I've done a fair amount of traveling in India, though mostly in Urban/semi rural areas, but there's a fair amount of computer interest even outside the largest cities. On numerous road journeys in southern and south western India, every town (not as small as villages) had several satellite dishes, with cables stringing via electrical wire, bringing Cable TV to the villagers. In some of the larger towns, there were Internet access centers, and computer training classes.
When the state monopoly ISP, VSNL, was forced to allow other companies to hook up for access, ~ a year or so ago, cable modem internet services started springing up, first in the wealthiest areas of the largest cities, but spreading.
I recently found out that the district center of my native district has 12 cybercafes, with a population of under 100,000
All of these developments have only served to help out the richest Indians so far.
However, things are changing, and frankly improved communications via the net can impact the lives of even the poorest Indian villagers, not withstanding the protestations of Anonymous Cowards who think that Indians should improve their living standards by the same plodding methods that other countries did.
Studies that I've read have shown that the existence of just one phone in a village was enough to _double_ its average income. Why? Because, the increased communication allowed villagers, most of whom in India are farmers, to get better information about wholesale prices and get better deals from middlemen.
With one Internet connection to a village (imagine 1 or 2 486's running Linux, maybe hooked up with a bunch of VT100's running as serial consoles), villagers would be able to email bureaucrats and politicians, and get information on everything ranging from weather forecasts, to current crop prices, to even advice on animal husbandry.
Some objections that can (and have) been raised are costs, and also linguistic barriers. Given that an i-opener or cheap network computer has an approximate cost of $300 to make, it would cost a village of 500 people about 60 cents per person to purchase a computer, about half a day's wages for an average Indian.
Another objection raised is one of language and literacy. About 60% of Indians are literate, but people with at least a high school education can easily hired to run a place and help people whose literacy skills are weak. Also, people with a high school education are likely to have had a few years of English. A small fee can be placed for using the "cybercafe", the proceeds of which could be used to pay the operator and also pay for the purchase costs of the machine. This scheme is already being done in some areas of India.
With regards to the language issues, websites are starting to spring up in many Indian languages and scripts, making this less of a problem in the future.
Though it may seem that building better roads and a greater supply of electricity would be a better use of the money, helping them gain knowledge will help them increase their income several fold, which will in the long run help them increase their living standards by much more than institutional wisdom holds is possible....
There are several other languages which were "lingua francae" amongst an equally large group of people. As Islam spread from Medina in the central part of the Arabian peninsula, to the entire Near East and Africa, Arabic became the Lingua Franca of that entire region. Within a few centuries, it had mostly crowded out use of Coptic, Aramaic, Syriac, Assyrian, Berber, Latin, and several other once thriving languages which had formerly been spoken in these regions and are now limited in those regions to religious rituals of the non-Muslim (mostly Christian) minorities. But over the centuries, Arabic has greatly fragmented. A Palestinian friend of mine resorts to communicating to a Moroccan friend of his in English, or Classical Arabic (The formal Arabic speech from several centuries ago), since they can't understand each other's dialect.
That could be done. Another solution would be to just install it in a vmware virtual machine. Sure it would take up extra space, and you would have to install windows too, but hey, with 40GB hard drives going at under $300, should that be a real concern:)
QNX is not UNIX in the sense that it was not derived from the original UNIX operating system or based on its spec (i.e. Linux). QNX is a Real Time Operating System which has a UNIX-like interface, in the manner that BeOS has a UNIX like environment and possibly POSIX compliance, in order to simplify the porting of programs.
I wonder why none of the other satellite telephone companies was interested in purchasing their fleet of satellites, for use at least in a backup capability. It probably wouldn't be that expensive for Globalstar to do it, for example.
Are there plans by Motorola to help eventually merge their kernel patches into the linux kernel,or will this endup in the long feared fork of the kernel?
So when is Apple going to start porting MacOSX to the x86 architecture? Since MacOS X runs on top of the Mach microkernel, it seems like it could be done in a relatively short period of time
SIPB has had a linux Athena port for 6 years now, with early versions apparently based on Slackware. There are now efforts to port the Athena packages to non x86 linuxes, including PPC. Arun
The practice of numbering years from the birth of Christ was started by Dionosius Exiguus, a Syrian monk of the 800's (AD). Given the fact that trade and travel were very limited in those ages, it may still not have been in common usage by 888 AD. It's quite possible that people still used AUC, which counted the number of years since Rome was founded. However, they used the same months and it's quite possible that it was an even numbered year even in that system.
Slashdot Mirror
hopefully. That happens on Linux/Sparc machines...
Arun
How the f*** did this comment get moderated as insightful?
Someone is on definitely on crack.....
Arun
That's correct 1,00,000 is a numerical unit known as the lakh, which is the same as 100,000 in American usage.
Arun
I've done a fair amount of traveling in India, though mostly in Urban/semi rural areas, but there's a fair amount of computer interest even outside the largest cities. On numerous road journeys in southern and south western India, every town (not as small as villages) had several satellite dishes, with cables stringing via electrical wire, bringing Cable TV to the villagers. In some of the larger towns, there were Internet access centers, and computer training classes.
When the state monopoly ISP, VSNL, was forced to allow other companies to hook up for access, ~ a year or so ago, cable modem internet services started springing up, first in the wealthiest areas of the largest cities, but spreading.
I recently found out that the district center of my native district has 12 cybercafes, with a population of under 100,000
All of these developments have only served to help out the richest Indians so far.
However, things are changing, and frankly improved communications via the net can impact the lives of even the poorest Indian villagers, not withstanding the protestations of Anonymous Cowards who think that Indians should improve their living standards by the same plodding methods that other countries did.
Studies that I've read have shown that the existence of just one phone in a village was enough to _double_ its average income. Why? Because, the increased communication allowed villagers, most of whom in India are farmers, to get better information about wholesale prices and get better deals from middlemen.
With one Internet connection to a village (imagine 1 or 2 486's running Linux, maybe hooked up with a bunch of VT100's running as serial consoles), villagers would be able to email bureaucrats and politicians, and get information on everything ranging from weather forecasts, to current crop prices, to even advice on animal husbandry.
Some objections that can (and have) been raised are costs, and also linguistic barriers. Given that an i-opener or cheap network computer has an approximate cost of $300 to make, it would cost a village of 500 people about 60 cents per person to purchase a computer, about half a day's wages for an average Indian.
Another objection raised is one of language and literacy. About 60% of Indians are literate, but people with at least a high school education can easily hired to run a place and help people whose literacy skills are weak. Also, people with a high school education are likely to have had a few years of English. A small fee can be placed for using the "cybercafe", the proceeds of which could be used to pay the operator and also pay for the purchase costs of the machine. This scheme is already being done in some areas of India.
With regards to the language issues, websites are starting to spring up in many Indian languages and scripts, making this less of a problem in the future.
Though it may seem that building better roads and a greater supply of electricity would be a better use of the money, helping them gain knowledge will help them increase their income several fold, which will in the long run help them increase their living standards by much more than institutional wisdom holds is possible....
Arun
There are several other languages which were "lingua francae" amongst an equally large group of people. As Islam spread from Medina in the central part of the Arabian peninsula, to the entire Near East and Africa, Arabic became the Lingua Franca of that entire region. Within a few centuries, it had mostly crowded out use of Coptic, Aramaic, Syriac, Assyrian, Berber, Latin, and several other once thriving languages which had formerly been spoken in these regions and are now limited in those regions to religious rituals of the non-Muslim (mostly Christian) minorities. But over the centuries, Arabic has greatly fragmented. A Palestinian friend of mine resorts to communicating to a Moroccan friend of his in English, or Classical Arabic (The formal Arabic speech from several centuries ago), since they can't understand each other's dialect.
http://www.advogato.org/article/56.html
Arun
Arun
I know a person who got asked his email address a second time (over the phone) after ending it with .edu Arun
QNX is not UNIX in the sense that it was not derived from the original UNIX operating system
or based on its spec (i.e. Linux). QNX is a Real Time Operating System which has a UNIX-like
interface, in the manner that BeOS has a UNIX like environment and possibly POSIX compliance,
in order to simplify the porting of programs.
Arun
Arun
So when is Apple going to start porting MacOSX to the x86 architecture? Since MacOS X runs on top of the Mach microkernel, it seems like it could be done in a relatively short period of time
SIPB has had a linux Athena port for 6 years now, with early versions apparently based on Slackware. There are now efforts to port the Athena packages to non x86 linuxes, including PPC. Arun
Just Kidding!? It would be great if that happened. Maybe we'll finally get the truth about the advanced alien starcraft that are being stored there :)
The practice of numbering years from the birth of Christ was started by Dionosius Exiguus, a Syrian monk of the 800's (AD). Given the fact that trade and travel were very limited in those ages, it may still not have been in common usage by 888 AD. It's quite possible that people still used AUC, which counted the number of years since Rome was founded. However, they used the same months and it's quite possible that it was an even numbered year even in that system.