Government rejects used UK computers

[StrontiumDog]

I've taught people to program on way lower spec than a P111 (**** I learned Cobol on an old 486)

And from what I heard from a friend, COBOL programmers earn heaps... damn, I should have never have gotten out of COBOL, but I was young and wanted something more exciting

I learnt COBOL on a 386 I am sure

RMCOBOL, we used to program booting off a stiffy disk, LOL!

 

[Gambit23]

The government is right to reject such junk. It is not only about learning to type but how to use computers one finds in the real world. Try and find a Pentium III or Win3.1 anywhere in a successful business.
If one wants to educate the young people then at least give them equipment that was not obsolete 5 years ago already.

Rubbish. I was using a PIII up until the end of last year and running 3D CAD programs and MATLAB on it, it was a bit slow but it got the job done. You can't tell me that school puplils need a more powerful PC to become computer LITERATE.

 

[Tns]

A PIII 866 with 128ram will run windoze 2000 and word,will bit slow but hell it's will work. Like other forum peeps said there is no security where the pc's are (they most likely get stolen) and no trained staff to maintain the equipment

 

[NameOfBeast]

Jonny Steinberg: Bound by the fear of being patronised

Why were South African officials so quick to take offence? Why was their instinctive assumption that they were being condescended to? The roots of these sensitivities are clearly in our white supremacist past. Goldman Sachs’ second-hand computers are reminiscent of the threadbare sweater the baas handed down to the house servant. It is no longer good enough for us; you can wear it now. That is, of course, the Mbeki government’s abiding fear; that we have been liberated from South African apartheid into a global apartheid; that our continent is a great, yawning receptacle for hand-me-downs.

The department became the house servant only because it thought itself the house servant. It denied South African teenagers access to technology because it believed they had been denied that technology. There is a terribly thin line between pride and self-immolation.

Read the whole thing here:
http://www.businessday.co.za/articles/opinion.aspx?ID=BD4A548481