Re: The computer graveyard

[Ron Lindeboom] "So what we do is we ask to speak with one of the teachers that we have worked with and we ask them: "Which student needs and deserves a computer that doesn't have one -- either because the parents are too poor or their parents don't have the vision to understand just how important it is to know computers"

And THAT boys and girls is why Ron is one of the smartest people any of us know. Brilliant, Ron. And I say this as someone who attempted to donate gear and software to our local school system. A few years back I won a raffle at a computer conference and had just under $20k of stuff that was either redundant to what I had or stuff I would never use. The head of IT for the county's schools looked at me like I had three heads. This, of course after asking me what I was trying to sell him using this ploy. Finally I found a special needs school in an adjoining county that was only to happy to accept the donation.

One thing that we just went through was getting the call from our accountants last month asking if we REALLY wanted to keep so much old equipment on the books, incurring a hefty personal property tax each year. It didn't take too long to see that we were still writing off -- and PAYING TAXES on -- RAIDS, monitors and computers that I'd been letting sit in storage. "Aw jeez... do I really want to just throw away a SCSI RAID I paid $5,000 for?" Uh, duh. At 18 gig it's hazardous landfill material. And that weekend it along with many of its compatriots were.

[Mike Cohen]"We keep our 1" machine out because it looks cool, like an old tv."

You mean I'm not the only one?? A friend of mine who owns a post house offered me an old Sony BVH-2500, the single frame animation powerhouse of the mid-eighties, the one that in those days was probably $75 or $80,000. Okay his exact words were, "If you want it come get it this week, otherwise it's going in the dumpster." Today it helps decorate our office along with 1930's radio cabinets and an RCA 44BX microphone which probably is worth real money, but who could part with such a marvelous prop?

Back to the 1" -- some of our clients see it towering in the corner and think, "Wow, this must be a real video facility if they have something like this." I'd power it up, but the fans make too damn much noise.