I am Ghanaian working on a similar idea for different purpose. In Ghana(and most of "third world") , where the average user cannot afford a computer but will be able to afford a few hours of internet access - this idea would be very useful. I am part of an NGO: Ghanathink(http://www.ghanathink.org) that is currently in the design stages of such a concept. The original idea was from Paa Kwesi a Ghanaian student at Yale Univ. Our architecture builds on the oceanstore project from berkeley for data storage. We basically write the open-source desktop environment that the user sees. Now if only we had the resources that Intel had...
Not forgetting that Westel failed to meet their contract and now being fined by the government. You should also read the The US Assistant Secretary of Commerce recent statement about it during his visit to Ghana a few days ago. Here is the link to the story
And maybe the president of Ghana's outrage and reply
I must second the heading: Ghana is definitely not a black hole. I am a Ghanaian and have lived in Ghana till two years ago when I came to the US for college. The article seems to be talking of a time long gone. I can say that seven years ago, this article would definitely be true. Power outages are not so rampant. I lived two blocks from Cyberia and the US Embassy is a block down. The US embassy being so close to us ensured that we hardly ever had any power outages even during the times when the whole country was going through power rationing. The phone system is definitely not that bad. The dropped calls he is talking about are calls from ground lines to mobile phones which as you can see from his statistics are definitely clogged. I have been trying to reach a cell phone for a whole week now(well, calling fom the US does not help either). I am not even going to talk about programmers, I can say for sure that there a lot more than stated and some are very good. You only need to local at locally produced software to convince yourself of that.
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I am Ghanaian working on a similar idea for different purpose. In Ghana(and most of "third world") , where the average user cannot afford a computer but will be able to afford a few hours of internet access - this idea would be very useful. I am part of an NGO: Ghanathink(http://www.ghanathink.org) that is currently in the design stages of such a concept. The original idea was from Paa Kwesi a Ghanaian student at Yale Univ. Our architecture builds on the oceanstore project from berkeley for data storage. We basically write the open-source desktop environment that the user sees. ...
Now if only we had the resources that Intel had
Not forgetting that Westel failed to meet their contract and now being fined by the government. You should also read the The US Assistant Secretary of Commerce recent statement about it during his visit to Ghana a few days ago. Here is the link to the
story
And maybe the president of Ghana's outrage and reply
I must second the heading: Ghana is definitely not a black hole. I am a Ghanaian and have lived in Ghana till two years ago when I came to the US for college. The article seems to be talking of a time long gone. I can say that seven years ago, this article would definitely be true. Power outages are not so rampant. I lived two blocks from Cyberia and the US Embassy is a block down. The US embassy being so close to us ensured that we hardly ever had any power outages even during the times when the whole country was going through power rationing.
The phone system is definitely not that bad. The dropped calls he is talking about are calls from ground lines to mobile phones which as you can see from his statistics are definitely clogged. I have been trying to reach a cell phone for a whole week now(well, calling fom the US does not help either).
I am not even going to talk about programmers, I can say for sure that there a lot more than stated and some are very good. You only need to local at locally produced software to convince yourself of that.
Africa and definitely Ghana is not a black hole