Giving someone a desktop is a moving experience. I’ve done it hundreds of times. It was my job to deploy desktops with Red Hat or Fedora 2000-2006 for Carnegie Mellon School of Computer Science. There, some of the brightest minds would be there to receive it. Here are a few that you might know…
- Scott Falhman,the first person to type
to denote a smile. - The late Randy Pausch, of “the last lecture” and the open source children’s programming teacher alice.org
- Dave Touretzky, who testified before Congress to assert that computer code that would decrypt DVDs was 1st amendment protected free speech.
Giving a desktop to these folks or any of their grad students was never a leap of faith. Everyone was highly intelligent and capable of great things. Even so, if I saw a meaningful project scrounging, I would do my best to give them a nice desktop that a richer project had walked away from. One such grad student of project that seemed high on productivity and low on funds circa 2005 was Luis von Anh. As it turned out, he using hardware that would have otherwise been discarded to build Captcha. That’s right, that little English-word based puzzle you need to solve to submit a webform was invented on Fedora would-have-been-trash desktops.
I thought that I was putting Linux in the hands of the most influential hands in computing. One of them, with all of the resources to their avail, would surely develop that killer application that would have everyone leaving Microsoft in droves.
Now, I believe someone else to be far more influential. He does not have a doctorate or an office funded by the Bill and Melinda Foundation like most Carnegie Mellon School of Computer Science faculty.
Instead he has a simple mission…
A child’s exposure to technology should never be predicated on an ability to afford it.
This content is published under the Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.
Free Analytics
W3Schools
