Relevance...
Since in the Linux world a lot of focus is involved on getting the Third World nations in to computing as well as those of us who live in say, America.
I would be wealthy by Third World standards, but in America I could simply not afford new computer equipment. Knowing the nature of Corporate Marketing I'd be very surprised if they offered any kind of discount on computer equipment just because the people can't afford it.
There's a few shining examples, the AMD-India connection. But those examples shine brightly in a really dark Corporate Universe.
My machine is what's technically referred to as "Dinosaur" the BIOS date is 1999. No APIC, ACPI, SATA Support or any of those other groovy initials. I got it as salvage because somebody who had more money than brains didn't know how to reseat a memory stick, got a blank screen and a beep-code and threw it away.
The maximum RAM I could put into this is 1.5 GB and that would assume that I could afford 3 512mB sticks. I can't even afford one. I have 2 256s and one 128. I also have some legacy SCSI 68 pin drives, two of them, also salvaged. A fairly fast SCSI controller and a Video card with 32 megs of Video Ram. Also salvaged. I did pay for the IDE DVD burner and the second IDE hard drive. The rest of my expenses are in labor and pure skills.
There's a big issue now as to what exactly to do with the "legacy" machines that don't belong in landfills and the American market doesn't have much use thereof.
The suggestion and it's a good one, has been made that they be given or sold cheaply to school systems in the Third World nations to teach the kids and the adults as well to repair, condition, configure and use the computers.
It worked in India and China because the governments (just not most of the citizens) had the advantage of a marketplace where companies like AMD could import the facilities for building the components, and facilities and equipment to train the people.
One of the suggestions, hotly contested by Our Friends at Microsoft, is to have Senior Citizen and Dinosaur computers run as workstations off more modern but still Legacy computers. This would be a lot cheaper to do, give the computers to these nations as an outright gift, than it would cost to store the computers indefinitely in Toxic Waste facilities.
Which is what they would be. It costs more to store them than to simply give them away.
The reason Microsoft objects is the client computers wouldn't run any supported version of Windows reliably. Some in the Linux community suggest that NO computer will run Windows reliably.
That essentially leaves Unix clones.
So suggesting that "nobody" would benefit from the hardware tweaks that make such computing possible is kind of missing a Huge demographic in the world.
I can't even afford ONE 512 stick. In the richest country in the world, the poor can't afford modern computers. And I'm not even the poorest of the poor here.
If you look at it from my viewpoint, (try sometime) the notion that "simply EVERYBODY" has a modern computer or can obtain one is really insulting, derogatory and elitist.
If we're to build a New Elite based on talent, meritocracy it's called, then we have to dispose of the really obsolete notion that's driving the First World economies, that of "simply EVERYBODY can afford"..
It's not even the case in America and certainly doesn't extend beyond our borders. That being said, read the next post.