How do you handle caring about PPC?

[Richmond]

On 04/08/2013 07:28 PM, stephen barncard wrote:
> With education going to tablets, and with more and more old machines
> costing more and more to support and find parts for, I'd say Power PC is
> dead.
>
>

This is a fairly redundant comment that has been said before quite a few 
times, and
it does make sense if you live in some peachy sort of situation where 
you have a generous
annual budget to endlessly upgrade your machines and chuck your 
functional but 'outdated'
ones into landfills in a fit of ecological nihilism.

----- I am sorry, Stephen, but you have really hit a nerve; Please do 
not take what follows as a personal attack, because it is not meant as 
such ----

However, I for one (and I am not the only one) have 4 perfectly good G3 
slot-loading iMacs
merrily chuntering along on Mac OS 10.4.11, and will only replace them 
when they go 'bang'
as they do the job I want them to do superbly.

Because of that I almost always hive off PPC standalones (the 
"middle-path", Mac OS Universal,
is neither one thing or the other and is merely bloatware) as well as 
Intel Mac standalones.

That is also why I don't merrily chuck out old versions of any Mac 
software (stuff backed up all the way
back to 1993), especially Livecode/RunRev versions.

I regularly send copies of my EFL stuff off to a Church of Scotland 
school in Botswana where
an inspired teacher is able to make good use of them on old PPC Macs 
running Mac OS 9;
that means porting stacks back to version 2.0.1 and saving them as 
Classic standalones. The
fact that that chap is able to use them to help Botswanan (err; not sure 
if that is the right adjective)kids get ahead when they don't live
in the same sort of financial environment that people such as Thee and 
me (one of them
is going to the University of Sheffield, in England) floats my boat in a 
big, big way.

Now for me to keep floating my boat, and, more importantly, for those 
kiddos out in Botswana,
the ability to supply them with half-decent software for educational 
support, the ability to
pump out standalones for PPC machines is really very important indeed.

As I am currently working on a project to get the University of St 
Andrews in Scotland to ship out
a load of their G3 iMacs to the school in Botswana along with all the 
licensed Mac 10.4 installation disks
they no longer need, the ability for me to pump out PPC standalones is 
mission critical.

Many on the Use-List may be quite unaware that Africa is neither 
terribly rich, nor a place wholly
inhabited by 'primitive' people who aren't interested in anything beyond 
tribal dances. It is a dumping
ground for lots and lots of "dead" computers which are nothing of the 
sort, they are just 5-15 years old
and perfectly useful for all sorts of things in the right hands (and 
there are plenty of extremely switched on people in Africa who are 
rather frustrated) and given software that will work on those
machines.

Richmond.