[Asterisk-Users] X100P Clone, Which one?

[Paul]

Andrew Kohlsmith wrote:

>I can't tell if you're on "my side" of this debate or not, because you sure 
>sound like it.  :-)
>
>  
>
I'm on "my side" and always on the side of the serious and earnest end 
user. I live in a sparsely populated rural area. Most of the locals 
can't afford to pay for computer help. I have told several of them that 
I am willing to give free classes as long as somebody volunteers to do 
the announcements and all that. Problem is that nobody is interested 
enough to give some of their own time. I mean I am even willing to do 
this at my own facilities and  throw in free coffee. I would cover 
topics like protecting their wintel boxes from virus and other threats 
and FOSS for win32. The local school district offers paid continuing 
education classes that focus on things that most of these people can't 
afford like MS-Office. I would love the opportunity to show more win 
users things like openoffice and firefox.

So I am willing to give one evening a week to help others but that's not 
good enough. They want to be able to call me anytime of day for free 
advice. Same thing applies to some of the people seeking help on lists 
like this. I think it is reasonable to expect people to RTFM before they 
start asking for help. The only exception I make is for pay or for a 
good cause.

I should mention that I did two infected PC cleanups for locals last 
week. I don't even try to find them but somehow they find me. Both were 
so badly hosed that I just pulled the hard drive and mounted it on a 
linux box to make a copy of everything, then reinstalled win XP from 
scratch. I only charged $120 for this. Both customers would have 
benefited from a free class in how not to get the PC infected. Neither 
of them are the type that would be willing to do anything like posting 
flyers in order to make such a free class happen. No guilt here.