Microsoft removes claim that Windows is legal requirement. Apparently Microsoft is waffling on their previous butt-stupid insistence that schools (and charitable organizations) "make sure that the [PC] hardware donation includes the original operating system software [Windows]. Keeping the operating system with the PC is not just a great benefit--it is a legal requirement."
What makes many of these old PCs actually useful is stripping the old, decayed Windows installation off them and installing a free Unix like Linux instead. Gets a lot more life out of the hardware, keeps it out of landfills, and lets people learn valuable computing skills. (IMHO, Windows know-how does not of itself constitute "valuable computing skills.")
But even if Microsoft is waffling, the damage is done: "By making it more complicated and onerous to donate old computers, Microsoft depresses the recycling market . . . and thus sells more new Windows licences. This is a general Microsoft ambition . . ." Meanwhile the world suffers (particularly, these days, in China) under the accumulating toxic waste of discarded computers.
Microsoft. We don't give a crap.
Update 2002-05-07: Good refutation of Microsoft's claims:
Linux Enables Safe Computer Donations to Schools
10:04:10 AM |
|
. Also, for the moment I'm leaving all the archive pages in their previous thematic state, jarringly different though that is from the experimental main page.)
