The Kentucky Dumpster Test

Source

Forgot to mention in the previous test - I am proud to present the first of what will no doubt be many exciting and highly useful concepts I have been lucky enough to participate in developing! Will, James, myself and Vincent (Danen) were all chatting and got on to the topic of the discussion about what compiler optimization flags to use, that's come up recently on the Fedora development mailing list. We decided the basic problem was setting the bar in terms of just *how* old hardware you bother supporting. Someone pointed out that they've found a working i686 system in a dumpster, but it was in turn noted that it was a dumpster *in Raleigh*, which may not have been a fair test. So we perfected... The Kentucky Dumpster Test which is a simple method for determining minimum acceptable hardware. To whit, the lowest spec machine you should support is one for which you can find a working example in a dumpster in Kentucky. Anything older than that gets no love. A fine and practical concept, I'm sure everyone will agree! I'm off to file an expenses claim for a fact-finding trip to Kentucky...

Comments

AkBrian wrote on 2009-02-07 03:11:
If it was the Guatemalan dumpster test, I'd really be impressed. Here in Fairbanks, Upgrade Time is held at the Dumpsters near the University of Alaska at the end of spring finals week, when the students clean out their dorm rooms. The selection is excellent. I've often thought that it would be great to have a way to get computers from 1st World dumpsters to the people in the 3rd World who would really appreciate them....