"Can I handle my 2 Gb of PST files with Evolution and Kontact? If not, then I'm not interested."
If you want things to be interoperable, why are you using proprietary formats? If you're happy with your proprietary solution, why are you complaining?
"I have not failed to notice that many of the same people are now whining about the totally integrated Windows XP is "teh suxx0r" compared to Linux because Linux has all these powerful command prompt things and all these configuration files and..."
I'm not going to argue with the fact that you can find a troll for any position, but please consider that many (if not most) people who tout Linux over Windows do so based on their professional judgement. I don't think the folks guiding IBM and Novell's Linux policy use the word 'suxx0r' very often, for example.
The problem with the 'totally integrated Windows XP' as you call it has been hashed over so many times, I'm surprised that a silverback like you would have missed why the kind of integration that Microsoft does is a Bad Thing. Read yesterday's thread on browser security for enlightenment if you're still puzzled.
As for command lines and config files, the thing I like best about them is that they allow you to automate just about any process. But most desktop distros these days have GUIs too, so stating that command line and scripting are available for admins does not imply that we expect users to use them as well.
I have a useful little one-line script that allows a new user to reset their desktop environment to the default. So if in the course of exploring their desktop environment things get messed up and they just want to go back to what they had at the start, they can run this script. Rather than force them to understand the CLI, I simply place an icon on their desktop that says, 'Cleanup'.
Now that is the kind of integration that Linux admins love. It's called the 'toolkit approach', and it weaves together the capabilities of thousands of single purpose tools to achieve exactly the desired effect. To the computer user, it's just a 'magic happens' box.
I'm not arguing that you can't do the same thing in Windows, by the way, only that *nix systems are designed to be open and flexible from the ground up, and Linux lovers tend to think that design is superior to Windows' monolithic approach.
"Hey, if a business sets up something you want at a reasonable price - what's wrong with that? Would you prefer the government run this?"
Strawman: Hi everybody!
Everybody: Hi, Strawman!!
Sorry to dump on you like that, but you seem to have missed the part in the comment where the poster says:
"As a resident of downtown Tempe, I hope the rollout isn't successful, as I would much prefer to see a more community-based effort, such as in Seattle, Austin, and New York City."
[Links omitted from the quotation. Feel free to scroll back up the page if you're not sure what the submitter means by 'community-based'.]
This isn't even a case of RTFA, it's more like 'RTFSecond half of the sentence'. Please, there's no need to invent an answer on the submitter's behalf.
Personally, I can sympathise with his sentiments. Community-driven wireless seems to be the most successful model available. Costs are spread thin enough that noone has to bear too much of the burden. Tech support is, from what I've seen, exceptional too. You see, it's in everybody's interests to ensure network-wide security and robustness.
I'm not saying this as an uninformed observer, by the way. I've been actively lurking (heh, if such a thing is possible) on a number of community wireless lists, because I'm planning to set one up where I live.
People keep saying, 'When are we going to get a real benchmark?" Well, why don't we roll our own? Seriously.
Here's my idea:
Slashdot has strong zealot^H^H^H^H^H^Hsupporters for both Microsoft and Linux. Let's have a contest to select the best qualified from each side, have them work in teams on identical hardware. Let them make any changes, tweaks or optimisations they can dream up. Then, let 'em rip.
I'm dead serious about this, by the way. Let's get off this endless roundabout and for once make a clear comparison.
For bonus points, once the first contest is finished, we should take the two servers, leave them exposed to the Internet and see which one gets 0wned first. 8^)
"The companies own the code and they contribute it to OSS projects instead of the individual coders. The result is the same."
That's partially true, but there's more. I worked for three years for a software company that sold a small office server that was essentially highly customised RedHat. We not only honoured the GPL on all the company-owned components, but also had employment contracts which explicitly stated that we were allowed to work on other GPL projects in our own time.
In other words there are at least a few enlightened companies out there who realise that value provided to the community comes back several times over, and that at worst having employees active in the FOSS community will make them look like Good Guys. At best, they leverage the work that gets done and roll it into their GPL product.
That company was later bought out by a larger one (which is why I left). That company continues to honour the GPL, though with somewhat less enthusiasm than the original. Anyway, they seem to have a credible business model - they just got USD 55 million in backing last month!
" And 0.9 is "stable?" I thought 1.0 was the stable release..."
There's a difference between 'stable' and 'feature-complete'.
If the working parts of an app are solid, but the app as a whole is not feature-complete, then it makes sense to keep it in beta (i.e. sub-1.0). But there's no harm in making it clear to people that the parts that do work aren't likely to break in unforeseen ways.
"Just an observation that most bloggers I know or read were ingeniously suckered into giving gmail free advertising."
I take it, then, that "suckered" means: independantly evaluated and, found to be in a class of its own, recommended to others who rely on our expertise?
Seriously, I take your point. The invitation scheme was a direct play on the typical geek's sense of 133TN355. But, in fairness, Google took the hardest road. Geeks are usually far harsher judges than just about anyone else. Google asked that they evaluate and recommend their service with virtually no overt attempts to influence that judgement.
The proposal that I brought to the Ministry of Trade was that they should reduce the tariff on components to zero. That way, they could still raise needed funds for government, but they'd be helping to increase (semi-)skilled employment here. That would also make computers more affordable for everyone. They were quite receptive to this idea. I haven't seen the final rate proposal yet, but I believe they're lowering duties on systems somewhat, and components even more.
"Jesus. What kind of box are you trying to buy? $1000 US? Maybe you should set your sights a little lower and realize that not everyone needs a game box."
I wasn't going to reply at first, but then I realised that you genuinely don't get it. The country where I live cannot survive on income tax revenues, because the cash economy is almost non-existent. This means that it relies on import duties, business license fees, etc. for its revenues. This means that things like computers have hugely inflated prices. PCs, for example, have a 40% duty slapped on them. Vendors also add large markups because they pay extremely high business license fees.
All this means that a low-end computer that would cost about USD 4-500 ends up costing not less than USD 1000 when it arrives here. Is it clearer now?
"The truth is that in "third world" countries, bare bones PCs that run your choice of Windows or Linux simply don't cost a hell of a lot more than $100, and often less."
Welcome to the land of Generalisation, where one anecdotal observation trumps any need for actual data!
Sorry to be so crude, but what you're saying is so hopelessly wrong that it just about made me jump out of my chair. How do I know it's wrong? Because I'm sitting right now in a developing nation that adds a 40% duty to all imported computer goods. I cannot buy a new PC of any kind for less than USD 1000. (That's about 6 times the legal monthly minimum wage.)
I've spoken with officials from the department of trade, and they've been extremely receptive to the fact that high computing costs are a huge barrier to development. In fact, they're in the process of lowering those barriers. But even then, the best we could expect would be a roughly $4-500 computer, which still represents a huge amount of money for the average person. When you're earning very little money, every dollar has to count.
So guess what? We used 8 year-old Pentiums to operate as thin clients to connect to 'modern' PIII 450s running Ubuntu. Here's the press release we just published.
In fairness, there are a number of countries where computer hardware is cheap. But the fact that some developing countries have cheap computers does not mean that 'the developing world has cheap computers'.
"If this is a publicity stunt, someone in Microsoft's marketting department's getting fired. This move won't sway many to stay with Microsoft products. If anything, it acknowledges OSS as a real force in the marketplace, bringing more people consider OSS."
Well said. But that's not the end of the stupidity. Microsoft cannot allow this kind of talk to gain credibility. FOSS advocates have nothing to lose and everything to gain by being perfectly frank and honest. Add to this the credibility and exposure they'd earn from being treated as equals by Microsoft, and they'd represent more of a threat than ever before.
These are not marketing folks they'd be sitting down with. FOSS geeks don't come out of the boardroom talking about synergies and new paradigms, they come out saying, things like 'MS has refused to budge on their third-rate security measures, their proprietary file formats and closed APIs. As a result, you the consumer will continue to suffer, in spite of our best efforts to mitigate the damage.'
Microsoft has a pathological streak a mile wide when it comes to partnership and dialogue. IBM, Lotus, Stack Technologies and Novell have all been victimised by their blindly opportunistic avarice. They all left it to the lawyers to do the talking, and never expressed their full and frank opinions on MS' business practices - likely because in many cases it would leave them open to pot-and-kettle accusations.
FOSS advocates aren't (typically) officers of publicly owned corporations, so they don't have a fiduciary responsibility to their shareholders that requires that they 'play nice'. If they're given a pulpit to preach from, you can count on some fairly frank discussion that corporate powers-that-be would find quite difficult to address. That's why even 'good guys' like IBM tends to avoid open discussion about the principles of Free Software.
"Yes, a PDF reader exists....but for the love of god, it's the most bloated, slow, nag-infested document viewers I've ever used, and it only seems to get worse with each version."
Wow, those are pretty strong things to say about Ghostview.
"If you release an image as a PNG which you had originally created in Photoshop, and used a GPL'd font, wouldn't you have to release the "source" (the original PSD) of said image?"
No.
The font story is a troll and this is thoughtless speculation.
Er, we're in screaming agreement here. My point was not that regulation doesn't exist elsewhere, but, to repeat myself: "Your economic system is so evolved that you're not even aware of all this stuff going on in the background. For you, it just works."
"...wouldn't it make sense to ask the potential customers first?"
Son, with an attitude like that, you'll never get far in development. 8^)
I've been working in IT for about a year and a half now in a country designated by the UN as an LDC (Least Developed Country). A lot of people have challenged my assertion that the communications infrastructure is critical to development, pointing to the 34% literacy rate in this country, the abysmal state of health care and various other items as higher priorities.
But when I ask the locals what they think is more important, they always end up talking about communication. How hard it is to contact a doctor, how hard it is to find books to read, how hard it is to take their corrupt leaders to task.
This country has some of the highest telephone and Internet rates in the world. The staff of the NGO I work with share a single modem line (using the SME Server for dial-on-demand and proxying services). The cost for unlimited dial-up in the capital? USD 200 per month. This is higher than the monthly minimum wage. And most people don't earn as much as that.
Would cheaper, more efficient communications help make health care, education, business etc. better here? Ask a local and they'll give you a gentle you-must-be-new-here look and in the politest tones explain say, effectively, 'Damn straight! Without affordable communications, we can't do anything!'
So, on behalf of the people I work with: Thank you ever so much for showing a tad of common sense. It's so rare in the developing world that donors actually listen.
The big selling point of the Simputer is its ruggedness. I can tell you from experience that the death rate in the tropics for standard office technology is extremely high.
I know you mean well when you say that, and that it seems stupidly easy, but unfortunately, it's not at all like that. Let's see how that works...
I call India from Vanuatu, which has some of the most expensive long-distance rates in the world. The five minutes I spend on hold will probably cost me the equivalent of national monthly minimum wage. (I'm not exaggerating.)
Then, I say, 'Hey, I'd love to test your product! Where can I get a demo?'
Okay, maybe that wouldn't work; maybe it would be better for me to scare up some donor money and buy one on spec. All I need to do then is to contact them, ask them to fill out an export clearance form, write a note on letterhead, signed by a company officer, and send those to me. Then I take that to the local government offices along with similar forms and letters from my NGO, and ask the government to please allow me to import this equipment without paying the 40% import duty normally charged on computers and the 15% tax paid on everything.
A week later, assuming that the proper government authority isn't on vacation, I can confirm with the Simputer folks that I'm allowed to order one of their computers. They say, 'Fine, just send the payment and we'll ship your computer.'
So I go to the bank and arrange for an international bank draft (this country has no credit cards). The bank draft costs me USD 50 and takes about a week to clear.
Assuming that the transaction doesn't get stopped for any one of dozens of trivial reasons, I then get to arrange for transport of the device. I can't send it by ship, unless I'm willing to wait up to 4 months to receive it. If I send it by courier, it will probably double the price of the device. I'll probably have to find someone in Fiji (which has a large Indian community) who has connections on the subcontinent and who is willing to do me a favour.
So after months of organising and waiting, the device finally arrives. It's impounded at Customs until I purchase three separate clearance forms costing a total of about USD 40. If I take too long getting those forms filled out, I get to pay a storage fee to the folks who run the warehouse.
Finally and at last, I hold the beloved object in my hands. A friend of mine looks at it, his eyes aglow and says, 'Wow! Can I have one?' I think about what I just went through... and burst into tears and collapse.
See, these are some of those neat infrastructure things that people in the developed world don't consider. Your economic system is so evolved that you're not even aware of all this stuff going on in the background. For you, it just works. For the developing world, these are huge hurdles, any one of which could derail the whole undertaking.
So, to restate what I said in grandparent: Until issues of distribution and availability are addressed, things like the Simputer, aimed solely at the developing world, cannot thrive.
"Seriously, $100... why, when you could probably organise computers for India for free with a little international logistics and som..... wait..."
"Actually scratch all that I just remembered we are capitalists. Silly me."
Oh boy, does that ever strike a chord for me. I just ranted about how hard it is to get decent equipment in the developing world last weekend.
Honestly, the big problem is not whether people would actually buy such a device, but how they would go about buying one. You see, shopping online is not an option if you're not online(!). Nor are there handy factory outlet stores in the places where these things are most useful. Governments do some things very well; one of those things is business and/or technology development. They generally don't know jack****, however, about little details like sales channels and marketing.
If I could get in touch with a supplier of these (or any similar competing device), I'd order a dozen right now. I'd easily be able to sell them on my next trip into the villages.
"Accept the fact that they really can do good things and shut with the Microsoft bashing."
Memo:
Negative talk is no longer spelled 'criticism'; it is now spelled 'bashing'.
Seriously, how is it 'bashing' when one points out that publicly available information shows a large number of their business strategies are illegal or unethical and accomplished not on merit but through lies, coercion and pay-offs?
Call it 'bashing' if you must, but don't pretend that makes it untrue.
"I may have misunderstood you or what you mean by anti-intellectual, but personally I've found The Simpsons to be, by far, one of the most insightful shows on TV."
Well said. The episode that convinced me that The Simpsons was a bastion of wit in a sea of drivel was when Lisa evolves a tiny civilisation in a Petri dish:
"Oh, look," she says, peering through her microscope "There's a man nailing some papers to the cathedral door! I've invented Lutherans!!"
Moments like these are sprinkled throughout each episode, albeit sometimes sparingly.
Now, if you want to get really intellectual about the whole thing, try researching Commedia dell'Arte. You'll quickly find that this show is following a centuries-old Western European tradition. Skim through the list of characters and see how many you recognise.
Slashdot Mirror
[Re: The Slashdot Effect]
"Yeah, a DDoS without needing zombies."
Well, I guess that depends on your definition of 'zombies'. 8^)
"I haven't heard a lot about .NET itself being insecure."
It may be secure, but it runs on Windows, a notoriously insecure platform.
"Can I handle my 2 Gb of PST files with Evolution and Kontact? If not, then I'm not interested."
If you want things to be interoperable, why are you using proprietary formats? If you're happy with your proprietary solution, why are you complaining?
HTH, HAND
"I have not failed to notice that many of the same people are now whining about the totally integrated Windows XP is "teh suxx0r" compared to Linux because Linux has all these powerful command prompt things and all these configuration files and..."
I'm not going to argue with the fact that you can find a troll for any position, but please consider that many (if not most) people who tout Linux over Windows do so based on their professional judgement. I don't think the folks guiding IBM and Novell's Linux policy use the word 'suxx0r' very often, for example.
The problem with the 'totally integrated Windows XP' as you call it has been hashed over so many times, I'm surprised that a silverback like you would have missed why the kind of integration that Microsoft does is a Bad Thing. Read yesterday's thread on browser security for enlightenment if you're still puzzled.
As for command lines and config files, the thing I like best about them is that they allow you to automate just about any process. But most desktop distros these days have GUIs too, so stating that command line and scripting are available for admins does not imply that we expect users to use them as well.
I have a useful little one-line script that allows a new user to reset their desktop environment to the default. So if in the course of exploring their desktop environment things get messed up and they just want to go back to what they had at the start, they can run this script. Rather than force them to understand the CLI, I simply place an icon on their desktop that says, 'Cleanup'.
Now that is the kind of integration that Linux admins love. It's called the 'toolkit approach', and it weaves together the capabilities of thousands of single purpose tools to achieve exactly the desired effect. To the computer user, it's just a 'magic happens' box.
I'm not arguing that you can't do the same thing in Windows, by the way, only that *nix systems are designed to be open and flexible from the ground up, and Linux lovers tend to think that design is superior to Windows' monolithic approach.
"Hey, if a business sets up something you want at a reasonable price - what's wrong with that? Would you prefer the government run this?"
Strawman: Hi everybody!
Everybody: Hi, Strawman!!
Sorry to dump on you like that, but you seem to have missed the part in the comment where the poster says:
"As a resident of downtown Tempe, I hope the rollout isn't successful, as I would much prefer to see a more community-based effort, such as in Seattle, Austin, and New York City."
[Links omitted from the quotation. Feel free to scroll back up the page if you're not sure what the submitter means by 'community-based'.]
This isn't even a case of RTFA, it's more like 'RTFSecond half of the sentence'. Please, there's no need to invent an answer on the submitter's behalf.
Personally, I can sympathise with his sentiments. Community-driven wireless seems to be the most successful model available. Costs are spread thin enough that noone has to bear too much of the burden. Tech support is, from what I've seen, exceptional too. You see, it's in everybody's interests to ensure network-wide security and robustness.
I'm not saying this as an uninformed observer, by the way. I've been actively lurking (heh, if such a thing is possible) on a number of community wireless lists, because I'm planning to set one up where I live.
"Who gives a fuck what Bill Gates thinks about every little thing?"
I generally agree, but this time I read the headline as:
Information Overlord Overblown Says Gates
I found myself thinking, 'For once I agree with the guy. Funny that he should be so harsh on himself, though....' 8^)
" They have pictures from California, South Dakota, Kansas and Illinois. "
'"Around the world", eh? Spoken like a true American.'
You have to cut them a little slack. From where they stand, California and Kansas look like different planets. 8^)
People keep saying, 'When are we going to get a real benchmark?" Well, why don't we roll our own? Seriously.
Here's my idea:
Slashdot has strong zealot^H^H^H^H^H^Hsupporters for both Microsoft and Linux. Let's have a contest to select the best qualified from each side, have them work in teams on identical hardware. Let them make any changes, tweaks or optimisations they can dream up. Then, let 'em rip.
I'm dead serious about this, by the way. Let's get off this endless roundabout and for once make a clear comparison.
For bonus points, once the first contest is finished, we should take the two servers, leave them exposed to the Internet and see which one gets 0wned first. 8^)
"The companies own the code and they contribute it to OSS projects instead of the individual coders. The result is the same."
That's partially true, but there's more. I worked for three years for a software company that sold a small office server that was essentially highly customised RedHat. We not only honoured the GPL on all the company-owned components, but also had employment contracts which explicitly stated that we were allowed to work on other GPL projects in our own time.
In other words there are at least a few enlightened companies out there who realise that value provided to the community comes back several times over, and that at worst having employees active in the FOSS community will make them look like Good Guys. At best, they leverage the work that gets done and roll it into their GPL product.
That company was later bought out by a larger one (which is why I left). That company continues to honour the GPL, though with somewhat less enthusiasm than the original. Anyway, they seem to have a credible business model - they just got USD 55 million in backing last month!
" And 0.9 is "stable?" I thought 1.0 was the stable release..."
There's a difference between 'stable' and 'feature-complete'.
If the working parts of an app are solid, but the app as a whole is not feature-complete, then it makes sense to keep it in beta (i.e. sub-1.0). But there's no harm in making it clear to people that the parts that do work aren't likely to break in unforeseen ways.
Does that make it any clearer?
"Just an observation that most bloggers I know or read were ingeniously suckered into giving gmail free advertising."
I take it, then, that "suckered" means: independantly evaluated and, found to be in a class of its own, recommended to others who rely on our expertise?
Seriously, I take your point. The invitation scheme was a direct play on the typical geek's sense of 133TN355. But, in fairness, Google took the hardest road. Geeks are usually far harsher judges than just about anyone else. Google asked that they evaluate and recommend their service with virtually no overt attempts to influence that judgement.
The proposal that I brought to the Ministry of Trade was that they should reduce the tariff on components to zero. That way, they could still raise needed funds for government, but they'd be helping to increase (semi-)skilled employment here. That would also make computers more affordable for everyone. They were quite receptive to this idea. I haven't seen the final rate proposal yet, but I believe they're lowering duties on systems somewhat, and components even more.
"Jesus. What kind of box are you trying to buy? $1000 US? Maybe you should set your sights a little lower and realize that not everyone needs a game box."
I wasn't going to reply at first, but then I realised that you genuinely don't get it. The country where I live cannot survive on income tax revenues, because the cash economy is almost non-existent. This means that it relies on import duties, business license fees, etc. for its revenues. This means that things like computers have hugely inflated prices. PCs, for example, have a 40% duty slapped on them. Vendors also add large markups because they pay extremely high business license fees.
All this means that a low-end computer that would cost about USD 4-500 ends up costing not less than USD 1000 when it arrives here. Is it clearer now?
And stop calling me Jesus. 8^)
"The truth is that in "third world" countries, bare bones PCs that run your choice of Windows or Linux simply don't cost a hell of a lot more than $100, and often less."
Welcome to the land of Generalisation, where one anecdotal observation trumps any need for actual data!
Sorry to be so crude, but what you're saying is so hopelessly wrong that it just about made me jump out of my chair. How do I know it's wrong? Because I'm sitting right now in a developing nation that adds a 40% duty to all imported computer goods. I cannot buy a new PC of any kind for less than USD 1000. (That's about 6 times the legal monthly minimum wage.)
I've spoken with officials from the department of trade, and they've been extremely receptive to the fact that high computing costs are a huge barrier to development. In fact, they're in the process of lowering those barriers. But even then, the best we could expect would be a roughly $4-500 computer, which still represents a huge amount of money for the average person. When you're earning very little money, every dollar has to count.
So guess what? We used 8 year-old Pentiums to operate as thin clients to connect to 'modern' PIII 450s running Ubuntu. Here's the press release we just published.
In fairness, there are a number of countries where computer hardware is cheap. But the fact that some developing countries have cheap computers does not mean that 'the developing world has cheap computers'.
"If this is a publicity stunt, someone in Microsoft's marketting department's getting fired. This move won't sway many to stay with Microsoft products. If anything, it acknowledges OSS as a real force in the marketplace, bringing more people consider OSS."
Well said. But that's not the end of the stupidity. Microsoft cannot allow this kind of talk to gain credibility. FOSS advocates have nothing to lose and everything to gain by being perfectly frank and honest. Add to this the credibility and exposure they'd earn from being treated as equals by Microsoft, and they'd represent more of a threat than ever before.
These are not marketing folks they'd be sitting down with. FOSS geeks don't come out of the boardroom talking about synergies and new paradigms, they come out saying, things like 'MS has refused to budge on their third-rate security measures, their proprietary file formats and closed APIs. As a result, you the consumer will continue to suffer, in spite of our best efforts to mitigate the damage.'
Microsoft has a pathological streak a mile wide when it comes to partnership and dialogue. IBM, Lotus, Stack Technologies and Novell have all been victimised by their blindly opportunistic avarice. They all left it to the lawyers to do the talking, and never expressed their full and frank opinions on MS' business practices - likely because in many cases it would leave them open to pot-and-kettle accusations.
FOSS advocates aren't (typically) officers of publicly owned corporations, so they don't have a fiduciary responsibility to their shareholders that requires that they 'play nice'. If they're given a pulpit to preach from, you can count on some fairly frank discussion that corporate powers-that-be would find quite difficult to address. That's why even 'good guys' like IBM tends to avoid open discussion about the principles of Free Software.
"Yes, a PDF reader exists....but for the love of god, it's the most bloated, slow, nag-infested document viewers I've ever used, and it only seems to get worse with each version."
Wow, those are pretty strong things to say about Ghostview.
8^)
"If you release an image as a PNG which you had originally created in Photoshop, and used a GPL'd font, wouldn't you have to release the "source" (the original PSD) of said image?"
No.
The font story is a troll and this is thoughtless speculation.
HTH, HAND.
Er, we're in screaming agreement here. My point was not that regulation doesn't exist elsewhere, but, to repeat myself: "Your economic system is so evolved that you're not even aware of all this stuff going on in the background. For you, it just works."
"...wouldn't it make sense to ask the potential customers first?"
Son, with an attitude like that, you'll never get far in development. 8^)
I've been working in IT for about a year and a half now in a country designated by the UN as an LDC (Least Developed Country). A lot of people have challenged my assertion that the communications infrastructure is critical to development, pointing to the 34% literacy rate in this country, the abysmal state of health care and various other items as higher priorities.
But when I ask the locals what they think is more important, they always end up talking about communication. How hard it is to contact a doctor, how hard it is to find books to read, how hard it is to take their corrupt leaders to task.
This country has some of the highest telephone and Internet rates in the world. The staff of the NGO I work with share a single modem line (using the SME Server for dial-on-demand and proxying services). The cost for unlimited dial-up in the capital? USD 200 per month. This is higher than the monthly minimum wage. And most people don't earn as much as that.
Would cheaper, more efficient communications help make health care, education, business etc. better here? Ask a local and they'll give you a gentle you-must-be-new-here look and in the politest tones explain say, effectively, 'Damn straight! Without affordable communications, we can't do anything!'
So, on behalf of the people I work with: Thank you ever so much for showing a tad of common sense. It's so rare in the developing world that donors actually listen.
The big selling point of the Simputer is its ruggedness. I can tell you from experience that the death rate in the tropics for standard office technology is extremely high.
"Phone them?"
I know you mean well when you say that, and that it seems stupidly easy, but unfortunately, it's not at all like that. Let's see how that works...
I call India from Vanuatu, which has some of the most expensive long-distance rates in the world. The five minutes I spend on hold will probably cost me the equivalent of national monthly minimum wage. (I'm not exaggerating.)
Then, I say, 'Hey, I'd love to test your product! Where can I get a demo?'
Okay, maybe that wouldn't work; maybe it would be better for me to scare up some donor money and buy one on spec. All I need to do then is to contact them, ask them to fill out an export clearance form, write a note on letterhead, signed by a company officer, and send those to me. Then I take that to the local government offices along with similar forms and letters from my NGO, and ask the government to please allow me to import this equipment without paying the 40% import duty normally charged on computers and the 15% tax paid on everything.
A week later, assuming that the proper government authority isn't on vacation, I can confirm with the Simputer folks that I'm allowed to order one of their computers. They say, 'Fine, just send the payment and we'll ship your computer.'
So I go to the bank and arrange for an international bank draft (this country has no credit cards). The bank draft costs me USD 50 and takes about a week to clear.
Assuming that the transaction doesn't get stopped for any one of dozens of trivial reasons, I then get to arrange for transport of the device. I can't send it by ship, unless I'm willing to wait up to 4 months to receive it. If I send it by courier, it will probably double the price of the device. I'll probably have to find someone in Fiji (which has a large Indian community) who has connections on the subcontinent and who is willing to do me a favour.
So after months of organising and waiting, the device finally arrives. It's impounded at Customs until I purchase three separate clearance forms costing a total of about USD 40. If I take too long getting those forms filled out, I get to pay a storage fee to the folks who run the warehouse.
Finally and at last, I hold the beloved object in my hands. A friend of mine looks at it, his eyes aglow and says, 'Wow! Can I have one?' I think about what I just went through... and burst into tears and collapse.
See, these are some of those neat infrastructure things that people in the developed world don't consider. Your economic system is so evolved that you're not even aware of all this stuff going on in the background. For you, it just works. For the developing world, these are huge hurdles, any one of which could derail the whole undertaking.
So, to restate what I said in grandparent: Until issues of distribution and availability are addressed, things like the Simputer, aimed solely at the developing world, cannot thrive.
"Seriously, $100... why, when you could probably organise computers for India for free with a little international logistics and som..... wait..."
"Actually scratch all that I just remembered we are capitalists. Silly me."
Oh boy, does that ever strike a chord for me. I just ranted about how hard it is to get decent equipment in the developing world last weekend.
Honestly, the big problem is not whether people would actually buy such a device, but how they would go about buying one. You see, shopping online is not an option if you're not online(!). Nor are there handy factory outlet stores in the places where these things are most useful. Governments do some things very well; one of those things is business and/or technology development. They generally don't know jack****, however, about little details like sales channels and marketing.
If I could get in touch with a supplier of these (or any similar competing device), I'd order a dozen right now. I'd easily be able to sell them on my next trip into the villages.
"Accept the fact that they really can do good things and shut with the Microsoft bashing."
Memo:
Negative talk is no longer spelled 'criticism'; it is now spelled 'bashing'.
Seriously, how is it 'bashing' when one points out that publicly available information shows a large number of their business strategies are illegal or unethical and accomplished not on merit but through lies, coercion and pay-offs?
Call it 'bashing' if you must, but don't pretend that makes it untrue.
"I may have misunderstood you or what you mean by anti-intellectual, but personally I've found The Simpsons to be, by far, one of the most insightful shows on TV."
Well said. The episode that convinced me that The Simpsons was a bastion of wit in a sea of drivel was when Lisa evolves a tiny civilisation in a Petri dish:
"Oh, look," she says, peering through her microscope "There's a man nailing some papers to the cathedral door! I've invented Lutherans!!"
Moments like these are sprinkled throughout each episode, albeit sometimes sparingly.
Now, if you want to get really intellectual about the whole thing, try researching Commedia dell'Arte. You'll quickly find that this show is following a centuries-old Western European tradition. Skim through the list of characters and see how many you recognise.
"Just think about the synergies and win-win go to market opportunities that can be obtained by utilizing it."
BZZZZT. You didn't say 'paradigm'. Thanks for playing, though. 8^)