I'm the happy owner of a year-old Acer Aspire and can report that I'm running Ubuntu (breezy) on it smoothly - including using the built in wireless and the binary nvidia drivers. Everything works fine. Moreover, (at least in the UK) Acer support is good - after a couple of months I accidently poured coffee down the keyboard, and they replaced the keyboard free of charge with couriers both ways in the agreed 14 days.
Lucky to see this get posted the day after my team's existing contract came to an end. We spent yesterday afternoon writing a 'joint CV' and wondering whether anyone would want to hire a ready-made dev team!
We're a team of four (three devs and a project lead) who've enjoyed working together, from our respective homes, on a similar mission for the last eighteen months and want to find a way to keep on doing it...
Of course I took piles of CDs out, including linux distros, project gutenburg and free software. The points I specifically mentioned however were windows and anti virus updates, which are harder to solve with posted CDs. Also predicting in advance what's going to be required is a tricky business - still I'll be better informed for my next trip.
And FYI the internet is the main reason they want computers in the first place. Mail is unreliable and slow, particularly internationally. International phonecalls are prohibitively expensive and so contact with western charities that can provide advice and funding is pretty much all done by email.
It ironic then that the best developed countries in Africa today are those where European colonisation was strongest, compare e.g. Kenya (British colony - exports ~ $2.5 billion) and Uganda (British Protectorate - exports ~ $600 million).
Having spent two months in Uganda teaching IT this summer, I can wholeheartedly agree with the article. I was working in the rural south-wesst of the country and teaching IT to local charity workers. They had a lot of computers after receiving them (old P1/II's) from a UK charity, but I only found two that were being actively used - the others were in the office of people who had never been taught how to use them.
Internet access was pretty poor, 9.6k dialup, which was an issue. Between the power cuts and flaky telephone service it is impossible to download free software, windows updates or virus definitions if the file is 1Mb or more.
For the charity workers, the most useful thing I taught was some basic accounting and how to track their accounts in Excel. This is one thing theat is not taught in local schools, but naturally the supporting charities from the West expect their donations to be managed in a western manner.
I also took some of the computers out to schools where the children had never seen computers and I worried a bit about this, where 9/10 of the kids are going to live a subsistence farming life, you wonder about the point of teaching them how to use the computers. However, if we take that attitude about anything that's more complicated than working a mattock then where is the development going to come from?
Erm, no actually. The question of what is computable with which resources is a question for physics. It may well turn out that some problems, e.g. Factoring semi-primes, are NP within classical physics, but P within quantum mechanics. AFAIK no-ones done a lot of work on computational complexity within field theory or m-branes, although its a few years since I left the field myself so someone else might be able to add more.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm the happy owner of a year-old Acer Aspire and can report that I'm running Ubuntu (breezy) on it smoothly - including using the built in wireless and the binary nvidia drivers. Everything works fine. Moreover, (at least in the UK) Acer support is good - after a couple of months I accidently poured coffee down the keyboard, and they replaced the keyboard free of charge with couriers both ways in the agreed 14 days.
Lucky to see this get posted the day after my team's existing contract came to an end. We spent yesterday afternoon writing a 'joint CV' and wondering whether anyone would want to hire a ready-made dev team!
We're a team of four (three devs and a project lead) who've enjoyed working together, from our respective homes, on a similar mission for the last eighteen months and want to find a way to keep on doing it...
nagoff@gmail.com
Of course I took piles of CDs out, including linux distros, project gutenburg and free software. The points I specifically mentioned however were windows and anti virus updates, which are harder to solve with posted CDs. Also predicting in advance what's going to be required is a tricky business - still I'll be better informed for my next trip.
And FYI the internet is the main reason they want computers in the first place. Mail is unreliable and slow, particularly internationally. International phonecalls are prohibitively expensive and so contact with western charities that can provide advice and funding is pretty much all done by email.
It ironic then that the best developed countries in Africa today are those where European colonisation was strongest, compare e.g. Kenya (British colony - exports ~ $2.5 billion) and Uganda (British Protectorate - exports ~ $600 million).
Having spent two months in Uganda teaching IT this summer, I can wholeheartedly agree with the article. I was working in the rural south-wesst of the country and teaching IT to local charity workers. They had a lot of computers after receiving them (old P1/II's) from a UK charity, but I only found two that were being actively used - the others were in the office of people who had never been taught how to use them.
Internet access was pretty poor, 9.6k dialup, which was an issue. Between the power cuts and flaky telephone service it is impossible to download free software, windows updates or virus definitions if the file is 1Mb or more.
For the charity workers, the most useful thing I taught was some basic accounting and how to track their accounts in Excel. This is one thing theat is not taught in local schools, but naturally the supporting charities from the West expect their donations to be managed in a western manner.
I also took some of the computers out to schools where the children had never seen computers and I worried a bit about this, where 9/10 of the kids are going to live a subsistence farming life, you wonder about the point of teaching them how to use the computers. However, if we take that attitude about anything that's more complicated than working a mattock then where is the development going to come from?
SuSE also ships windowmaker, that's the combo I run!
"physics doesn't break encryption. Mathmatics does."
Erm, no actually. The question of what is computable with which resources is a question for physics. It may well turn out that some problems, e.g. Factoring semi-primes, are NP within classical physics, but P within quantum mechanics. AFAIK no-ones done a lot of work on computational complexity within field theory or m-branes, although its a few years since I left the field myself so someone else might be able to add more.
Nagoff