Comments on: Closing The Digital Divide

By: triticale

triticale — Fri, 15 Dec 2006 12:02:49 +0000

Well in all honesty it wasn’t quite zero dollars. The office parks are in the suburbs and cannot be discretely dived when the busses are running. This means a car, preferably a decent looking one, is needed. I can write off the gas because I make my run after driving the wee wifey to church, but this approach is not directly available to the poorest of the poor. It also happens that I am using an optical mouse bought at a thrift store for a couple bucks.

A couple years ago I passed on a dhove laptop running Win95 at 150 mHz to a wheelchairbound fellow I met at the library. I ran into him recently and he told me that the skills he honed on it opened the door to entry level employment in IT.

By: Solveig Haugland

Solveig Haugland — Fri, 15 Dec 2006 09:00:26 +0000

I’m glad you posted this, since it frustrates me when people talk negatively about how OpenOffice doesn’t have, say, the Split Column at Comma feature in a right-click option. I wish they would look at the big picture — the digital divide, changing culture, enabling small businesses to spend more on business and less on infrastructure, enabling schools to spend money on what’s important instead of spending too much on computer software–the list goes on and on.

By: Stephen Gordon

Stephen Gordon — Fri, 15 Dec 2006 04:28:37 +0000

Triticale:

heh.

…which illustrates my point nicely. You get to take part in the brilliance that is The Speculist, and no one would have guessed you had to go dumpster diving to be here.

The “digital divide” has been crossed for $0. Bravo.

By: triticale

triticale — Thu, 14 Dec 2006 18:27:28 +0000

The guy with $3000 to spend on a new computer passed last year’s machine to his secretary, and her previous machine went in the office park dumpster. I dragged it home and am posting this comment from it.