FreeBSD I LOVE YOU

[Matthias Buelow]

Scott Bennett wrote:

>      And so your preference would be that the machines should go to a landfill
> rather than to someone who can't afford a computer at all?

Here in the Civilized World, we recycle the materials used in computers 
(well, most of them), we don't throw them into the sea.

>      You sound awfully willing to spend other people's money.  Perhaps you
> should ask them to buy you some texts on economics.

Perhaps you should attempt to do some calculations and try to find out 
which is actually less expensive, and at the same time, provides bigger 
benefit.  Apart from the fact that a person who speaks Arabic or 
Indonesian, or Pashtu probably has little use for a "kewl-themed" 
blackbox desktop, or something like that.  That works for us 
latin-script Unix geeks with a working knowledge of English but 
certainly not for an average user in the 3rd World.  And anything that 
gets near internationalization on Unix or Linux, namely KDE and Gnome, 
requires even more powerful hardware than "Windoze" and probably still 
doesn't have the kind of local language integration that a localized 
version of Windows has.

Wake up from your pipe dreams.  Shipping decommissioned computers to the 
3rd world is not going to solve any development problem.  Cheap Asian 
computers with a pirated localized version of XP Home and Office are a 
lot more effective here.