Do we need this junk?

[Garrett Cooper]

moanga at gmail.com wrote:
> On Fri, Apr 06, 2007 at 11:56:32PM -0700, Garrett Cooper wrote:
>   
>> Emil Mikulic wrote:
>>     
>>> On Fri, Apr 06, 2007 at 11:44:31PM -0700, Garrett Cooper wrote:
>>>       
>>>> Furthermore keep in mind, while we run excellent machines in this
>>>> section of the world I've heard of other people running much older,
>>>> lower class machines (Romania / Czechoslovakia for instance) in internet
>>>> cafes, and they think that their PCs are the best things since sliced
>>>> bread, even though they just run Win 3.11.
>>>>         
>>> Dude, Czechoslovakia hasn't been a country since 1993.  ;)
>>>
>>> And from talking with a buddy of mine who lives in the Czech Republic,
>>> they have a lot more internets over there than we have here in
>>> Australia.  =(
>>>
>>> --Emil
>>>       
>> Sorry -- meant Bosnia / Romania. You're right :P.
>>     
>
> Your geek's imagine of a poor & backward country
> - people using Win 3.11 on old PCs - is obscenely hilarious.
>   
That's what I heard from a coworker who has a friend over in Romania, 
that runs an internet cafe. So, my sources could be totally off.
The thing is though, is that regardless of the place there _are_ some 
sections of the world where people are using ancient machines, so we 
shouldn't strip their capability to run something on their hardware if 
it's the only thing they have to work with.
> Actually, from the tiny minority that cares about computers here, 99% won't
> give a rat's about for hardware not able to run XP. And I haven't
> seen a Win 3.11 system since I was in high-school (12 years ago).
>   
I realize that. The company that I worked for in IT drops machines that 
are less than their 2.8 GHz P4 Northwood boxes. However, people will run 
XP on crappy machines and complain about how slow everything is because 
their machines are 7-8 years old. That's another topic though for 
another thread (maybe)..
> And even for XP-able hardware, if it's not the newest and greatest, they
> would rather buy another newer computer, since it's cheaper than paying
> someone to reinstall the system or de-virus it ;-)
>
> Just days ago, I've saved from the scrapyard a Dell with 256 MB RIMM memory,
> 800 GHz Pentium III and 15GB disk - all with very a quiet fans & builtin
> audio, vga and ethernet, and it works like a charm not only with FreeBSD
> and Linux, but also with the latest Solaris Nevada.
>
> It's actually the other way around - a German or Japanese engineer
> will have to deal with a lot more of legacy hardware than a Romanian one -
> since they've deployed a lot of real-life systems
> (not just PCs for Excel secretaries :) during the '80 and '90 -
> which are still working just fine, and people are conceivably hostile
> to the idea of spending money to replace them with the latest crap.
>   
And who's making generalizations now? I know a lot of Japanese companies 
that run up to date Lenovos and Apples, at least. However, many of my 
Japanese friends don't have up to date laptops (8-9 years old). Why? 
Culture uses cell phones and other mediums for communication than PCs.
-Garrett