Hard drives are NOT cheap if your goal turn the computer around for use by someone with low income. I rebuild computers and give them away for free to people who need them. Spending even $20 to replace the hard drive would increase the cost of the computer enough to make it unusable for my purposes.
Is it really possible to recover data from a disk that has been wiped with DBAN? I highly doubt it -- I've never heard of data being recovered after wiping with DBAN.
If you want to be friendly to the environment and spread the availability of low-cost computing, don't destroy the disk, use DBAN instead.
I've worked in educational computing for 15 years in the U.S. Just as in business, the only way to do IT in a cost effective way is to solve the support problem.
Teachers should be teachers, students should be students. If we ask them all to be electronics hackers to get anything done, nothing will get done.
Private industry as well as schools in the U.S. are sitting on boatloads of free processors, and all of them find it far more cost effective to buy new, reliable, consistant hardware and software rather than re-use the old stuff. Trying to run a school, or any private business, with a pile of assorted gadgetry as your IT infrastructure would be a financial and productivity nightmare.
The best business minds in the U.S can't make the pile of free processors from old computers that we are sitting on work cost-effectively in the U.S.; I don't know why the results would be any different in the third world.
Sure, it is easy enough to set up one kid to do his homework on an old calculator or cell phone. Maybe a dozen kids. But the only way to distribute, train and support hundreds of thousands of these into the field in any cost effective way is to have all of them running almost identical hardware and software.
That is the role these ultra-cheap, mass-produced, low-end computers can play.
In fact, these projects are leveraging the pile of old, obsolete devices that are out there, just as you suggest. Except, rather than re-using the old devices directly from the garbage pile, they are re-using the excessive manufacturing capability that has been built up to serve the general consumer market and using it to build affordable, reliable, educational appliances.
The merger of the company with the vast majority of web searches with its next-closest rival would never win the approval of the Federal Trade Commission.
Google needs Yahoo! to stick around just like Microsoft needs Apple. Each company would have an effective monopoly of their respective markets if it weren't for their smaller rival, and would risk being broken up by the FTC.
I don't understand why a small business wouldn't want community-like functions in their website. Don't you have any customers you would like a better relationship with? I think if you look into everything that a website can do for your company, you will realize that you do want a community site. And if you do want a community site, their is no better platform to build one in than Drupal.
The mobile world smells of Internet Appliance to me.
I don't see things that way. If their objective is to be the consumer-facing OS of the future, people are voting with their pocket books that they want their computing to be mobile. It doesn't have to be a closed appliance, it can be open and extensible like Android is.
Microsoft, Apple, Google, and several Linux groups all have mobile strategies in the works. If it wants to be relevant, Haiku will need one too.
If they want to be relevant, they had better have a strategy for mobile computing. This is by far the fastest growing segment of consumer-facing ("desktop") operating systems, and one segment that is not already dominated by Microsoft.
It is true that the selling of pirating MS software in the 3rd world helps MS spread their monopoly. In South America I could easily buy full versions of Windows and Office for $5 each on the street, which removed most people's incentive to try open-source products. But I'm guessing that alot of the product that was sold in the 3rd world originated, in some way, from Maximus Technology.
Wireless Minneapolis is rolling out nicely. It is succeeding because
- It is not free -- but half the price of other ISP providers in the area so it is a great bargain.
- It is a based on a Municipal Services model, where the city will be the biggest customer of the network. So even if no one signs up, the network provider will still make a profit.
I expect future muni wifis will use a Municipal Services-based model as well.
Clunky and slow are relative. Stuff just works is absolute. In my experience, once people learn that their data is always backed up and available from any computer, that their apps are always up-to-date with no user updates needed, no version conflicts (should I use.doc or.docx?) and always look and behave the same on any computer they sit down at, and that stuff just works without any monkey business on their part (like the hassle of setting up VPN connections from every place they go) -- People I work with are willing to live with a little bit of clunky and slow in order to have all of those advantages.
I agree the Minneapolis roll out seems to be going very well. I live in Minneapolis and here is why I think it is working:
- They chose a smaller company (USInternet) to do the build. This means the company is committed to customer service and building their reputation, rather than just extending their monopoly like the big telecos would have tried to do.
- The City of Minneapolis set itself up as the biggest customer of the network, to provide network access for public services throughout the city. That way, USInternet has a guarenteed customer base that is large enough to make the network work, even if few other people sign on. At the same time, Minneapolis gets a wireless network that is cheaper to lease from USInternet than it would be for Minneapolis to build it themselves internally.
- The service is not free, but still half of what existing ISPs are charging. This gives USInternet a growing source of revenue as the network grows.
- US Internet is building a network in a modular fashion, which makes it easy for them to move things around and upgrade parts, even mix in WiMax in the future, as the needs change.
So good technology, sound financial planning, and finding the right company seem to be what is making the Minneapolis network happen.
Not all American households have proper internet connections. In lower income households, like mine, I'm sure the incidence is less than 50%. I don't have a dedicated internet line myself. Buying a $400 laptop for my kid is hard enough. Paying an additional $45 per month for an internet connection to make it useful takes it out of my price range.
One of the big benefits of these OLPC machines is their automatic peer-to-peer networking. How can I take advantage of that if I buy one laptop? To really show the benefits of this machine, they should partner with some U.S. school district or city to get one of these into the hands of each of their kids. There are already hundreds of districts around the country pursuing school-wide laptop initiatives, I'm sure these programs would be very receptive to a reliable machine that costs less than $200 per kid.
The Distrowatch ranking is only a count of how many people click through distrowatch.org to get to a distribution.
Because the Ubuntu name is so well known, the vast majority of people downloading Ubuntu do it by going to ubuntu.com directly, or get directed to ubuntu.com by Google.
PCLOS, on the other hand, is practically unknown. I would imagine that most people have never heard of it until they went to Distrowatch and saw it near the top of the list, and decided to click on it. In fact, that is how I first learned about PCLOS.
Since most people are discovering PCLOS through Distrowatch, while most people are downloading Unbuntu via ubuntu.com, it makes sense that PCLOS would show up higher on the Distrowatch ranking.
In fact, if you look at Google Trends more and more people are searching for "Ubuntu" on Google, even as the amount of people searching for "Linux" is dropping. You could argue that Ubuntu is becoming a replacement for Linux in the common lexicon. Meanwhile, "PCLOS" and "PCLINUXOS" hardly even show up in any Google searches.
People choose pirated Windows over free Linux, not because Windows is better, but because of support. The advantages of Windows are:
I've probably used Windows before somewhere so I won't have to learn too much new stuff.
If I find something I don't know and I take the time to figure it out, putting my knowledge of Windows on a resume is more likely to help me get a job in the future than putting my knowledge of Linux on a resume.
If I find something I don't know and I don't want to figure it out on my own, it is much easier to find someone else who can fix my Windows install than fix my install of Ubuntu or whatever.
Windows is not better than Linux, but Windows has advantages in terms of support.
Are you suggesting that if a carrier came out with a lower price, people wouldn't flock to it because people are okay with the prices they pay to Cingular and Sprint? The problem isn't that people are buying what is currently offered, the problem is that there is no disruptive provider coming in to challenge the established market.
Industries won't change until they are challenged by a disruptive competitor. That has been true with automobiles, computers, agriculture -- all across the board. The same is true of mobile voice and data services. Nothing will change until disruptive technologies are allowed to enter the market.
Students can buy an education version of MS Office at a ridiculously low price, and many of them can get it for free from their schools that have already bought district-wides licenses for it.
WalMart knows this, so rather than pay for an MS Office or Works license when they sell the computer, they sell it without an MS office suite thereby increasing their margin. They only put OO.o on it as a filler so it has a good feature set in the newspaper ads. But I'm sure they understand that a lot of students will put MS Office on it once they get it home.
The idea is that the cost is in the development, not the distribution.
That is true, but my question is, how can this succeed in the long term?
At some point in the future, computer users in the developing world will far outnumber computer users in developed nations. Eventually, the majority of MS's user base will be running cut-rate versions of Windows. Whether MS sells them for $3, $10, or $20, they will still be far below the normal retail price in the US. At some point I think US customers will rebel and refuse to subsidize the development cost of software, and the profits of the software corporations, while the majority of the computer users in the world get to use the same software at a huge discount.
What will Microsoft's business model be once they succeed in covering the world with software that is sold at a cost just barely above the cost of distribution?
until they invested heavily in the country and opened a research center to change their image.
And starting dumping their product into the market at a loss to prevent competitors from moving in. And convinced the government to enact monopolistic laws like requiring "legal" (ie Microsoft) software to be loaded onto each new machine produced.
Sure, Microsoft is trying to do business in China, but they are borrowing a few pages from their anticompetitive playbook in the U.S. in the process.
As the story states, Microsoft is selling XP/Office bundles for $3 in emerging markets, in what is a clearly a defensive strategy to keep Linux from gaining a foothold in those markets.
This is going to be a popular product -- Microsoft products at Open Source prices -- however, it certainly can't be a sustainable strategy for Microsoft. Microsoft is using its enormous profits in other areas to essentially give Windows and Office for free to the third world. It won't be long before these $3 windows bundles, with valid product keys, start showing up on torrents and other file download sites.
What will be Microsoft's strategy when its $3 windows bundles start eating into its core business of selling over-priced software in developed countries?
If a producer wants customers, the burden is on the producer to price their products at a level that people are willing to pay. If the products are significantly over-priced, consumers will always find other ways to get stuff. Responding to that situation by calling potential customers "criminals", rather than coming up with a strategy to sell your product at a price that your customers will accept will certainly not help your sales.
that person went through the work of designing and creating those items so that they were unique to him/her and planned to sell them for a living
The vast majority of artists would not be upset in the slightest to know there are infinite digital copies of their work floating around the world. In fact, they would be quite flattered, and would look forward to the increased demand for paid live performances and other product sales that would be sure to follow. The small minority who would be upset about it are already rich enough to live out the rest of their life in comfort. I don't think they have been deprived of anything that could be considered ethically significant.
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Hard drives are NOT cheap if your goal turn the computer around for use by someone with low income. I rebuild computers and give them away for free to people who need them. Spending even $20 to replace the hard drive would increase the cost of the computer enough to make it unusable for my purposes.
Is it really possible to recover data from a disk that has been wiped with DBAN? I highly doubt it -- I've never heard of data being recovered after wiping with DBAN.
If you want to be friendly to the environment and spread the availability of low-cost computing, don't destroy the disk, use DBAN instead.
www.freegeek.org
www.worldcomputerexchange.org
If either has a chapter near you, give your stuff to them. Both are great at putting old computer equipment to good use.
I've worked in educational computing for 15 years in the U.S. Just as in business, the only way to do IT in a cost effective way is to solve the support problem.
Teachers should be teachers, students should be students. If we ask them all to be electronics hackers to get anything done, nothing will get done.
Private industry as well as schools in the U.S. are sitting on boatloads of free processors, and all of them find it far more cost effective to buy new, reliable, consistant hardware and software rather than re-use the old stuff. Trying to run a school, or any private business, with a pile of assorted gadgetry as your IT infrastructure would be a financial and productivity nightmare.
The best business minds in the U.S can't make the pile of free processors from old computers that we are sitting on work cost-effectively in the U.S.; I don't know why the results would be any different in the third world.
Sure, it is easy enough to set up one kid to do his homework on an old calculator or cell phone. Maybe a dozen kids. But the only way to distribute, train and support hundreds of thousands of these into the field in any cost effective way is to have all of them running almost identical hardware and software.
That is the role these ultra-cheap, mass-produced, low-end computers can play.
In fact, these projects are leveraging the pile of old, obsolete devices that are out there, just as you suggest. Except, rather than re-using the old devices directly from the garbage pile, they are re-using the excessive manufacturing capability that has been built up to serve the general consumer market and using it to build affordable, reliable, educational appliances.
Let's see... Comcast is $85 per month (Minneapolis area). Netflix is $5 per month. That is why you might need/want this.
The merger of the company with the vast majority of web searches with its next-closest rival would never win the approval of the Federal Trade Commission.
Google needs Yahoo! to stick around just like Microsoft needs Apple. Each company would have an effective monopoly of their respective markets if it weren't for their smaller rival, and would risk being broken up by the FTC.
Log in to Gmail, then go to Settings / Accounts / Add another e-mail address.
Each person will get a unique email address but the email can all be accessed and sorted by person or keyword through one central account.
I don't understand why a small business wouldn't want community-like functions in their website. Don't you have any customers you would like a better relationship with? I think if you look into everything that a website can do for your company, you will realize that you do want a community site. And if you do want a community site, their is no better platform to build one in than Drupal.
I don't see things that way. If their objective is to be the consumer-facing OS of the future, people are voting with their pocket books that they want their computing to be mobile. It doesn't have to be a closed appliance, it can be open and extensible like Android is.
Microsoft, Apple, Google, and several Linux groups all have mobile strategies in the works. If it wants to be relevant, Haiku will need one too.
If they want to be relevant, they had better have a strategy for mobile computing. This is by far the fastest growing segment of consumer-facing ("desktop") operating systems, and one segment that is not already dominated by Microsoft.
It is true that the selling of pirating MS software in the 3rd world helps MS spread their monopoly. In South America I could easily buy full versions of Windows and Office for $5 each on the street, which removed most people's incentive to try open-source products. But I'm guessing that alot of the product that was sold in the 3rd world originated, in some way, from Maximus Technology.
Wireless Minneapolis is rolling out nicely. It is succeeding because
- It is not free -- but half the price of other ISP providers in the area so it is a great bargain.
- It is a based on a Municipal Services model, where the city will be the biggest customer of the network. So even if no one signs up, the network provider will still make a profit.
I expect future muni wifis will use a Municipal Services-based model as well.
Clunky and slow are relative. Stuff just works is absolute. In my experience, once people learn that their data is always backed up and available from any computer, that their apps are always up-to-date with no user updates needed, no version conflicts (should I use .doc or .docx?) and always look and behave the same on any computer they sit down at, and that stuff just works without any monkey business on their part (like the hassle of setting up VPN connections from every place they go) -- People I work with are willing to live with a little bit of clunky and slow in order to have all of those advantages.
I agree the Minneapolis roll out seems to be going very well. I live in Minneapolis and here is why I think it is working:
- They chose a smaller company (USInternet) to do the build. This means the company is committed to customer service and building their reputation, rather than just extending their monopoly like the big telecos would have tried to do.- The City of Minneapolis set itself up as the biggest customer of the network, to provide network access for public services throughout the city. That way, USInternet has a guarenteed customer base that is large enough to make the network work, even if few other people sign on. At the same time, Minneapolis gets a wireless network that is cheaper to lease from USInternet than it would be for Minneapolis to build it themselves internally.
- The service is not free, but still half of what existing ISPs are charging. This gives USInternet a growing source of revenue as the network grows.
- US Internet is building a network in a modular fashion, which makes it easy for them to move things around and upgrade parts, even mix in WiMax in the future, as the needs change.
So good technology, sound financial planning, and finding the right company seem to be what is making the Minneapolis network happen.
Not all American households have proper internet connections. In lower income households, like mine, I'm sure the incidence is less than 50%. I don't have a dedicated internet line myself. Buying a $400 laptop for my kid is hard enough. Paying an additional $45 per month for an internet connection to make it useful takes it out of my price range.
One of the big benefits of these OLPC machines is their automatic peer-to-peer networking. How can I take advantage of that if I buy one laptop? To really show the benefits of this machine, they should partner with some U.S. school district or city to get one of these into the hands of each of their kids. There are already hundreds of districts around the country pursuing school-wide laptop initiatives, I'm sure these programs would be very receptive to a reliable machine that costs less than $200 per kid.
The Distrowatch ranking is only a count of how many people click through distrowatch.org to get to a distribution.
Because the Ubuntu name is so well known, the vast majority of people downloading Ubuntu do it by going to ubuntu.com directly, or get directed to ubuntu.com by Google.
PCLOS, on the other hand, is practically unknown. I would imagine that most people have never heard of it until they went to Distrowatch and saw it near the top of the list, and decided to click on it. In fact, that is how I first learned about PCLOS.
Since most people are discovering PCLOS through Distrowatch, while most people are downloading Unbuntu via ubuntu.com, it makes sense that PCLOS would show up higher on the Distrowatch ranking.
In fact, if you look at Google Trends more and more people are searching for "Ubuntu" on Google, even as the amount of people searching for "Linux" is dropping. You could argue that Ubuntu is becoming a replacement for Linux in the common lexicon. Meanwhile, "PCLOS" and "PCLINUXOS" hardly even show up in any Google searches.
Windows is not better than Linux, but Windows has advantages in terms of support.
Are you suggesting that if a carrier came out with a lower price, people wouldn't flock to it because people are okay with the prices they pay to Cingular and Sprint? The problem isn't that people are buying what is currently offered, the problem is that there is no disruptive provider coming in to challenge the established market.
Industries won't change until they are challenged by a disruptive competitor. That has been true with automobiles, computers, agriculture -- all across the board. The same is true of mobile voice and data services. Nothing will change until disruptive technologies are allowed to enter the market.
Students can buy an education version of MS Office at a ridiculously low price, and many of them can get it for free from their schools that have already bought district-wides licenses for it.
WalMart knows this, so rather than pay for an MS Office or Works license when they sell the computer, they sell it without an MS office suite thereby increasing their margin. They only put OO.o on it as a filler so it has a good feature set in the newspaper ads. But I'm sure they understand that a lot of students will put MS Office on it once they get it home.
The idea is that the cost is in the development, not the distribution.
That is true, but my question is, how can this succeed in the long term?
At some point in the future, computer users in the developing world will far outnumber computer users in developed nations. Eventually, the majority of MS's user base will be running cut-rate versions of Windows. Whether MS sells them for $3, $10, or $20, they will still be far below the normal retail price in the US. At some point I think US customers will rebel and refuse to subsidize the development cost of software, and the profits of the software corporations, while the majority of the computer users in the world get to use the same software at a huge discount.
What will Microsoft's business model be once they succeed in covering the world with software that is sold at a cost just barely above the cost of distribution?
until they invested heavily in the country and opened a research center to change their image.
And starting dumping their product into the market at a loss to prevent competitors from moving in. And convinced the government to enact monopolistic laws like requiring "legal" (ie Microsoft) software to be loaded onto each new machine produced.
Sure, Microsoft is trying to do business in China, but they are borrowing a few pages from their anticompetitive playbook in the U.S. in the process.
As the story states, Microsoft is selling XP/Office bundles for $3 in emerging markets, in what is a clearly a defensive strategy to keep Linux from gaining a foothold in those markets.
This is going to be a popular product -- Microsoft products at Open Source prices -- however, it certainly can't be a sustainable strategy for Microsoft. Microsoft is using its enormous profits in other areas to essentially give Windows and Office for free to the third world. It won't be long before these $3 windows bundles, with valid product keys, start showing up on torrents and other file download sites.
What will be Microsoft's strategy when its $3 windows bundles start eating into its core business of selling over-priced software in developed countries?
If a producer wants customers, the burden is on the producer to price their products at a level that people are willing to pay. If the products are significantly over-priced, consumers will always find other ways to get stuff. Responding to that situation by calling potential customers "criminals", rather than coming up with a strategy to sell your product at a price that your customers will accept will certainly not help your sales.
that person went through the work of designing and creating those items so that they were unique to him/her and planned to sell them for a living
The vast majority of artists would not be upset in the slightest to know there are infinite digital copies of their work floating around the world. In fact, they would be quite flattered, and would look forward to the increased demand for paid live performances and other product sales that would be sure to follow. The small minority who would be upset about it are already rich enough to live out the rest of their life in comfort. I don't think they have been deprived of anything that could be considered ethically significant.