I think what is at issue here is the different contexts involved. Edmond Gaible <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> On simplicity: Although laptops are durable and feature low power > requirements, they're more expensive and much more difficult to service. > In school computer labs, teachers and students often become adept at > scavenging parts to repair desktop computers. Such activities, although > arising out of need, become one of the "benefits" of participating in > school computers clubs. Such activities are _much_ more difficult with > laptops. In Zimbabwe, at least through 1998, servicing of a laptop > required that the machine be shipped to South Africa. In my communities there are no spares, let alone bins of cards for mating to motherboards and power supplies. Laptops eat less dust in the places I work (smaller fans in very open buildings) and hack the 100 lightning hits per hr in some ridges get in Arnhem Land. Probably the reason the US has a lightning research station in Darwin. When our machines die that's it. We can't even afford the funeral. But in my experience, the isolation of old laptops from the power grid and their smaller ingestion of dust leads to better longevity. I don't advocate new laptops in these environments (who can afford them anyway). But free discarded ones meet some people's needs fine for quite a long time. > On new technologies: Several features of Matthew Grant's proposed server > design have already proven valuable for the Virtual Didactic Lab > education project in Sao Paulo -- and could be of similar value to other > projects that require heavy e-mail / Internet use in regions that are > infrastructure-poor or poorly regulated. > > The LabVirt project engages secondary-school students in the design of > physics simulations, which are then built in Java by graduate students > at University of Sao Paulo, and uploaded to a central repository for use > as teaching/learning tools. Schools involved in the project, located in > underserved communities throughout the state of Sao Paulo, generally > have 10-computer labs, with machines on the order of Pentium 1s and 2s. > The project has designed and built a "blackbox server," which sits on > one of the school's 10 workstations. This server links the computers in > a LAN, giving them all access to the printer and maximizing the lab's > limited hard-drive space. OK, here's one of my contexts. 25 unreliable party lines in an area the size of a small European country. Cut off by floods for 3-6 months a year. Reliant on air and barge supply. Phone pits regularly blown out by lightning. Irregular and poorly conditioned power. Dust ridden, unconditioned buildings. I won't even begin to describe the social dysfunctionality. 10 computers here will not happen for a long time- if ever. A network here is 2 itinerant PCs that have the occasional liaison via a crossover cable. Hence my comment to a private poster: "Of course, the whole free software movement is great. I applaud it mightily. But let's just remember that the people we want to help don't have 2 cents literally, let alone 2 cents of opinion to contribute to religious software debates. If an old, ugly, creaky DOS machine lands on their desk and meets their needs, who are we to tell them any different? " It might actually be the only computer they see for quite a while. Personally, I'm the last one to tell them they have to wait until they can afford a Linux network. (And what else is Linux for?) > Critically, in a project that involves students uploading graphics and > downloading Java applets, the server uses call-scheduling to optimize > all email transactions -- processing these when the lab is unused and > when the city's phone lines have the least traffic. If the phones are > down or the connection is poor, the task is re-scheduled. > > (The LabVirt project has completed its second year -- I'm unaware of any > publicly accessible "web artifacts.") > > One could argue, as well, that _any_ Linux-based proposal for developing > countries should be given serious consideration as part of an effort to > reduce the future costs and constraints of participation in an otherwise > exclusionary networked society. Linux has already become much more user > friendly, with graphical interfaces (not unlike Windows) and simpler > distributions. It continues to run well on older computers (e.g., 486s), Well, not with a GUI it won't. You'll be restricted to a reduced distribution with a shell interface. Not a nice thing for the novice and the root account provides huge destructive potential for novices. > and provides good Internet-browsing capabilities even on those machines. > And integration of Linux into development projects is one way to ensure > that this collaboratively created alternative evolves to better meet the > needs of developing-country users. > > In an alternative view of the future, Microsoft is releasing its new > developers' toolkit (C-Sharp) this week, intended to compete with Java > [open-source, free], and to integrate with Microsoft's dot-Net and > Passport services -- all of these are designed to create greater > dependency on Microsoft's proprietary software and Internet services. Like I said to a private poster: "I applaud anyone having a go. I applaud any effort to provide choice against monopolies. Most of all, I enjoy watching the cast offs from software monopolies being put to good use - where and as appropriate. Appropriate is not always Linux. But it can be." Once more, we need to avoid seeing Linux as our hammer to which every problem is its nail. There was a world of simpler computing out there long before we all got religion with Linux. Now some people can afford that world because we've moved on and it's already installed on cast off machines. Who am I to mail them a Linux CD as a panacea-in-the-post? Having been chased down a couple of roads already by various dissatisfied people, I know exactly where that CD would end up. Perry Morrison ------------ ***GKD is an initiative of the Global Knowledge Partnership*** To post a message, send it to: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To subscribe or unsubscribe, send a message to: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>. In the 1st line of the message type: subscribe gkd OR type: unsubscribe gkd Archives of previous GKD messages can be found at: <http://www.globalknowledge.org>
