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Bringing The Internet To Borneo -- By Sea
dcigary writes: "CNN has an interesting story about the attempts to bring Maylasian citizens into the Internet Age. Now, they just have to wait until the infrastructure in the country catches up." Actually, this wouldn't be a bad idea of parts of the U.S. (and elsewhere), either.
Kinda' makes book mobiles look pathetic, huh?
Seriously though, what are the possibilities for other developments like this? I'm not thinking of access per se as much as hosting, ala Sealand. Sail a converted container ship in international waters, and load that ship up with servers, etc. (One could even have modular data suites fitted into standard sized containers...) I know rough seas would be a problem, but there's surely ways to dampen the shock. Unless the ship is kept in one spot for most of its life, fiber connections would be out meaning all connectivity would be satellite based---big time latency. But that wouldn't be a problem for storage of sensitive data.
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Am I the only one who thinks Microsoft is a misnomer? Perhaps Macrosoft would be a better fit?
BTW, Malaysia could also do with a Prime Minister who isn't so racist, anti-Western (he did his doctorate in Australia and he's hated us ever since), and inclined to throw his political opponents in prison on trumped-up charges, if it wants to convince the world it's a modern democracy.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
I agree that it's important for people to learn about technology and the Internet, but this is rediculous. Instead of spending millions of dollars promoting the "Internet boat", maybe we should teach these people how to read or write, or buy them some food. I mean my god, there's people who have been living off of termites and dirt for months, but at least they can now chat on AOL while starving a slow, painful death.
-atrowe: Card-carrying Mensa member. I have no toleranse for stupidity.
They're going to be using the vessel. docking at different villages to teach the villagers how to use computers and the internet, before the infrastructure even gets there. They want to educate. They're building a wan between the villages and giving them net access. They're not even in the building stages, so far blueprints have been submitted, but that's it.
IANAM (I am not a Malaysian) but I am from Asia, and my first impression is that Malaysia is not a country without troubles. You would think that in terms of priorities things like modernizing infrastructure, improving schools, and increasing the GNP would be more important than teaching people to use the internet. That being said, the boat is supposed to only cost about 200,000 USD, which is not all that much money in the grand scheme of things.
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Santa Claus: "Ho ho ho!"
NO CARRIER
Yes!!!! Let's help our Internet-less neighbors in Canada and Mexico. I don't know how many times I've looked into the eyes of the children there, knowing they sought the true knowledge that only the Internet could bring them....
Come my friends...let us start the Christian Children's Internet Fund...for only $40 a month you can adopt a child and give them DSL access...
Your adopted child will sent you email correspondence and naked pictures of Sally Struthers....
Where's the beef?
The "world" system breakdown:
1st world - Capitalist/free market, advanced
2nd world - Communist/socialist, advanced
3rd world - Not-advanced
4th world - Primitive
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"Defenestration" is to throw out of a window; what's a word for throwing 'Windows' out of something?
Hahaha. Smoke signals serve as a router.
-atrowe: Card-carrying Mensa member. I have no toleranse for stupidity.
I watched the sales guy at a Radio Shack for 5 minutes in 1978. He programmed the TRS-80 Model I they had there to print out my name with the TAB() option to zigzag across the screen.
PATRICK
PATRICK
PATRICK
PATRICK
PATRICK
DRAPER
DRAPER
DRAPER
DRAPER
DRAPER
(etc.)
The useful thing that I learned in that 5 minutes was that I *really* needed to get one of those things.
If tits were wings it'd be flying around.
so yes, even parts of the US might find a similar idea attractive.
As to its efficacy, I'm not so certain. It seems like it won't exactly be doing much for these people. We're not talking about the US, where 'puters are cheap and money is relatively easy to come by. I daresay that a lot of the third world has more important things on its mind than running networks between villages. But perhaps I'm wrong.
big thank you to the asshole who moderated this down. if you had read the book before you spurted your mod point you may have gone the other direction. fuck you for your support.
How much can a brief exposure to a computer allow people to learn anything useful? It seems lke a lot of money to spend for a limited end.
It may be better for countries to invest in putting permanent centers in every town, even if they are old computers and no internet access. Internet access could come with time, and in the meantime the catch-up could begin.
Kabeeb
Hi! This is the Sig, blatantly attached to the end of this comment.
>..seemed quite perplexing...
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>Bringing the Internet to Borneo -- By Sea
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>So, what does that mean?
Ahhh - it got lost in the subediting - heres the original second para, before the sub decided he needed to cut another 13 words to fit the article between the ads...
"The vessel will cruise the jungle-fringed Rajang River in the state of Sarawak, towing a high bandwidth cable recently liberated from the seabed just off Singapore, docking at villages every few hours..."
...seemed quite perplexing...
Bringing the Internet to Borneo -- By Sea
So, what does that mean? You put a request in at your local seaport to have them "download" to you www.yahoo.com, then wait two weeks for the shipment to come?
Man, I'd hate to figure out what it'd be like to download games!
My very first exposure to a computer was in 1986 when I saw a friend's dad use Printshop on his PC to print out a birthday card. That totally blew me away! From that day on, I longed for the day when I could afford my own PC to do exactly the same thing.
My friends dad had only demonstrated the PC for 5 minutes, but that was enough to set me on my career path of IT. So while I can understand how people may think that PD is being funny, his comment actually is insightful and it is five minute exposures like the one PD described that do launch a lot of people's careers!
Possibly Malaysia, which is I suppose a 'second world' country, will be able to use the lessons of the West to its advantage.
Possibly, as it does not have much of an infrastructure at the moment, when it does get one it will be modern and designed for the internet specifically, in the same way that London's street plan is 'designed' for Victorian times, and consequently Victorian levels of traffic, wheras Los Angeles was designed in the age of the car, and so is a much more pleasant place to drive a car in.
KTB:Lover, Poet, Artiste, Aesthete, Programmer.
KTB:Lover, Poet, Artiste, Aesthete, Programmer.
There is no
a three hour tour, a three hour tour.
This just in......... US authorities reported sometime after midnight on June 28th, a highly distructive virus was unleashed on the world. These same people believe the virus dubbed 'the love boat' originated somewhere within the state of Sarawak, possibly near the Rajang River
"We can't get an excact position of the transmissions, it almost appears to be moving away from us.", explains chief investigator Ronald Chatten, "We're optimistic that the perpetrators will eventually slip up, and when they do we'll sink they're ship, metophorically speaking of course".
I love the smell of Karma in the morning
I'm all for U.S. bashing in it's necessary situations...but I am curious as to what you are talking about. The U.S.'s two biggest neighbors, Canada and Mexico, are as high tech as the U.S. is, although there is less money in Mexico so a smaller percentage of people get to use the internet. Actually though, from talking with people in Canada, they seem to have a better environment for internet related business than the U.S. does. And as far as Mexico, I know a lot of stuff going on there that I have not seen in the U.S. yet. They have had cable modems for many years in Guadalajara through companies like MegaRed, and they had prepaid pagers and cellphones before I even heard about anything like that in the U.S. The latest thing that I think is starting to come out in the U.S. is some sort of wireless phone connection to your house. I'm not sure how it works but I know my girlfriend's parents have it at their house. They have an antenna or something on their roof, and that connects to their phone and it's cheaper than a landline via the phone monopoly Telmex.
I think that what should be done is to help people in the U.S. such as politicians. They have obviously never used computers, otherwise they wouldn't continue to try to pass such stupid laws. I saw we donate our old equipment to them and set up free ISP accounts so we can try to show them exactly what the internet is and how we use it. Then, even though they are being bought by big business, they could at least cut down on some of the stupid laws because it would possibly affect them.
I dream of a world where Jesse Helms has a deCSS mirror, and Bob Dole is downloading the new N'Sync album from Napster. Hmmmm...nevermind, that just sounds scary.
Mas vale cholo, que mal acompañado.
Should we get Sally Struthers to help these poor, impoverished people stuck on dialup? C'mon. Internet accesss isn't everything. In america, we got things(quality of life, etc) GOOD.
dust. Many places in the US don't have access to DSL, ISDN, Cable, etc
I wonder how many nodes of the type recently described here on /. you could buy for $250,000. Instead of a boat with 20PCs why not run a cheap and dirty 803.11b network and connect these communities permanently?
Judging that these people have never seen a computer before. Or atleast the fact that maybe they have seen a computer and have never used them. What good is this computer boat going to do? The boat will come in and teach a limited number of people for a limited amount of time. Then it will go off to another port. It seems that this money could be used in other ways to help out the IT movement in this country. I could see possibly if the boat had more computers then 20. That seems like such a small number. There has to be more then 20 students in each port of call. So basically a limited number of students would be getting selected to learn more about computers and the internet. Also how would these students be selected? A lot of times richer students seem to have more advantages in poorer countries so maybe the rich students would have access to learning more about the computers. This seems like a supposed good idea but in the long run it seems like it will waste a lot of money and only see meak results. I guess it would be hard to keep up with Slashdot if you had to wait for the internet boat to roll on into port. Imagine the amounts of spam at your hotmail account using this system :)
->neotope
www.neotope.com
>neotope
Are they going to educate them about the Internet economy also?
Now I can fufill my dream to teach Maylasia, and other 3rd world countries, reading and writing via telecommuting.. Do you I get to donate my canned goods this way too? *Dont throw that 486 away! Think about the maylasians with only commodore64's!*
Think masses and masses of AOL lusers. Problem is we (the rest of the clueful) don't have a big enough LART.
I live on a remote desert island, and for my IP services I have to save up all my packets for a week, and ship them out on the boat that swings by to drop off medical supplies. I get the replies a week later.
This really makes for slow downloads, which means I hardly ever get that coveted f1r57 p057.
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Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
I think Malaysia had something like that before except it was on land. It was some sort of van that travelled around Malaysia and taught children how to use the internet. I'm glad that Malaysia is taking the initiative to help its 3rd world neighbors and itself out with the high-tech world. It's much more than the US is doing for its neighbors.
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I'm just an ordinary man with nothing to lose.