Donations for the Ranch

[Lincoln Peters]

If there is enough equipment out there, we might as well share the wealth 
with a few other schools in the area.  Of course, I don't mind if Rancho 
gets the bulk of the equipment, since I go there.

And I should add:
In June, I got two broken computers from a company in Santa Rosa that 
otherwise would have been thrown away (whoever they hired to repair them 
wasn't very smart; he didn't know the difference between the memory and the 
hard disk!).  So at the moment, besides the server that I demo'ed last 
night, I have on hand one computer with an AMD K5/166 with 48MB RAM, an 
at-the-monent-unidentified soundcard, and a CD-ROM drive, but a broken hard 
disk (possibly a broken IDE controller).

The other computer appears to have a burned-out Pentium/133 motherboard 
(somehow the CPU fan fell off), a generic Tape drive, and a 5.25" floppy 
drive (maybe it would be useful to a school that is still using Apple II 
computers).


By the way, has anyone played with InterMezzo?  I haven't tried anything 
with it yet, but if it works, and the administrators are willing to give up 
NT, it might relieve some of the network burden that comes from these 
distributed filesystems.


Mike, that first system that you described would nicely replace the one 
that's set up now.  I've got a 100BaseTX Ethernet card that could go into it 
and speed up just about everything.


Of course, what I'd _really_ love to see at some point is a Math Department 
meeting done with Comic Chat.  Imagine a thin, gray alien on the computer 
screen saying "What part of x=(-b±sqrt(b^2-4*a*c))/(2*a) don't you 
understand?"


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