I use "it's" as a possessive pronoun, despite the fact that it's technically correct to use "its," simply because it is not intuitive.
Yes, I believe this is exactly why so many people make the mistake. (I get it wrong myself on occasion, but I almost always catch it.) The thought pattern is "Microsoft's", "Mandrake's", "it's". On the surface, this might seem consistent, but it actually isn't, given that "its" is a possessive pronoun that fits the pattern: "yours", "his", "hers", "theirs", "its". (Weren't we were supposed to master all that in kindergarten?) It's a special pet peeve of mine because I taught English in Japan for a year, and my students always got it right! So I'm always annoyed when I see native speakers get it wrong.
the meaning is obvious in context, so it's a valueless prescriptive rule
Hmm...almost any grammar and spelling error you can make is obvious in context, so let's just throw all the rulez owt th' wendoh. Y34h, TH4T w0uLd BE K3WL. W3'd 83 AbL3 +o Under5t4nd 34Ch 0+HeR MoRe 3@SilY If 3V3RY0n3 wro+3 englI$H 1N Wh@TevER w4Y thEy pHe3l 1$ In+U1+1VE. 1+ aLL m@K3$ pERph3Ct $EN$e in cONTEXT, r1gh+?
The "rules" on "its" and "it's" vary in different parts of the world. It is different in England and the United States, for example.
There is absolutely no difference between the British and American usage of "its" vs. "it's". You must be thinking of "its" vs. "their". In British writing, for example, companies are usually pluralized, such as: "Red Hat are working on their next release of Linux." In American writing, you will see: "Red Hat is working on its next release of Linux." A similar example comes from the word "crowd", as in the British expression "The crowd are roaring." American English never pluralizes the word "crowd", taking it to be a singular group rather than a number of people.
You just get over it and you have a wider variety of reading material.
No! The problem of "its" versus "it's" is universal. It is a grammar mistake, not an idiom, no matter what country you live in. I challenge you to come up with a sentence where British English would use "it's" and American English would use "its". (Correctly, I mean, and without grammar mistakes.)
never mind if they happen to be from the exact same part of the world and have the exact same education so that their punctuation can match.
This is not an issue of regional differences in punctuation. "It's" and "its" are completely different words.
My pet peeve is what seems to be the #1 grammar mistake on Slashdot (even in the articles): it's instead of its. (i.e. "Netscape and it's parent company AOL") I can understand messing up a Teddy Roosevelt quote, but a friggin' pronoun?
Tip: If you change "it's" to "it is" and it doesn't make sense, then take out the apostrophe.
Red Hat Linux is anything but focused on the corporate desktop. If it was they would have made it easy to use and fixed things like the screen resolution controls.
I work at a national call center where we have 300+ workstations with identical monitors and video cards. We never need to change screen resolutions.
Your comment about overhead projectors is interesting; I've never had the need for it myself. Obviously, salespeople using projectors will probably want to use Xandros rather than Red Hat Linux. For most corporate needs, however, changing screen resolutions isn't so important, and it will probably be greatly improved in Red Hat anyway once it ships with XFree86 4.3.
If you want to go off-topic on the thread and talk about Red Hat as a desktop alternative...
LOL! You're joking, right? You were the one who brought it up in the first place, dude. Go back and read your original post; you pulled Red Hat Linux out of the blue.
I stronlgy suggest that you try Xandros. You can get a copy for just $99 (or $49 without CrossOver) It's a great value and you might really like it...
Hmm...so my company could install Xandros on its 300 machines at a cost of $15,000, or they could put Red Hat Linux on all of them for free. Yeah, great value.
So the latest version, on what I consider a decently fast machine, gave you noticable improvements.
When pages load in a few seconds, a noticeable speed improvement is on the order of 500ms -- not really something to write home about. And I haven't actually confirmed that the latest version is faster; it just kind of felt that way when I first installed it. Now that I've been using it awhile, I can't tell if it's faster since it was pretty fast to begin with anyway.
So why not focus on improving this further?
I never said you shouldn't! If you want to contribute patches that improve Mozilla's speed, I'd be quite happy. But I don't think the Mozilla engineers should be working on <1s speedups when there are more important bug fixes to be working on. Any bug reports or patches that I submit will not be related to Gecko's rendering speed.
Think embedded devices.
I don't think anybody's thinking that, or at least I wasn't, given the enormous size of Mozilla. It would be a challenge to fit Gecko into the tiny amounts of RAM in most embedded devices. It was never designed for them, anyway.
Get into some more advanced CSS or DHTML and you really start to see room for improvement -- even on smaller pages.
Well, that's certainly possible. I wouldn't know since so few pages use advanced CSS and DHTML. I don't think the developers should be spending the majority of their time on corner cases.
Optimisation should *always* be a priority.
I never said otherwise. My point was only this: Optimization does not equal innovation. Besides, I think most computer scientists and engineers (and myself) would say that correctness and portability should take priority over speed.
you can insert a flash memory stick into the USB and, bam!, it appears in the file manager. ... This is one reason why Red Hat's desktop will never be a good option in corporations. Red Hat is a server company that nominally offers a desktop solution, but they do not even begin to understand these issues.
Memory sticks and similar USB-based devices (usually full of MP3s) are not high on the list of corporate IT requirements. In fact, I'd be surprised if there's any large corporation in the world that has a need for those things. Hardware detection (a.k.a. Plug-n-Play) is, after all, a consumer-driven feature. Large corporations typically standardize on one particular set of desktop peripherals, and their IT departments have dedicated staff that know exactly how to install them. Usually there is no hardware detection necessary at all; they just install the OS and drivers on one system, then replicate it on all their other machines. To say that Xandros' hardware detection makes it more attractive to corporations is a very strange conclusion to make, especially when you compare it to Red Hat Linux, a distribution targeted at the corporate desktop.
The innovation lies in making the engine that turns markup language into a layout on your screen faster
I've never understood why people complain about the rendering speed of modern browsers. Whenever I browse HTML files on my local hard disk, they come up almost instantly. It's only when I hop on the Internet that things slow down, which means that the bottleneck is the net, not the browser.
On modern systems, page rendering seems plenty fast to me. A cable modem is hooked up to my 800 MHz laptop with 256 MB of RAM (not exactly a powerhouse machine), and surfing is very fast. If it's slow for you, then I suggest upgrading to Mozilla 1.3b. The team seems to have made some noticeable speed improvements in this latest release.
Of course, when pages load in just a few seconds anyway, I still don't understand why people complain. Does it really matter if Slashdot loads in two seconds instead of four? Even if it does, I wouldn't call it "innovation".
and less buggy
Now that I can agree with. All browsers can use bug fixes. Of course, web pages can be buggy, too, and if web designers followed standards more carefully, our browsers would be both faster and less buggy.
I wonder if RedHat even bothered to test them, I mean they have fired their only KDE-contributor - who is actually in charge of KDE at RedHat?
I think Bernhard Rosenkraenzer (sp?) was a KDE packager, not a contributor. And he wasn't fired; he quit. Than Ngo's handling the KDE builds now.
GNOME looked quite OK at version 1.4 (actually I preferred the look over KDE although the functionality wasn't at the same level), but version 2 and above is definitely a step back and only barely better than the Windows GUI which is probably the most primitive GUI out there.
I was kind of the opposite. I thought GNOME 1.4 sucked compared to KDE 2.x, so I've continued to use KDE. (3.1 is now on my Red Hat laptop.) But now that GTK+ has anti-aliased fonts and GNOME 2.2 has that nifty Wi-Fi applet, I'm thinking about switching over to GNOME. They sure need to do something about that GTK+ file dialog, though. Man, what a piece of junk.
So you declare the startmenu as the control-center and think all problems are adressed?
No, I thought you would. I got the impression that you felt it was the biggest problem with Red Hat Linux. You were throwing out the baby with the bathwater, so I addressed it.
According to your logic, Safari users could send bugreports right to the KDE-team.
Yes, it was my understanding that Safari and Konqueror both use KHTML as the rendering engine. If a page doesn't render properly in Safari, then it also doesn't render properly in Konqueror. Maybe I was wrong -- bad example. But I think my point about Bluecurve still stands.
So you have to rely on a bunch of people to do what is the job of the distributor?
Huh? I don't expect them to do anything for me because I get everything from them for free! I download new Red Hat ISOs every six months at no charge. Or do you expect them to do what you want without giving them a nickel? No wonder you're all "ticked off". C'mon, beggars can't be choosers! Besides, even if you were paying them, Red Hat still can't include every package you want exactly the way you want it. They don't even have to provide KDE at all if they don't want to. For instance, rdiff-backup is a program I can't live with out, and it's not included in Red Hat. But I'm not going to quit using Red Hat just for that reason, since I can download the RPM here. The bottom line is, KDE 3.1 binaries are available from Red Hat, and if you don't like the way they've packaged them, you can still get the "pure" versions from that site I mentioned.
This loyality really ticks me off.
It's not loyalty; it's inertia.;) I've been using Red Hat Linux since 5.2, and the reasons to switch aren't compelling enough for me. It's just easier to go with what you know.
I would say "screw them" and switch to someone else.
Hey, that's perfectly fine by me! Use whatever distro you want. But like I said, I thought we were talking about what Linux newbies should use, not what you should use. I don't see why those folks would care whether KDE 3.1 was a few weeks late.
Goddamn, that was my point. KDE 3.1 is available for all non-RedHat distros in nice easily installable binary package. Only RedHat users have to compile.
I think you're misinformed. The KDE 3.1 packages for Red Hat are here. Besides, isn't it possible that this guy might prefer GNOME over KDE, or is GNOME also "crippled"? Actually, I shouldn't have said that. This is just going to turn into another off-topic flame-fest. Regardless, I don't understand why you insist he run KDE. I'd prefer he make that choice for himself.
He will have to mess with different configuration tools in different places and that sucks. (Or can I set IP-adresses, screen resolution, firewall settings, desktop colors and wallpaper in the same config center in RedHat?)
Have you actually tried Red Hat Linux? You can find all the configuration options on the start menu. For instance, to change the desktop background, click start menu, Preferences, Background. To change the screen fonts, click start menu, Preferences, Fonts. Seems pretty easy and consistent to me. If you want all of the options within one application, you can run GNOME Control Center, also available in the Preferences menu. I believe Bluecurve has the same control center option in KDE, but if not, it seems like a pretty silly reason to throw out Red Hat. Are you saying the whole distro is worthless because the system settings are in the start menu instead of a control center? (Rhetorical question; I think I already know your answer.)
it is inconsistent with all other distros
Since when do all desktops have to be identical to each other? Lindows and Lycoris also run heavily modified versions of KDE; are they trash, too?
causes RedHat to lag behind in availability of packages
Lag behind? They come out with a new release every six months, and if that's not enough, you can get the unstable packages here.
and makes bugreports from RedHat users worthless
I don't see why. The configuration of the desktop is different, but the code is same. For instance, Red Hat did not re-write the KDE CD Player for Bluecurve. When a Red Hat user finds a bug in kscd, the bug will be in all other distributions, as well.
Since when do we cheer up unecessary forks?
Bluecurve is not a fork; it's a repackaging. What Red Hat has done with KDE is similar to what Galeon has done with Mozilla, or what Apple's Safari has done with Konqueror. They've added code and changed the look a lot, but the foundation is still there. Or does this mean you think Safari is crap, too? It sounds like you think it's okay for others to modify KDE, but Red Hat can't.
Debian is as inconsistent as RedHat but has other advantages (apt-get)
Hmm. You complained about Red Hat lagging behind in package availability, but from what I hear, Debian is far worse. How long did it take Debian to come out with KDE 3.0 packages?
so does Gentoo.
Gentoo!? I thought we were talking about distros for newbies.
*ALL* the prejudices that I hear...
That you "hear"? Don't judge a distro until you've actually tried it.
on RedHat you do have to compile KDE 3.1 on no other major distro you have to do that!
This is simply not true. You can get them from the Rawhide links I posted above, or you can get them here. Just because you can't get them from kde.org doesn't mean you have to compile them yourself.
RedHat is not ready for the desktop, Linux is.
Well, to each his own. I can see why KDE purists might have a problem with Red Hat Linux, but for Linux newbies, it's one of the better distros out there. I think dj_paulgibbs should try several different distros and pick the one he likes best, not the one that has "pure KDE".
Since many userland issues penetrate the NT kernel, it is able to say things like "Give priority boost to the process that has the currently focused window". It's really freaking ugly, but it allows Windows to "cheat" to good effect.
Yes, I was surprised when I heard that Microsoft was moving GDI into the kernel. (NT 4.0, I think it was.) It doesn't seem like a good idea in theory, but it seems to have worked in practice, probably because GDI was so mature at the time (and still is) that they had all the bugs ironed out. Turth is, I've never heard of it being the source of problems in NT.
By design, the Linux kernel does not have this information, nor should it (since it has more than one rendering system, window manager, etc.)
Why not? If some additional data on mouse and keyboard events could help the Linux scheduler, it seems reasonable that there could be some standard method of communication between the input subsystem and the kernel. I don't think the window managers and rendering systems would have to be changed because they don't handle input events. Only the X subsystem that handles the mouse and keyboard would need to be modified. But IANA kernel hacker, so I'm just shooting in the dark here.
Why not just install KDE 3.1 which is available easily for every major non-RedHat distribution?
Because he's a first-time Linux user. Compiling and installing the dozen or so KDE packages is not a task I would recommend to a Linux newbie. He would also have to compile XFree86 and GNOME, both of which have had major updates since Red Hat 8.0. Are you suggesting he should compile and install them, too, plus the kernel and all of the other updated packages that will be included in 8.1? I don't think we want to torture this guy. The idea is to show him that Linux can be just as easy to use as Windows.
RedHat's decision to crippl^W make BlueCurve was stupid which is proven by the absence of official KDE3.1 packages for RedHat.
No matter what you think about the politics of Bluecurve, I think we can all agree it improves the out-of-box experience for new Linux users like our friend dj_paulgibbs.
Now, I am a long-time user of Windows, but am (and have been always) increasingly tempted by switching to a Linux-based distribution, probably Redhat, on my main desktop machine.
I'd wait until Red Hat Linux 8.1 comes out. It'll include the latest releases of GNOME, KDE, and XFree86.
With that lack-of-linux-knowledge, could someone explain why precisly this is a "Significant Interactivity Boost in (the) Linux Kernel"? Thank you.
First, you need to know what they mean by "interactivity". They're talking about applications that respond to keyboard and mouse events -- basically any application that has a GUI. Non-interactive applications are those that run in batch mode, such as compiling the Linux kernel or ripping tracks from a CD.
You probably wouldn't care if those tasks paused for a second or two every so often, but you'd get really annoyed if you were typing an email and there was a one-second delay after each keypress. The idea, then, is to give priority to those interactive apps and improve their response times.
I haven't looked at the patch, but I assume it tries to be smart and find the interactive app that's in the foreground -- that is, the one that's actively handling keypress and mouse clicks. Even though you could be running many interactive apps at once, you probably care most about the one in front of you.
It's interesting to note that Windows, having always been a GUI environment, has always tried to boost interactive applications automatically. Linux, on the other hand, has traditionally been used on servers, and it requires manual adjustment for interactive applications (using the "nice" command, for instance). This patch could make GUI applications on Linux just as responsive as Windows without sacrificing its role on the server. Of course, that remains to be seen.
dominated by the costs of rolling out trucks, digging trenches, laying wire and climbing poles.
This is true in the industrial world but not in developing countries like Senegal, where you can hire laborers for dollars a day. The labor would actually be the cheapest part of the overall cost.
Think about it... 500 km with a pole every 25 m, that's 10000 poles, each one has to be put up, the cable strung, etc. etc.
I was talking about 100 km, not 500 km, because the cost benefit of wired lines is greater at shorter distances. Also, I'm not sure where you got the value of 25 m. I'd say the poles could be much farther apart than that. Also, wooden poles are dirt-cheap in West Africa, because the forests are in-country (Ghana actually exports timber), so you wouldn't need to pay the costs of importing and international shipping (unlike the Wi-Fi electronics).
Of course, at a distance of 500 km, wires are normally put up using large metal towers at great distances apart. They'd cost more but would be more permanent. Regardless, I don't think either of us has enough data on this subject to do a proper comparison.
Laptops run on solar power.
No, they can be charged with solar power, but they cannot run on solar power. I know this because I actually tried it when I lived in Ghana. I brought a 60 cm by 30 cm portable solar panel with me to Ghana, thinking that I'd be able to power my laptop with it, but it was useless. Even in direct sunlight with no clouds in the sky, it took two days to charge the thing, and as you know, laptops can only run about 3 hours max on a full charge. That meant I could only use my laptop for 3 hours every two days! And of course, during the rainy season (a span of about four months), I couldn't use it at all because there was no sun. An even bigger issue is price. The small solar panel I brought with me cost $500. Are you suggesting we add $500 to the cost of each computer that these villagers buy? No, solar power just isn't feasible in the situation we're talking about. As for routers, even if they draw very little current, they'd still go dead at night if they were on solar power. I suppose you could add batteries (and thus several hundred dollars more to the cost), but I doubt they could store enough juice to last through a four-month rainy season.
Let's just say, for the sake of argument, that computers and APs don't need electricity, and the only issue is cost. Are you still suggesting that we hook up these rural villages to Wi-Fi before we give them electricity? Try going for a week without electricity sometime, and I think you'll find light bulbs will become much more important to you than Internet access.;) (Seriously, I went without electrical power for long periods at a time while living in Ghana, and Internet access was not high on my list! A nice cool fan was much more valuable than a computer in those conditions.)
The bottom line is, you can do so much more with electricity than with Wi-Fi. Electricity gives you lights, fans, refrigerators, radios, TVs, and other appliances that have a much deeper impact on the quality of life than being able to surf the net. For instance, in the small rural town where I lived, the hospital used electricity to chill polio vaccines that would otherwise be ruined in the tropical heat. Meanwhile, in the center of town, women used an electric mill to grind cornmeal so they could prepare meals for their families. Are you honestly saying that Wi-Fi access and VoIP are more important than these things?
Although there are Wi-Fi APs that include routers, many don't.
Actually, I meant APs, not APs with routers. (I use the term "router" for both types.)
At each base station, the WiFi devices may be connected to any of the available routing and switching equipment that can be used with a normal TCP/IP network. So, each base station can tap into the data stream, and do whatever they like with it. Wi-Fi doesn't care how many "connections" there are, it's all TCP/IP packets.
You're saying that a Wi-Fi AP can support an arbitrary number of simultaneous connections, but this just isn't true. You cannot increase the number of connections to an AP without bound. Every time a computer connects to an AP and transmits packets, the AP has to allocate resources (RAM and CPU) to forward those packets. And because there is a finite amount of RAM and clock cycles in the AP, there is a finite number of simultaneous connections.
I did some more checking on this, and I have yet to find an off-the-shelf router that can handle more than 256 connections, and most can only handle 64. Try these links: Envara CheetahWireless And this guy says his AP can't handle more than 7 (!) connections.
Microsoft Windows has had versioning of DLLs for as long as I can remember, way back in the days of 3.x. The article says, "Windows and Windows applications have no notion of DLL version numbers," but this is false. You can see the version numbers for DLLs on your system by starting Windows Explorer and navigating to the c:\windows\system directory. Right-click on a DLL, then click Properties, then click the Version tab. You'll see the version numbers there, including the company name, copyright info, and other important details. Windows applications can retrieve this data by calling the GetFileVersionInfo function.
Also Senegal isn't that big a country... with 25km hops you can go border to border (about 500km) with 20 hops. Each hop is a tower, a couple of antennas and a couple of APs... costing maybe $1200 total.
I'm not following you. First, I don't think 20 hops in 500 km is possible, but let's say it is. You say each hop needs a tower, two antennae, and two APs. Antennae are about $100 each, and 802.11b APs are about $100, also. That's $400 per hop, times 20 hops is $8,000. I haven't included the 50-foot metal towers yet, which must surely cost several thousand dollars each, since you've also got to pay for the transportation of the metal beams and labor for the installation. Even if the towers were only $5,000 each, you'd still end up with a grand total of $108,000!
Even if you could do what you suggest for only $24,000, what have you actually accomplished? All you've done is connected two points together that are on opposite ends of the country. How are people supposed to get access to the link from within the country? They'd only be able to use your Internet connection if they were lucky enough to be right underneath one of the hops. (Remember, we're talking about directional, point-to-point nodes in this scenario.) And even if they were able to reach those hops, there are still those bandwidth limitations I mentioned.
If you have been making the move to wireless lately, most likely you are working with the microwave, high bandwidth frequencies of 802.11b. If so, you know that on a clear day you maybe can get a line-of-sight connection out 10 miles or so.
Italics are his, not mine, so he's certainly not in support of your argument. Can you be more specific on your sources?
Do you even know what SAT-3 is? It's an undersea cable, that is very difficult to cut.
I wasn't suggesting that you go underwater to cut the link. It has to come out onto land in Senegal somewhere, and that's where it can be cut.
What would be interesting to see is a price comparison between 100 km of standard phone line and a Wi-Fi link of the same distance. My guess is that the phone line would be far cheaper and provide about the same bandwidth...
You're joking, right?
No, I'd really like to see some figures on that. Wooden poles and copper wires are cheaper than steel towers and wireless routers. (Was that a rhyme?)
It is possible to have higher bandwidth using directionals, and the antennas are cheap, in the range of $50-$100.
Everything I've read about long-distance Wi-Fi says that even with a high-gain antenna, you still get only a fraction of the bandwidth at the distances you're talking about (30 km). Also, $100 is certainly not cheap. Remember, we're talking about a developing country here, and the $100 you're suggesting would be multiplied across every node.
Another point I was trying to make is that by using a directional antenna, you're making a site-to-site connection, rather than spreading the Wi-Fi access throughout an area. That defeats one of the big advantages of having a wireless connection in the first place.
No, but it's cheaper than building a power grid (since that, too, doesn't exist in much of the developing world). If a power grid is present, the generator is only for backup. In addition, Wi-Fi equipment has a minimal power use.
I'm really not following your logic here. You're suggesting that if a region doesn't have a power grid, then we can still go ahead and put in a Wi-Fi network anyway? You need a computer to use Wi-Fi, and you can't use a computer without electricity! In any case, providing electrical power is far more important than Wi-Fi, so it's not a simple dollar-for-dollar comparison. I mean, being able to turn on a light bulb is more important than hooking up to a Wi-Fi network, so a power grid should take priority over Wi-Fi even if it costs more.
This shows me that you are missing a clue. Since when does dial-up give you 1Mbps?
Oops. I was typing too fast and doing the calculations in my head, and I got to thinking in Kbps instead of Mbps. Sorry. Let me revise my figures then. Let's say 802.11g is giving you 30 Mbps, as you said. That means if there are 1000 users online at once (quite possible, since you're suggesting we share the Wi-Fi link with all 10 million people in Senegal), then each user would get less than 4 kilobytes per second. And besides, isn't Wi-Fi limited to 256 simultaneous connections, anyway? I think my points still stand, or did I have another brain-fart?
Thanks for your reply, because you've helped me show that my concept stands up to (admittedly lame) criticism. I'm not even going to bother addressing your last comment since you clearly have little grasp on the concepts of network design.
Perhaps I don't, so please explain what I said that was so "lame". Am I wrong in thinking that most Wi-Fi routers puke out when they get to around 30 or so simultaneous connections?
I realize you think I'm only trying to attack your ideas, but I'm not -- I had the same ideas myself when I was in the Peace Corps! But after reading up on Wi-Fi and thinking a lot about the possibilities, I realized that there are just too many problems with Wi-Fi, and I'm mentioning the caveats here. It would be great if it could work, but I don't believe it's possible for Wi-Fi to share an Internet connection throughout the rural areas of a developing country.
What's needed is wireless. Wireless internet (e.g. 802.11b Wi-Fi) is a far more appropriate solution in a country like Senegal
I'm not a Wi-Fi expert, but everything I know about Wi-Fi tells me that what you propose isn't possible. Here's why:
traditional wireline infrastructure is going to be subject to harsh environmental conditions and being destroyed by political unrest
Are you saying that Wi-Fi infrastructure would somehow be invincible to these issues? Let's say there's a coup, and the new leader wants to cut off Internet access. All he has to do is cut the SAT-3 link that you speak of. This would affect Internet links throughout the country, whether they were wireless or not.
As for environmental conditions, sub-Saharan West Africa may be harsh, but so is North America! We tend to think West Africa has a worse environment because of famine and diseases such as malaria, but that doesn't affect infrastructure, of course. And although it's true that West Africa can see some very high temperatures, they're not much worse than what you'll find in the southwestern states of the U.S. In fact, I'd say that the weather conditions here in America are actually harsher than West Africa's due to the wide ranges of temperature we experience. In my home state of Kansas, we go from 35 degrees Celsius in the summer down to -10 in the winter, and that can really play havoc on Wi-Fi electronics.
Naturally, with the wireless infrastructure you propose, you'd need links that are well protected from the rain and heat of Senegal, and that can add a lot to the cost of installation and maintenance. What would be interesting to see is a price comparison between 100 km of standard phone line and a Wi-Fi link of the same distance. My guess is that the phone line would be far cheaper and provide about the same bandwidth, since Wi-Fi bandwidth diminishes greatly over long distances.
Wi-Fi long-distance links can span 30 km in a single hop
From what I've read, 30 km is a best-case scenario for Wi-Fi under good weather conditions, and it only provides minimal bandwidth (on the order of one or two Mbps). More importantly, this can only be acheived with a high-gain directional antenna! Even if you could get this to work as an Internet link between towns, you still haven't solved the last-mile problem! How are you going to spread out that Wi-Fi access across the town? Even with good omni-directional antennae, you'd have to put repeaters in a grid every two kilometers or so, driving up the cost beyond the means of rural towns in a developing country like Senegal.
the towers like cell towers can be powered with generators
Do you have any idea how much that would cost? Over time, gas-powered generators would suck up money like a sponge, and solar panels with batteries are still too expensive to be put on every single Wi-Fi node. Plus, generators can easily break down and have to be serviced, adding even more to the cost.
Wi-Fi delivers true broadband, 802.11b is 10Mbps, and 802.11a and 802.11g can deliver more like 30Mbps.
This shows me that you really haven't thought this idea through. Let me get this straight: You're suggesting that we take the fiber optic backbone coming into Senegal and span it out across the country using Wi-Fi repeaters. Sorry, but Wi-Fi bandwidth is shared! If 30 users are on a "fast" 802.11g channel, then they'll each see less than 1 Mbps -- even worse than dial-up! So much for the broadband you speak of. And besides, most Wi-Fi routers can't handle more than 30 or so connections anyway. That means out of the 10 million people in Senegal, only 30 of them could be on the Internet at any given time. It sounds like not many people will be using this "killer app" of yours!
Next time, you ought to think about the limitations of Wi-Fi before you trumpet its advantages.
These people most likely dont have the skills to combat cyber terrorism
Yep, that's the point. The Peace Corps has very strict rules about separating volunteers from any sort of law enforcement activities, and that's a good thing: If foreign governments have any reason to suspect that the Peace Corps could be involved in spying or any kind of intelligence operations, they wouldn't be able to trust our intentions. Plus, the volunteers would be even more at risk to kidnapping and similar dangers than they already are. For this reason, all volunteers are put through a CIA background check as part of the application process, not to determine whether they're a security risk, but to find out if they've ever had any association with the CIA. If so, they're permanently ineligible for Peace Corps service, no matter what other qualifications they might have. (There's a similar rule for related intelligence agencies, but they might forgive you if it was more than 10 years ago.) Check out the eligibility form.
Actually, the Peace Corps is taking IT very seriously. They now consider it a "focus area", which means that they devote about the same amount of resources to IT development as they do to AIDS education and prevention. (In other words, a lot.) They made it a focus area in late 2000, probably right after you left, and I attended one of the in-service trainings that Peace Corps funded as part of this change. It is true, though, that IT is not yet a full-fledged Peace Corps assignment, but I predict that it will become one sometime within the next ten years.
I speak from experience, too, and I have no idea what the original poster was talking about. The vast majority of Peace Corps volunteers are most definitely not English teachers. The Corps does send English teachers to countries that request them (such as Poland), but the majority of volunteers train host-country nationals in things like health, water sanitation, small business development, and non-English education such as science or math.
A friend of mine, Joel, was a Peace Corps volunteer in Ghana for four years, and he did exactly what you suggest. He set up an entire network of Linux-based computers to be used as a computer lab at the local high school in Wenchi, Ghana. See the home page.
You can also find more info about my Peace Corps experience here: Two Years, Two Months
The requirements you listed are spot-on. Note that if you don't have knowledge of Spanish or French, having a science or engineering degree can do just as much to help get you in to the Peace Corps. (Most applicants are liberal arts majors without any technical skills that the Peace Corps needs.)
I could see 3 or 4 months, but 2 years of my life to be a volunteer?
Two years is nothing -- a small fraction of your normal life span -- especially when you consider the impact those two years could have on your life. Think about it: What would you do with those two years in the U.S.? Work a nine-to-five job so you can buy that new computer and a big screen TV? I'd prefer to spend the time traveling the world, making friends, learning a new language, and discovering places I've only seen in National Geographic. But that's just me. If you can only commit three months, try the GeekCorps.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, I believe this is exactly why so many people make the mistake. (I get it wrong myself on occasion, but I almost always catch it.) The thought pattern is "Microsoft's", "Mandrake's", "it's". On the surface, this might seem consistent, but it actually isn't, given that "its" is a possessive pronoun that fits the pattern: "yours", "his", "hers", "theirs", "its". (Weren't we were supposed to master all that in kindergarten?) It's a special pet peeve of mine because I taught English in Japan for a year, and my students always got it right! So I'm always annoyed when I see native speakers get it wrong.
the meaning is obvious in context, so it's a valueless prescriptive rule
Hmm...almost any grammar and spelling error you can make is obvious in context, so let's just throw all the rulez owt th' wendoh. Y34h, TH4T w0uLd BE K3WL. W3'd 83 AbL3 +o Under5t4nd 34Ch 0+HeR MoRe 3@SilY If 3V3RY0n3 wro+3 englI$H 1N Wh@TevER w4Y thEy pHe3l 1$ In+U1+1VE. 1+ aLL m@K3$ pERph3Ct $EN$e in cONTEXT, r1gh+?
There is absolutely no difference between the British and American usage of "its" vs. "it's". You must be thinking of "its" vs. "their". In British writing, for example, companies are usually pluralized, such as: "Red Hat are working on their next release of Linux." In American writing, you will see: "Red Hat is working on its next release of Linux." A similar example comes from the word "crowd", as in the British expression "The crowd are roaring." American English never pluralizes the word "crowd", taking it to be a singular group rather than a number of people.
You just get over it and you have a wider variety of reading material.
No! The problem of "its" versus "it's" is universal. It is a grammar mistake, not an idiom, no matter what country you live in. I challenge you to come up with a sentence where British English would use "it's" and American English would use "its". (Correctly, I mean, and without grammar mistakes.)
never mind if they happen to be from the exact same part of the world and have the exact same education so that their punctuation can match.
This is not an issue of regional differences in punctuation. "It's" and "its" are completely different words.
No, it's the end of a Saturday night spent in the backseat of a car parked up on Makeout Point.
My pet peeve is what seems to be the #1 grammar mistake on Slashdot (even in the articles): it's instead of its. (i.e. "Netscape and it's parent company AOL") I can understand messing up a Teddy Roosevelt quote, but a friggin' pronoun?
Tip: If you change "it's" to "it is" and it doesn't make sense, then take out the apostrophe.
I work at a national call center where we have 300+ workstations with identical monitors and video cards. We never need to change screen resolutions.
Your comment about overhead projectors is interesting; I've never had the need for it myself. Obviously, salespeople using projectors will probably want to use Xandros rather than Red Hat Linux. For most corporate needs, however, changing screen resolutions isn't so important, and it will probably be greatly improved in Red Hat anyway once it ships with XFree86 4.3.
If you want to go off-topic on the thread and talk about Red Hat as a desktop alternative...
LOL! You're joking, right? You were the one who brought it up in the first place, dude. Go back and read your original post; you pulled Red Hat Linux out of the blue.
I stronlgy suggest that you try Xandros. You can get a copy for just $99 (or $49 without CrossOver) It's a great value and you might really like it...
Hmm...so my company could install Xandros on its 300 machines at a cost of $15,000, or they could put Red Hat Linux on all of them for free. Yeah, great value.
When pages load in a few seconds, a noticeable speed improvement is on the order of 500ms -- not really something to write home about. And I haven't actually confirmed that the latest version is faster; it just kind of felt that way when I first installed it. Now that I've been using it awhile, I can't tell if it's faster since it was pretty fast to begin with anyway.
So why not focus on improving this further?
I never said you shouldn't! If you want to contribute patches that improve Mozilla's speed, I'd be quite happy. But I don't think the Mozilla engineers should be working on <1s speedups when there are more important bug fixes to be working on. Any bug reports or patches that I submit will not be related to Gecko's rendering speed.
Think embedded devices.
I don't think anybody's thinking that, or at least I wasn't, given the enormous size of Mozilla. It would be a challenge to fit Gecko into the tiny amounts of RAM in most embedded devices. It was never designed for them, anyway.
Get into some more advanced CSS or DHTML and you really start to see room for improvement -- even on smaller pages.
Well, that's certainly possible. I wouldn't know since so few pages use advanced CSS and DHTML. I don't think the developers should be spending the majority of their time on corner cases.
Optimisation should *always* be a priority.
I never said otherwise. My point was only this: Optimization does not equal innovation. Besides, I think most computer scientists and engineers (and myself) would say that correctness and portability should take priority over speed.
...
This is one reason why Red Hat's desktop will never be a good option in corporations. Red Hat is a server company that nominally offers a desktop solution, but they do not even begin to understand these issues.
Memory sticks and similar USB-based devices (usually full of MP3s) are not high on the list of corporate IT requirements. In fact, I'd be surprised if there's any large corporation in the world that has a need for those things. Hardware detection (a.k.a. Plug-n-Play) is, after all, a consumer-driven feature. Large corporations typically standardize on one particular set of desktop peripherals, and their IT departments have dedicated staff that know exactly how to install them. Usually there is no hardware detection necessary at all; they just install the OS and drivers on one system, then replicate it on all their other machines. To say that Xandros' hardware detection makes it more attractive to corporations is a very strange conclusion to make, especially when you compare it to Red Hat Linux, a distribution targeted at the corporate desktop.
I've never understood why people complain about the rendering speed of modern browsers. Whenever I browse HTML files on my local hard disk, they come up almost instantly. It's only when I hop on the Internet that things slow down, which means that the bottleneck is the net, not the browser.
On modern systems, page rendering seems plenty fast to me. A cable modem is hooked up to my 800 MHz laptop with 256 MB of RAM (not exactly a powerhouse machine), and surfing is very fast. If it's slow for you, then I suggest upgrading to Mozilla 1.3b. The team seems to have made some noticeable speed improvements in this latest release.
Of course, when pages load in just a few seconds anyway, I still don't understand why people complain. Does it really matter if Slashdot loads in two seconds instead of four? Even if it does, I wouldn't call it "innovation".
and less buggy
Now that I can agree with. All browsers can use bug fixes. Of course, web pages can be buggy, too, and if web designers followed standards more carefully, our browsers would be both faster and less buggy.
I think Bernhard Rosenkraenzer (sp?) was a KDE packager, not a contributor. And he wasn't fired; he quit. Than Ngo's handling the KDE builds now.
GNOME looked quite OK at version 1.4 (actually I preferred the look over KDE although the functionality wasn't at the same level), but version 2 and above is definitely a step back and only barely better than the Windows GUI which is probably the most primitive GUI out there.
I was kind of the opposite. I thought GNOME 1.4 sucked compared to KDE 2.x, so I've continued to use KDE. (3.1 is now on my Red Hat laptop.) But now that GTK+ has anti-aliased fonts and GNOME 2.2 has that nifty Wi-Fi applet, I'm thinking about switching over to GNOME. They sure need to do something about that GTK+ file dialog, though. Man, what a piece of junk.
So you declare the startmenu as the control-center and think all problems are adressed?
No, I thought you would. I got the impression that you felt it was the biggest problem with Red Hat Linux. You were throwing out the baby with the bathwater, so I addressed it.
According to your logic, Safari users could send bugreports right to the KDE-team.
Yes, it was my understanding that Safari and Konqueror both use KHTML as the rendering engine. If a page doesn't render properly in Safari, then it also doesn't render properly in Konqueror. Maybe I was wrong -- bad example. But I think my point about Bluecurve still stands.
So you have to rely on a bunch of people to do what is the job of the distributor?
Huh? I don't expect them to do anything for me because I get everything from them for free! I download new Red Hat ISOs every six months at no charge. Or do you expect them to do what you want without giving them a nickel? No wonder you're all "ticked off". C'mon, beggars can't be choosers! Besides, even if you were paying them, Red Hat still can't include every package you want exactly the way you want it. They don't even have to provide KDE at all if they don't want to. For instance, rdiff-backup is a program I can't live with out, and it's not included in Red Hat. But I'm not going to quit using Red Hat just for that reason, since I can download the RPM here. The bottom line is, KDE 3.1 binaries are available from Red Hat, and if you don't like the way they've packaged them, you can still get the "pure" versions from that site I mentioned.
This loyality really ticks me off.
It's not loyalty; it's inertia. ;) I've been using Red Hat Linux since 5.2, and the reasons to switch aren't compelling enough for me. It's just easier to go with what you know.
I would say "screw them" and switch to someone else.
Hey, that's perfectly fine by me! Use whatever distro you want. But like I said, I thought we were talking about what Linux newbies should use, not what you should use. I don't see why those folks would care whether KDE 3.1 was a few weeks late.
I think you're misinformed. The KDE 3.1 packages for Red Hat are here. Besides, isn't it possible that this guy might prefer GNOME over KDE, or is GNOME also "crippled"? Actually, I shouldn't have said that. This is just going to turn into another off-topic flame-fest. Regardless, I don't understand why you insist he run KDE. I'd prefer he make that choice for himself.
He will have to mess with different configuration tools in different places and that sucks. (Or can I set IP-adresses, screen resolution, firewall settings, desktop colors and wallpaper in the same config center in RedHat?)
Have you actually tried Red Hat Linux? You can find all the configuration options on the start menu. For instance, to change the desktop background, click start menu, Preferences, Background. To change the screen fonts, click start menu, Preferences, Fonts. Seems pretty easy and consistent to me. If you want all of the options within one application, you can run GNOME Control Center, also available in the Preferences menu. I believe Bluecurve has the same control center option in KDE, but if not, it seems like a pretty silly reason to throw out Red Hat. Are you saying the whole distro is worthless because the system settings are in the start menu instead of a control center? (Rhetorical question; I think I already know your answer.)
it is inconsistent with all other distros
Since when do all desktops have to be identical to each other? Lindows and Lycoris also run heavily modified versions of KDE; are they trash, too?
causes RedHat to lag behind in availability of packages
Lag behind? They come out with a new release every six months, and if that's not enough, you can get the unstable packages here.
and makes bugreports from RedHat users worthless
I don't see why. The configuration of the desktop is different, but the code is same. For instance, Red Hat did not re-write the KDE CD Player for Bluecurve. When a Red Hat user finds a bug in kscd, the bug will be in all other distributions, as well.
Since when do we cheer up unecessary forks?
Bluecurve is not a fork; it's a repackaging. What Red Hat has done with KDE is similar to what Galeon has done with Mozilla, or what Apple's Safari has done with Konqueror. They've added code and changed the look a lot, but the foundation is still there. Or does this mean you think Safari is crap, too? It sounds like you think it's okay for others to modify KDE, but Red Hat can't.
Debian is as inconsistent as RedHat but has other advantages (apt-get)
Hmm. You complained about Red Hat lagging behind in package availability, but from what I hear, Debian is far worse. How long did it take Debian to come out with KDE 3.0 packages?
so does Gentoo.
Gentoo!? I thought we were talking about distros for newbies.
*ALL* the prejudices that I hear...
That you "hear"? Don't judge a distro until you've actually tried it.
on RedHat you do have to compile KDE 3.1 on no other major distro you have to do that!
This is simply not true. You can get them from the Rawhide links I posted above, or you can get them here. Just because you can't get them from kde.org doesn't mean you have to compile them yourself.
RedHat is not ready for the desktop, Linux is.
Well, to each his own. I can see why KDE purists might have a problem with Red Hat Linux, but for Linux newbies, it's one of the better distros out there. I think dj_paulgibbs should try several different distros and pick the one he likes best, not the one that has "pure KDE".
Yes, I was surprised when I heard that Microsoft was moving GDI into the kernel. (NT 4.0, I think it was.) It doesn't seem like a good idea in theory, but it seems to have worked in practice, probably because GDI was so mature at the time (and still is) that they had all the bugs ironed out. Turth is, I've never heard of it being the source of problems in NT.
By design, the Linux kernel does not have this information, nor should it (since it has more than one rendering system, window manager, etc.)
Why not? If some additional data on mouse and keyboard events could help the Linux scheduler, it seems reasonable that there could be some standard method of communication between the input subsystem and the kernel. I don't think the window managers and rendering systems would have to be changed because they don't handle input events. Only the X subsystem that handles the mouse and keyboard would need to be modified. But IANA kernel hacker, so I'm just shooting in the dark here.
Because he's a first-time Linux user. Compiling and installing the dozen or so KDE packages is not a task I would recommend to a Linux newbie. He would also have to compile XFree86 and GNOME, both of which have had major updates since Red Hat 8.0. Are you suggesting he should compile and install them, too, plus the kernel and all of the other updated packages that will be included in 8.1? I don't think we want to torture this guy. The idea is to show him that Linux can be just as easy to use as Windows.
RedHat's decision to crippl^W make BlueCurve was stupid which is proven by the absence of official KDE3.1 packages for RedHat.
Dude, if you're gonna troll, at least do it right. ^W=end of transmisttion block, ^H=backspace
No matter what you think about the politics of Bluecurve, I think we can all agree it improves the out-of-box experience for new Linux users like our friend dj_paulgibbs.
I'd wait until Red Hat Linux 8.1 comes out. It'll include the latest releases of GNOME, KDE, and XFree86.
With that lack-of-linux-knowledge, could someone explain why precisly this is a "Significant Interactivity Boost in (the) Linux Kernel"? Thank you.
First, you need to know what they mean by "interactivity". They're talking about applications that respond to keyboard and mouse events -- basically any application that has a GUI. Non-interactive applications are those that run in batch mode, such as compiling the Linux kernel or ripping tracks from a CD.
You probably wouldn't care if those tasks paused for a second or two every so often, but you'd get really annoyed if you were typing an email and there was a one-second delay after each keypress. The idea, then, is to give priority to those interactive apps and improve their response times.
I haven't looked at the patch, but I assume it tries to be smart and find the interactive app that's in the foreground -- that is, the one that's actively handling keypress and mouse clicks. Even though you could be running many interactive apps at once, you probably care most about the one in front of you.
It's interesting to note that Windows, having always been a GUI environment, has always tried to boost interactive applications automatically. Linux, on the other hand, has traditionally been used on servers, and it requires manual adjustment for interactive applications (using the "nice" command, for instance). This patch could make GUI applications on Linux just as responsive as Windows without sacrificing its role on the server. Of course, that remains to be seen.
This is true in the industrial world but not in developing countries like Senegal, where you can hire laborers for dollars a day. The labor would actually be the cheapest part of the overall cost.
Think about it ... 500 km with a pole every 25 m, that's 10000 poles, each one has to be put up, the cable strung, etc. etc.
I was talking about 100 km, not 500 km, because the cost benefit of wired lines is greater at shorter distances. Also, I'm not sure where you got the value of 25 m. I'd say the poles could be much farther apart than that. Also, wooden poles are dirt-cheap in West Africa, because the forests are in-country (Ghana actually exports timber), so you wouldn't need to pay the costs of importing and international shipping (unlike the Wi-Fi electronics).
Of course, at a distance of 500 km, wires are normally put up using large metal towers at great distances apart. They'd cost more but would be more permanent. Regardless, I don't think either of us has enough data on this subject to do a proper comparison.
Laptops run on solar power.
No, they can be charged with solar power, but they cannot run on solar power. I know this because I actually tried it when I lived in Ghana. I brought a 60 cm by 30 cm portable solar panel with me to Ghana, thinking that I'd be able to power my laptop with it, but it was useless. Even in direct sunlight with no clouds in the sky, it took two days to charge the thing, and as you know, laptops can only run about 3 hours max on a full charge. That meant I could only use my laptop for 3 hours every two days! And of course, during the rainy season (a span of about four months), I couldn't use it at all because there was no sun. An even bigger issue is price. The small solar panel I brought with me cost $500. Are you suggesting we add $500 to the cost of each computer that these villagers buy? No, solar power just isn't feasible in the situation we're talking about. As for routers, even if they draw very little current, they'd still go dead at night if they were on solar power. I suppose you could add batteries (and thus several hundred dollars more to the cost), but I doubt they could store enough juice to last through a four-month rainy season.
Let's just say, for the sake of argument, that computers and APs don't need electricity, and the only issue is cost. Are you still suggesting that we hook up these rural villages to Wi-Fi before we give them electricity? Try going for a week without electricity sometime, and I think you'll find light bulbs will become much more important to you than Internet access. ;) (Seriously, I went without electrical power for long periods at a time while living in Ghana, and Internet access was not high on my list! A nice cool fan was much more valuable than a computer in those conditions.)
The bottom line is, you can do so much more with electricity than with Wi-Fi. Electricity gives you lights, fans, refrigerators, radios, TVs, and other appliances that have a much deeper impact on the quality of life than being able to surf the net. For instance, in the small rural town where I lived, the hospital used electricity to chill polio vaccines that would otherwise be ruined in the tropical heat. Meanwhile, in the center of town, women used an electric mill to grind cornmeal so they could prepare meals for their families. Are you honestly saying that Wi-Fi access and VoIP are more important than these things?
Although there are Wi-Fi APs that include routers, many don't.
Actually, I meant APs, not APs with routers. (I use the term "router" for both types.)
At each base station, the WiFi devices may be connected to any of the available routing and switching equipment that can be used with a normal TCP/IP network. So, each base station can tap into the data stream, and do whatever they like with it. Wi-Fi doesn't care how many "connections" there are, it's all TCP/IP packets.
You're saying that a Wi-Fi AP can support an arbitrary number of simultaneous connections, but this just isn't true. You cannot increase the number of connections to an AP without bound. Every time a computer connects to an AP and transmits packets, the AP has to allocate resources (RAM and CPU) to forward those packets. And because there is a finite amount of RAM and clock cycles in the AP, there is a finite number of simultaneous connections.
I did some more checking on this, and I have yet to find an off-the-shelf router that can handle more than 256 connections, and most can only handle 64. Try these links:
Envara
CheetahWireless
And this guy says his AP can't handle more than 7 (!) connections.
Microsoft Windows has had versioning of DLLs for as long as I can remember, way back in the days of 3.x. The article says, "Windows and Windows applications have no notion of DLL version numbers," but this is false. You can see the version numbers for DLLs on your system by starting Windows Explorer and navigating to the c:\windows\system directory. Right-click on a DLL, then click Properties, then click the Version tab. You'll see the version numbers there, including the company name, copyright info, and other important details. Windows applications can retrieve this data by calling the GetFileVersionInfo function.
I'm not following you. First, I don't think 20 hops in 500 km is possible, but let's say it is. You say each hop needs a tower, two antennae, and two APs. Antennae are about $100 each, and 802.11b APs are about $100, also. That's $400 per hop, times 20 hops is $8,000. I haven't included the 50-foot metal towers yet, which must surely cost several thousand dollars each, since you've also got to pay for the transportation of the metal beams and labor for the installation. Even if the towers were only $5,000 each, you'd still end up with a grand total of $108,000!
Even if you could do what you suggest for only $24,000, what have you actually accomplished? All you've done is connected two points together that are on opposite ends of the country. How are people supposed to get access to the link from within the country? They'd only be able to use your Internet connection if they were lucky enough to be right underneath one of the hops. (Remember, we're talking about directional, point-to-point nodes in this scenario.) And even if they were able to reach those hops, there are still those bandwidth limitations I mentioned.
I went to the link you provided, clicked one of the articles at random (http://www.linuxjournal.com/print.php?sid=6299), and saw this quote:
If you have been making the move to wireless lately, most likely you are working with the microwave, high bandwidth frequencies of 802.11b. If so, you know that on a clear day you maybe can get a line-of-sight connection out 10 miles or so.
Italics are his, not mine, so he's certainly not in support of your argument. Can you be more specific on your sources?
I wasn't suggesting that you go underwater to cut the link. It has to come out onto land in Senegal somewhere, and that's where it can be cut.
What would be interesting to see is a price comparison between 100 km of standard phone line and a Wi-Fi link of the same distance. My guess is that the phone line would be far cheaper and provide about the same bandwidth...
You're joking, right?
No, I'd really like to see some figures on that. Wooden poles and copper wires are cheaper than steel towers and wireless routers. (Was that a rhyme?)
It is possible to have higher bandwidth using directionals, and the antennas are cheap, in the range of $50-$100.
Everything I've read about long-distance Wi-Fi says that even with a high-gain antenna, you still get only a fraction of the bandwidth at the distances you're talking about (30 km). Also, $100 is certainly not cheap. Remember, we're talking about a developing country here, and the $100 you're suggesting would be multiplied across every node.
Another point I was trying to make is that by using a directional antenna, you're making a site-to-site connection, rather than spreading the Wi-Fi access throughout an area. That defeats one of the big advantages of having a wireless connection in the first place.
No, but it's cheaper than building a power grid (since that, too, doesn't exist in much of the developing world). If a power grid is present, the generator is only for backup. In addition, Wi-Fi equipment has a minimal power use.
I'm really not following your logic here. You're suggesting that if a region doesn't have a power grid, then we can still go ahead and put in a Wi-Fi network anyway? You need a computer to use Wi-Fi, and you can't use a computer without electricity! In any case, providing electrical power is far more important than Wi-Fi, so it's not a simple dollar-for-dollar comparison. I mean, being able to turn on a light bulb is more important than hooking up to a Wi-Fi network, so a power grid should take priority over Wi-Fi even if it costs more.
This shows me that you are missing a clue. Since when does dial-up give you 1Mbps?
Oops. I was typing too fast and doing the calculations in my head, and I got to thinking in Kbps instead of Mbps. Sorry. Let me revise my figures then. Let's say 802.11g is giving you 30 Mbps, as you said. That means if there are 1000 users online at once (quite possible, since you're suggesting we share the Wi-Fi link with all 10 million people in Senegal), then each user would get less than 4 kilobytes per second. And besides, isn't Wi-Fi limited to 256 simultaneous connections, anyway? I think my points still stand, or did I have another brain-fart?
Thanks for your reply, because you've helped me show that my concept stands up to (admittedly lame) criticism. I'm not even going to bother addressing your last comment since you clearly have little grasp on the concepts of network design.
Perhaps I don't, so please explain what I said that was so "lame". Am I wrong in thinking that most Wi-Fi routers puke out when they get to around 30 or so simultaneous connections?
I realize you think I'm only trying to attack your ideas, but I'm not -- I had the same ideas myself when I was in the Peace Corps! But after reading up on Wi-Fi and thinking a lot about the possibilities, I realized that there are just too many problems with Wi-Fi, and I'm mentioning the caveats here. It would be great if it could work, but I don't believe it's possible for Wi-Fi to share an Internet connection throughout the rural areas of a developing country.
I'm not a Wi-Fi expert, but everything I know about Wi-Fi tells me that what you propose isn't possible. Here's why:
traditional wireline infrastructure is going to be subject to harsh environmental conditions and being destroyed by political unrest
Are you saying that Wi-Fi infrastructure would somehow be invincible to these issues? Let's say there's a coup, and the new leader wants to cut off Internet access. All he has to do is cut the SAT-3 link that you speak of. This would affect Internet links throughout the country, whether they were wireless or not.
As for environmental conditions, sub-Saharan West Africa may be harsh, but so is North America! We tend to think West Africa has a worse environment because of famine and diseases such as malaria, but that doesn't affect infrastructure, of course. And although it's true that West Africa can see some very high temperatures, they're not much worse than what you'll find in the southwestern states of the U.S. In fact, I'd say that the weather conditions here in America are actually harsher than West Africa's due to the wide ranges of temperature we experience. In my home state of Kansas, we go from 35 degrees Celsius in the summer down to -10 in the winter, and that can really play havoc on Wi-Fi electronics.
Naturally, with the wireless infrastructure you propose, you'd need links that are well protected from the rain and heat of Senegal, and that can add a lot to the cost of installation and maintenance. What would be interesting to see is a price comparison between 100 km of standard phone line and a Wi-Fi link of the same distance. My guess is that the phone line would be far cheaper and provide about the same bandwidth, since Wi-Fi bandwidth diminishes greatly over long distances.
Wi-Fi long-distance links can span 30 km in a single hop
From what I've read, 30 km is a best-case scenario for Wi-Fi under good weather conditions, and it only provides minimal bandwidth (on the order of one or two Mbps). More importantly, this can only be acheived with a high-gain directional antenna! Even if you could get this to work as an Internet link between towns, you still haven't solved the last-mile problem! How are you going to spread out that Wi-Fi access across the town? Even with good omni-directional antennae, you'd have to put repeaters in a grid every two kilometers or so, driving up the cost beyond the means of rural towns in a developing country like Senegal.
the towers like cell towers can be powered with generators
Do you have any idea how much that would cost? Over time, gas-powered generators would suck up money like a sponge, and solar panels with batteries are still too expensive to be put on every single Wi-Fi node. Plus, generators can easily break down and have to be serviced, adding even more to the cost.
Wi-Fi delivers true broadband, 802.11b is 10Mbps, and 802.11a and 802.11g can deliver more like 30Mbps.
This shows me that you really haven't thought this idea through. Let me get this straight: You're suggesting that we take the fiber optic backbone coming into Senegal and span it out across the country using Wi-Fi repeaters. Sorry, but Wi-Fi bandwidth is shared! If 30 users are on a "fast" 802.11g channel, then they'll each see less than 1 Mbps -- even worse than dial-up! So much for the broadband you speak of. And besides, most Wi-Fi routers can't handle more than 30 or so connections anyway. That means out of the 10 million people in Senegal, only 30 of them could be on the Internet at any given time. It sounds like not many people will be using this "killer app" of yours!
Next time, you ought to think about the limitations of Wi-Fi before you trumpet its advantages.
Yep, that's the point. The Peace Corps has very strict rules about separating volunteers from any sort of law enforcement activities, and that's a good thing: If foreign governments have any reason to suspect that the Peace Corps could be involved in spying or any kind of intelligence operations, they wouldn't be able to trust our intentions. Plus, the volunteers would be even more at risk to kidnapping and similar dangers than they already are. For this reason, all volunteers are put through a CIA background check as part of the application process, not to determine whether they're a security risk, but to find out if they've ever had any association with the CIA. If so, they're permanently ineligible for Peace Corps service, no matter what other qualifications they might have. (There's a similar rule for related intelligence agencies, but they might forgive you if it was more than 10 years ago.) Check out the eligibility form.
Actually, the Peace Corps is taking IT very seriously. They now consider it a "focus area", which means that they devote about the same amount of resources to IT development as they do to AIDS education and prevention. (In other words, a lot.) They made it a focus area in late 2000, probably right after you left, and I attended one of the in-service trainings that Peace Corps funded as part of this change. It is true, though, that IT is not yet a full-fledged Peace Corps assignment, but I predict that it will become one sometime within the next ten years.
--TH (Peace Corps volunteer, Ghana, 1999-2001)
African women love computers, too.
A friend of mine, Joel, was a Peace Corps volunteer in Ghana for four years, and he did exactly what you suggest. He set up an entire network of Linux-based computers to be used as a computer lab at the local high school in Wenchi, Ghana. See the home page.
The best answer is in an article I wrote, available here: More than one way to make a difference
You can also find more info about my Peace Corps experience here: Two Years, Two Months
The requirements you listed are spot-on. Note that if you don't have knowledge of Spanish or French, having a science or engineering degree can do just as much to help get you in to the Peace Corps. (Most applicants are liberal arts majors without any technical skills that the Peace Corps needs.)
I could see 3 or 4 months, but 2 years of my life to be a volunteer?
Two years is nothing -- a small fraction of your normal life span -- especially when you consider the impact those two years could have on your life. Think about it: What would you do with those two years in the U.S.? Work a nine-to-five job so you can buy that new computer and a big screen TV? I'd prefer to spend the time traveling the world, making friends, learning a new language, and discovering places I've only seen in National Geographic. But that's just me. If you can only commit three months, try the GeekCorps.