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Slashback: India, Kartoo, Orbs
Attribution where due. Frank Bajak, Technology Editor for The Associated Press, wrote with a correction to last week's post "CNN Talks WIth ACLU Tech Maven Barry Steinhardt," writing "CNN didn't speak to Steinhardt. We, The Associated Press, did. CNN merely posted our story." Thanks for pointing that out.
If it's an orb, it had better do some glowing! shakes writes "Since the recent outbreak of interest in the Ambient Orb, I took a moment to homebrew one using a PICchip. The source code is currently incomplete as it does not support serial communication, but that will come in the next day or so."
Please secure the locking safety mechanism, or call an attendant if you have trouble. BoomZilla writes "I was intrigued with the home made roller coaster report on Slashdot last year. Just the sort of thing I *need* for the kids. Problem was that I had neither the skill nor the time to build such a beast. I've recently become re-inspired by the Back Yard Roller Coaster site. It's short on details (just a few pictures and a video) - but long on firing up my enthusiasm. Straightforward design. Easy construction. Modest cost. All I need is a hill (check) and the patience and understanding of my wife (stand by for news on that...)"
Oooh, look at the pictures. The visually intriguing meta search engine Kartoo is now more accessable to flash-poor browsers (and lazy or stubborn flash-avoiding users). Alexandre Dos Santos writes "Kartoo now offers an alternative to the regular flash display. The html version is only in beta. It offers the same functionality as the flash version, i.e. you can add or subtract keywords. It's obviously an attempt at reaching out to users who are on machines without flash, or very slow connections.
The option to use html only had been there before, but now Kartoo seems to push this more to the front...and important point...Without sponsored links."
Keeping their options open, or closing doors? bigmase521 writes "LinuxWorld has an article with statements from the Minister of Information Technology and Communications of India stating that India is NOT going to support Open Source alternatives Government-Wide. However, different branches of the government are still considering open source as their primary computing solutions. So I guess unfortunately, it seems as if Mr. Gates' Bribe err 'heartfelt visit' may have worked after all."
I plan on trying to put one together when it comes back, if it's not too expensive (like, under $20... college student here)
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His visit may have been unnecessary.
I'm curious to hear from Indian IT folks on this, but I have some ideas about Free Software and India, based on my experience with IT in the Middle East.
First, in an economy where there is no real fear of legal action for illegal copying, and where a Microsoft licence costs a month's wages or more, you can expect illegally copied MS products to be everywhere. In such an environment, there is little incentive to use free (as in beer) products, because all products cost nothing to procure.
Second, in an economy where corruption is endemic down to the lowest clerical levels, decisions are often made on a, um, non-technical basis. (Bofors, anyone?) Free software may be at a disadvantage here, because there is not always a for-profit entity to ``encourage'' a product's adoption. I can't really see the Apache team buying anyone a villa.
Given both of these, I would not expect Free software to be a major player in Indian IT. Indeed, in contrast with (for example) East and Central Europe, Latin America, or East Asia, South Asia doesn't seem to be making any major contributions to Free software, despite having large numbers of trained programmers.
Am I on the right track here?
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Basically, this depends on how you view computer technology. If you see the labor being primarily one of doing standard programming jobs (i.e. the same jobs are repeated over and over again) then this is much the same as "The Green Revolution", which was supposed to bring agricultural developments into Africa. While on the other hand, you can look at this technology as similar to the arms race. Once the US developed the neutron bomb, they did not just give it away to the Russians. I fall somewhere in between - the research that has gone into all this work needs to be rewarded (with more grants for more research) but third world countries can't be crippled with a buy-in price that's beyond their GDP.
And just because a company makes a profit from a third world country does not mean that that country is being exploited.
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There seem to be a number of reasons for this - one is that flash is pretty standard - most versions of flash work alike - much more than can be said for html on internet exploder, netscape, opera, mozilla, phoenix and so on - all of which exist in various versions with various oddnesses.
Another is that web developers put time into learning flash and thus have an intellectual investment in continuing to use it (and I'll refrain from commenting on how much of their intellectual capital they've used up in the process - for some people learning new technology seems to open new ways to think, for too many it seems to close them off).
There's the notion that flash provides a spiffy keen looking interface full of motion, color and all kinds of "cleverness" That these are usually ugly does not seem to matter much. That the clever interactions are usually almost completely unfathomable by the users matters less. That the files can take forever to download and use up lots of processor is the users fault - not the developers. My favorite quote from a web developer came in response to a comment on my part about the download time needed for his idea website. He said "Well, if they can't download it or watch it, they don't deserve to see my website."
Finally there is the notion that a web developer can determine more exactly what flash provides the user - things like eliminating the ability to save images, presenting exactly what the developer/marketroid wants the user to see in the order they choose. Don't want those users to mess all that up.
For all these reasons, I suspect that we'll be seeing more and more flash and similar products. Indeed, I'm seeing many web sites that are flash only. And I'm wondering if the time that this could be effectively countered has already passed (but then I'm a cynical old fart - all grown up from the cynical young fart I used to be).
Flash != web. Much as macromedia would like you to believe, it ain't; it is a highly proprietary, expensive-to-author format. The plugin's a pain in the ass even on Windows or Macintosh- you're always having to upgrade it, or you've got the wrong particular "flavor".
I wish web designers would get it through their thick skulls- flash is okay if you want to do some southpark webtoon, but it should be a MINOR part of the site- never something that controls navigation, or represents all of the site content. Same for Javascript.
Throwing me to a "you need to have flash installed to view this site" is one sure-fire way to guarantee I'm going to visit your competitor's site. Flash gets you nothing- it's just for lazy designers who are too stupid to learn how to properly code HTML.
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Sounds to me like he's saying Mr Gates will have to make a courtesy call on each and every different Ministry and/or Gov Dept in order to prevent the insidious spread of Open Source. A rather interesting twist on the "divide and conquer" strategy - "we've divided, so it'll take you longer to conquer us"...
Here in Egypt Microsoft donated a large amount of money to some law enforcement agency to make them crack on users with illegal copies of Microsoft Office, very small business which cannot afford to pay for the license were closed and all PCs were seized, but as the opensource movement gain momentum I personally started advising all my clients (l'm a developer) to switch to Open Office which supports Arabic nicely on it's Windows version, another dangerous tactic employed by the Borg was to literally giveaway Visual Studio to CS and engineering students...result? a whole generation of VB monkeys who think that the world starts and ends with Microsoft. Bare in mind the Egypt is a poor country and that the dollar is raising continuously against the Egyptian pound, and that we import critical things like say... FOOD, ahh Cancer medicine?? So opensource worked just fine, the only thing that troubled us here is a corrupt government that accepts bribes to make Microsoft richer...and richer.
Phil and Alex's guide to web publishing makes a good point about flash - search engines won't index it (yet). So people are going to have a hard time trying to find your content online.
(a copy of the relevant chapter can be found here. The whole book should be compulsory reading for any web developer)