Slashdot Mirror
Providing Access to Info in Developing Countries
matt writes "Widernet is a program run at the University of Iowa to provide developing countries access to information. Most of the universities they work with (mainly in Nigeria) have no internet access or have a very expensive, limited one. So Widernet ships hard drives with a data dump of about 100G to place on the local network. Students have access through the eGranery. Some the of the problems they are dealing with are how to provide updates to the already distributed libraries, how to provide the eGranery such that it can be setup with little or no IT knowledge, and how to stretch a limited budget and donations. I sadly had to turn down an internship with them, but would still like to contribute. Surely we can help with time, resources, and/or knowledge." And you thought sneakernet was dead.
It's the easiest way to get 1.3TB from here to there.
Government of the people, by corporate executives, for corporate profits.
Jim Gray (Microsoft researcher, grand Poo Bah of transactions, etc) cowrote an interesting paper 2 years ago entitled TeraScale SneakerNet: Using Inexpensive Disks for Backup, Archiving, and Data Exchange. (Word .DOC file) which analyzes the economics of transferring huge amounts of data by shipping hardware.
(Insert obligatory "never understimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of 9-track tapes" reference here.)