be the cog in the middle or broker or attache-type person who does all the thinking and engagement of a proposal. From my experience it centralizes and exposes too much of a developers hand. What we need are more pre-standardized, pre-certified work templates or codesuites that are partially a result of shared code and part in-house proprietary approaches.
"Murky, unexplored legal quagmire or RIAA influenced revisionism?"
No, this isn't a quagmire. It isn't unexplored legal territory. We've been reading about this for years. The lawyers have been interpreting and representing for existing laws surprisingly well. Pro bonos and non-sell outs are getting ready to form new rules that take many of the old rules into account. Competitive, P2P type music industry is just around the corner. Everyone wants it. The RIAA will apply maximum litigation wherever they think copyrights are being infringed. The RIAA hawks have done just about all the revising they can.
Why did they shut down M.I.T.? It's a small group of supply-side elitists, aristocrats (bourgeoisie) and government oligarchs who don't want things to change. TOO BAD. The methods of delivering music mainstream are changing and for the better. This is a temporary setback and students, programmers, hackers etc. will find legitimate, copyright-compatible ways to deliver music sooner or later.
*Very informative* articles by Votescam.com
http://votescam.com/chap1.html (1 of 5 chapters)
Technological excerpts:
"Nothing was said in the press about the secretly programmed computer chips inside the "Shouptronic" Direct Recording Electronic (DRE) voting machines in Manchester, the state's largest city.
These 200-pound systems were so easily tampered with that the integrity of the results they gave -- and George Bush was the beneficiary of their tallies -- will forever be in doubt. Consider these points:
1. The "Shouptronic" was purchased directly from a company whose owner, Ransom Shoup, had been twice convicted of vote fraud in Philadelphia.
2. It bristled with telephone lines that made it possible for instructions from the outside to be telephoned into the machine without anyone's dear knowledge.
3. It completely lacked an "audit trail," an independent record that could be checked in case the machine "broke down" or its results were challenged.
4. Roy G. Saltman, of the federal Institute for Computer Sciences and Technology, called the Shouptronic "much more risky" than any other computerized tabulation system because "You are fundamentally required to accept the logical operation of the machine, there is no way to do an independent check."
A year later, in June of 1989, Robert J. Naegele, who had investigated all computerized voting systems for New York State, warned: "The DRE (which the Shouptronic was) is still at least a year and possibly two away from what I would consider a marketable product. The hardware problems are relatively minor, but the software problems are conceptual and really major".
A source close to Gov. Sununu insists that Sununu knew from his perspective as a politician, and his expertise as a computer engineer, that the Shouptronic was prime for tampering."
IEEE, IETF, IANA... These standards groups have been around a long time & have earned major credibility for making crucial decisions at the right time. That's really what it's all about when developing & setting standards and henceforth establishing standards groups, no? The subsequent credibility of a standards group follows the standards the group signs off on. If it had been a proprietary group like Wintel instead of J. Postel back in the early 80s we wouldn't have gotten TCP/IP and the RFC system when we did. Therefore I think standards groups for the standards groups are needed, now more than ever. It's like oversight for oversight. We don't have a lack of standards. Far from it, we have a lack of central, accountable organization bodies made up of counselors or commissioners who transparently decide on standards. With time it is this transparency that will earn respect in the international online standards community, not bags of cash and not closed-door meetings seeking out the highest bidder we've been thru that before it doesn't work for the majority commons.
here's my article at OSOpinion.com
http://www.syslab.ceu.hu/corliss/0-TitlePrefContAc k.html
http://www.syslab.ceu.hu/corliss/Nature.html
here's the link at nature.com: http://www.nature.com/nsu/021202/021202-3.html
Sadly this is a lie:
http://64.177.75.218/completetimeline/index.htm
In brief: you're being lied to by the GOP-bought, U$ media. Read the international internet newsfeeds and get the facts straight. Whether it was SIGINT or another source CIA/NSA/FBI/FAA/NORAD/awacs knew in advance and so did Bu$h's advisors. They knew as early as 2000 when the terrorists met in Malaysia and possibly prior to that.
Why/how did 9/11 happen? Because a small group of people wanted and still want to rekindle the military-industrial complex and WWIII and make money with mercs and defense contractors. Follow the dollars.
are there written protocols & procedures for this activity agreed upon by the community?
where's the oversight? who made the decision that changed the root zone? A *.int (intl. exchange) entity should mandate or govern root zone oversight, not some U$ corporate shill.
why not goto FreeGeek if you're in portland, ore. area
So move on. What's stopping a person or organization commissioning policy on spam? Then they can set up a centrally managed system with pre-agreed permission hierarchies or trust metrics for continuous operations, audits, and compliance over the system?
Spam is a big problem so businesses will eventually get to their senses and put money and logistics into /dev/nulling spam in a systematic organized fashion. ORBZ (is/was it a non-profit 501(c)3?) had good protocols and HOWTO "templates" for dealing with *($^%^&!!! spam.
So basically we need clones of ORBZ at various points of presence to stop spam servers short of nuking user mailboxes, an undeniably constant problem. instead of centrally policing it should be central policies for open mail relays. In an open design model they basically sit upstream of participating organizations checking bandwidth and share results with ISPs.
the trick is how do you successfully sysadmin and manage such ORBZ clones in distributed environment?
they're like akamai.net in front of your URL
they backend your click and privacies unfurl
Can you cite benchmarks or code audits that validate this?
How does google get current stuff faster than altavista? Smarter webcrawlers? More efficient backend organization of xml? Better knowing when and when not to replace cached copies?
Show me the audit/changelog!
I say a lot here but I mean it concisely and sincerely because I've dealt with this and felt this way before--
Get ready to start relearning yourself. My experience primarily as an architect tells me kids in the middle school range and higher (grades 6,7,8++) are the fastest learners and come up with the best new ideas in CS.
You must mentor and apprentice to loud-mouthed or reserved but very bright kids because you were once one yourself. You should do this even if your instinct is to fear, reject or deny teaching for whatever reasons. Perhaps someone or several people took time to teach you principles of coding when you were first starting out?
The apprenticing and mentoring is very important because young people shouldn't always have to relearn & reinvent ideas the older & more experienced pretty much know but instead incorporate their own ideas. There's doing something yourself and not telling others about it (prima donna) and there's working with others.
I guess you're working in a corporation and might be comfortable there but from my perspective corporations really don't care about any of the learning stuff because they're all about bottom-line profits right now--maybe they'll change their financial tables when they learn integrating support makes money in the long term, not costing it.
Your challenge (all of ours if we wish to get out of a bad recession) as I see it is to form something independent of a corporation, bypass them entirely because they're owned and operated by shareholders, not stakeholders of opensource.
In the medieval age blacksmiths, tailors and bakers had guilds and trained apprentices and journeymen. It can't be that different from today?!
Start a guild and draft an agreement with a corporation to get paid but don't enter into a contract with the corporation or let them proscribe the standards and practices of the guild because they're only interested in supply-side economics where you get very little. If you work on an opensource project you're a guildmember in some capacity demonstrating your craft.
I don't know. You started this one with the word sexist. I said "could ease" but it wasn't a fixed and immutable clause in the statement or an implication of anything.
This topic doesn't seem that important to /. moderation, re: "Score: 1". That's too bad since it's going to be a serious topic in the next few years.
The U.S. workforce is still 90+ percent male in software and network design.
Women think differently then men. According to some scientists they have more serotonin transmitters so some think they are smarter then men but do not quote me on this, verify it elsewhere ...
I attended FreeBSDCon '99 in Berkeley and nowhere since then have I seen such a disproportionate ratio of women to men versus the average population (women at 50+ percent?). I think there were five women at the convention with hundreds in attendance.
These numbers are highly indicative of either a great reluctance on women's part to get into software design because it doesn't work the way they think or men who discriminate/harass them, or both. I'm tired of it and I don't think I'm alone.
A simple visual object-oriented programming language (successor to LOGO?) and a top notch GUI for Linux could ease this needed transition. Maybe a proportionate group of men and women working together cooperatively will develop this.
--ftide
Perhaps it is time to evolve beyond this very old argument. Others besides RMS and ESR need to define what opensource and free software is in addition to the current definitions. We need a bot/service provider to output stored definitions whenever multiple interpretations of a word come up. Print it as a local or global def. list. Wouldn't this be better then arguing about opensource and free software defs. over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over license arguments too and over and over and over ...
--ftide
The key is establishing open protocols for the distribution of the used hardware. Many businesses want to let go of their old hardware but want it received by legitimate accountable districts with documentation for records. Sometimes suppliers will do the transporting at their own expense. Schools and churches can fill out requests for used hardware. There's places like FreeGeek in Portland, Ore. and Foxhill in Staten Island, NYC that are ready to go for this. Both teach classes on how to take apart, repair, and rebuild old computers. At Foxhill after certification they can sell them or put them to work in the community. Foxhill has a local area network with DSL access that members of the community use and it consists almost entirely of used 486s and Pentiums with dusty keyboards, smeared monitors, and mice with no mousepads running Debian.
I think donating used hardware is a tax write-off for businesses so they'd rather send them to the legitimate organizations then send them to the dump and get fined by landfill/DEQ/EPA for toxic disposals. I've heard the warehouses are overflowing ...
Used hardware doesn't impress those that have lots of new stuff but to a district of people where many have never even used a computer or only surfed once or twice they're amazing! They eventually realize it is educational and profitable for them to fully access and build what they use. There are definitely underserved communities all over the U.S.--real victims of the often described digital divide.
My sources for information come primarily from experience as a developer.
Disclaimer: I'm affiliated with Foxhill but not with FreeGeek.