StarDestroyer.Net BBS

6.4 MB isn't that much nowadays, but considering that it's starting at under $40, I'd say that computers are now getting cheap enough for even people under the poverty line to afford. What I find funny is that my parents got a similar computer 6-7 years back for 50 times that price.

Ah, the digital divide, the shocking phenomenon that some people can afford better technology than others.

Durran Korr wrote:Ah, the digital divide, the shocking phenomenon that some people can afford better technology than others.

Not at all. The theory of the digital divide was that the poor would get poorer and poorer because they would never be able to acquire the computer skills that the "rich" would be able to obtain through exposure to computers at a young age.

Exposure that a kid can get at a library, a public school, or from his parents for about $200 bucks and around $9 a month (computers, not just this one, are extremely cheap these days).

Yeah, I live in a town with a significant population of Columbian immagrents, they all go to the town library to type up their papers. They do their research on Google just like everyone else

The theory of the digital divide was that the poor would get poorer and poorer because they would never be able to acquire the computer skills that the "rich" would be able to obtain through exposure to computers at a young age.

Which is ironic, because I was raised in a family that had always barely scraped by through most of the '80s and early '90s, and now I'm building computers for my friends that were born to millionaire parents.

Nowadays, just about anyone can afford a computer, or at least have good access to one. The only thing that wealth gets you is the ability to play the newest games and run system-heavy applications a tad faster.

IMO The digital Divide is still there.

Hardware is cheap, software is not.

Operating system and core applications will still cost a lot of money.

Hardware is cheap, software is not.

Tell that to a Linux user. For every $600 software package out there, there's a free counterpart which emulates it decently. Not nearly professional-level, no, but enough for someone to get their feet wet.

And as others have said, many libraries have free computer access. Virtually all of them in the Greater Tampa Bay area do.

Durran Korr wrote:Exposure that a kid can get at a library, a public school, or from his parents for about $200 bucks and around $9 a month (computers, not just this one, are extremely cheap these days).

It's a good thing that american schools are so well funded so this will utterly disappear.
The DD is a main target of the NAACP and other civil rights organizations. Closing it is one of the higher goals that such orgs must do to further their causes. Half because it will push more minorities further into the world of business, the other half is because if they don't have enough members who are professionals they won't have a good enough funding basis to compete with other lobbying groups.