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Still More on Connecting Laos
Rackemup writes "A story on Wired has some updated information on the progess made by the Remote IT Village Project attempting to connect several isolated villages deep in the Laotian Jungle to the rest of the world using wireless networks, pedal-power and Laonux (customized Linux installs translated into the Laotian language). Power surges can be a hassle when the nearest computer store is hundreds of miles away, but they're shooting for a May 18th "go live" date."
Looks like they're planning on using 802.11b... Wouldn't there be range issues? I'm assuming these villages are a decent distance from each other or wherever they could get a transceiver...
No one posts the IP of these networks to slashdot....
What would you rather have?
The Internet, or a flush toilet and potable drinking water?
I know what you will say: INTERNET!
Once again the Internet is more important than anything else. Do these people even want to be subjected to emails from AOLiens, spam from Japan, and know it all Canadians?
Why slashdot? Why not?
They better hope that their web server isn't running on a server in a remote Laos village - because here we come!
How is the Laotian government reacting to this? Any support or opposition? While I don't know much about Laos firsthand, I do know it's one of the last five remaining communist countries on Earth.
Other countries such as China and Vietnam have taken measures to regulate and censor the flow of information via the net -- will this be any different?
There's 10 types of people in this world, those who understand binary and those who don't.
I can only sit in horror as I realize the idiocy that is to come once Stallman gets a Laotian dictionary and find their word for "GNU/Laonix".
In SOVIET RUSSIA... erm...NSA AMERICA, the Internet logs onto YOU!
not true.
You can educate yourself on how to do thse thing via the internet. WIring to the internet gives people the opportunity to make ther eown money. It enables them to set up a paypal account so more people can donate money for those things. IT allows the users to find orginization to help them get immunization. teach them proper water handling, and purifing techniques.
They can fight for basic humn rights, they can orginize.
Have people become so complacent with porn and mp3s that they have forgotten the real power of the internet is empowerment?
OTOH I suppose this village could host a porn site.
we got the same thing as all the other porn sites, but your 20 bucks a month helps feed our children. heh.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
nut now te can find out how to build a windmill to convert wind to electricity. Hel there are a couple of sites that will tell you how to do it from old parts.
so now this village has learned how to harness the wind. Now they can improve there irrigation, and power a water purifier.
mamybe a could of smart kids gett the backing of the community to let them learn programming and computer skills so they can start there own company.
that could generate revenue to get what they ned to conrinue to impriove there life on there own.
See? do you understand? or are you sued to having things easy and not starving that you have no clue what it takes to buld a long term solution.
in short:
Give a man a fish, he eats for a day. Teach a man to fish, he eats for a life time.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
You, my friend are an id10t.
The people in the villages have ASKED for these PCs.. They aren't being foisted upon them.. the Jhai PCs are intended for voice over IP as well as internet. The VoIP was the top priority.
Before you make a comment about something, you should learn more about it.
Favorite Shutdown Method?
Has this story been sitting in the queue long enough for the poll to be made? No, the poll is almost a week older than the Wired story.
So the new poll people are both pre-scient and don't care about CowboyNeal? Mommy, I'm scared.
Irene KHAAAAAAN!
...these guys actually knew what they were doing.
I first heard about these guys on slashdot last year. I went and worked with them in Laos. And, what I thought was a bad situation went from bad to worse.
Sure, Laonux is cool -> anything to make technology accessible to more people. But the whole remote IT project was fundamentally flawed.
No planning to speak of. No actual understanding of the conditions. No testing. No risk analysis. And a manager with a head so into marketing he couldn't get his nose out of it for long enough to realize that he was biting off more than he could chew. All he saw was an opportunity to make money off of it for his foundation.
It was essentially conceived as a vehicle to do a couple of things:
Obtain fortune for the techies working on it. Obtain fame for the JHAI project in lao to get it more funding. Turn into a business opportunity for everyone when it was hugely successful.
The first launch was a complete sham (and a failure) -> there were invites sent out to everybody and their cousin months before the launch date. At that point, nobody'd even bothered to try out the software involved on the eventual hardware. It failed essentially because they hadn't bothered to test it out. And, because the "lauch date" was so all important, instead of finishing it, everybody went home!
This would have been a cool idea if:
It had been planned in an effective way by people who had a clue.
It had been made to benefit the Lao people instead of the people making it.
If it had been built as something to last, instead of the best that they could come up with.
Now, they're trying to do it again. But, they still haven't spent the adequate amount of time planning and testing, and yet they're setting a launch date and inviting all the relevant people. And it's going to fail.
My guess, is that they'll have the whole thing work, limpingly, on the launch date. Then, nobody will be around who can actually maintain it, and it'll all break down within 4 months. All that effort wasted, and everybody who's been a part can put it on their resume and say "look, I've been selfless." Because they've put no resources into training people, or into any kind of backup. They're just doing like the dot com's... waiting for the crash, but completely surprised when it happens. Either that, or it'll be so buggy that nobody will ever bother using it.
"its my opinion that the last thing these folks need is the corruption of the internet"
One mans corruption is another mans.... exercise left for the reader.
I wonder about this. One of the best ways to motivate people is to piss them off. If all you have in your third world village is state sponsored radio it's entirely possible you simply wouldn't know just how horribly bad you have it. I am convinced that most third world inhabitants are just plain ignorant of their relative condition. Even third world people who aren't dirt poor were staggered when Baghdad fell. They honestly believed Iraq had the means to defeat US forces, because they've been told so all their lives. When McDonalds first opened in Moscow, the patrons were often impressed with the quality of the food! What if the truth is that by providing uncensored access you do the greatest good by way of raising expectations?
Lord knows nothing else seems to work. The left would have us believe there is some unknown amount of money us selfish westerners are supposed to be using to make it all better. The right offers platitudes about boot straps. Why not give these people something to be angry about by showing them just how bad off they are? Being pissed off is often very motivational.
Maw! Fire up the karma burner!
...another man's imperialist running dog propoganda.
First off, people in the third world are quite aware that the US is loaded. Its shoved down their throats to the point that the myths of America told 2 and 3 hundred years ago are still believed. The roads may not be paved with gold but everyone is as beautiful as Jennifer Aniston and has a bitchin' apartment.
But, what I'm saying, what I'd prefer, is that if we're going to help them in any way lets not help them to be us. Let's help them enough so that they can figure out who they are.
How sad would it be that all the world is America? How boring? I'm in no way saying that I want them to remain a quaint village we can all visit and take pictures of. It would just be nice if they could remain the people they are at the core but be able to reap those benefits of technology they deemed useful.
America is like crack. We use peer pressure to push ourselves on the unsuspecting masses. "See, America is great, cold icy drinks come out of a tap in the wall! you need to be just like us to enjoy the benefits of the almighty slurpee."
I'm not a self-hater. I love America. I think of myself as a patriot in the unperverted sense of the word. I think America is great for me. I just don't think America is great for the rest of the world. If you want to come here fine but, don't clone our world. Don't make a doppleganger of Britney. Do your own thing. If you need a hand ask, I'll gladly help out.
Don't destroy your world to be like ours. Part of being American is being able to enjoy other worlds. It would suck if all the worlds were the same wouldn't it?
didn't mean to get off on a rant there.
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I just got back from Laos a couple months ago, and I have to say I am surprised they even know what a computer is outside the Vientiene. If they can pull this off, then I'll be really impressed, and will even want to go check it out next time. But seriously, there is NOTHING in Laos, and while I applaud the effort of starting to build some sort of information infrastructure, and doing it a clever way at that, these villiges need more than Internet.
Ok, some viliger starts a business and decides to start selling something, the roads aren't even drivable half the year! How will they get it out of the country!
Now, this is an interesting read for its technical merits, and on that alone I am interested in it and wish them luck--but this isn't going to change the country like I thought the author of the article was trying to imply.
So will somebody being posting a map to this place? When is the next user's meet? We should all go show our support and vote with our kip, baht, or dollars.