Laptops for Africa

Some months ago, I wrote of the One Laptop Per Child project which had developed cheap shiny green laptops intended for children in developing nations.

The XO laptops run on Linux and are amazingly capable, given their $200 price tag, and even have wireless networking built-in. The idea was that the units would not be available to the general public, but only to needy children.

Many, including myself, were disappointed at that but now the project organisers are doing a really clever thing. US consumers will pay $399 for two units and get one, while the other goes to a needy child.

The organisers seem to expect that the buyers will tamely hand over their XOs to their children but I suspect that a goodly number will be retained and make their appearance at business meetings and conferences, becoming really trendy.

More details are available from the organisers’ website at http://laptop.org/. In other news which broke recently, Apple has launched an update of its operating system, which is known as Leopard.

Preliminary reports say that it is pretty cool, with many new features and tweaks to what was already a pretty good system. One feature that caught my eye was the fact that it will allow you to install Windows on an Apple computer.

This could be very handy for people who want to switch to Apple but still have a couple of PC programs that they need to run. I wouldn’t be surprised if Apple gains some ground in the market, especially in the light of the legions of us who have taken a look at Windows Vista, and don’t want anything to do with it.

And talk about having nothing to do with Windows, there is a very interesting product from Asus, which should arrive fairly shortly in South Africa. It’s called the Eee PC and it’s a little notebook which runs Linux, and is currently selling at around £220 in the UK.

The Eee PC weighs less than 1kg, is about 16x22x3.5cm in size, has a 17cm screen, 4Gb of flash memory in place of a hard drive, 512Mb of RAM, USB slots for connecting external hard drives, or whatever, and a VGA port for plugging in a big screen.

It has a conventional modem but can connect to a network via Ethernet cable or WiFi, it has built-in speakers, microphone and camera, and a claimed battery life of 3,5 hours. It comes preloaded with a wide variety of programs including the Firefox

Web browser, Open Office, Skype, and many other bits and pieces.

I managed to contact Asus at the time of writing and had it unofficially confirmed that stocks of Eee PCs would be here in November. I was unable to get an estimated street price but, assuming it’s reasonable, I think one could be just the ticket as my Christmas present.

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Social sites virtually take over

This online socialising thing gives rise to a whole raft introspection about whether it’s altogether healthy spending lots of time socialising over the Internet with people you’ll probably never meet in the flesh.

I’m not talking about people who can’t get out, and whose computers are a lifeline to the outside world, or friends and family living a long way from each other. It’s the ordinary Joe and Josephine Soap spending long hours online chronicling their lives and thoughts for others to read, that I wonder about.

I suppose its up to each of us to decide where we draw the line and I seem to have decided that sites, such as Facebook, promoting general socialising aren’t for me. I remember I didn’t like CB radio either – don’t ask me why, I didn’t get as far as signing up for Psychology I.

I seem to pay attention to more ordered sites that cater for my interests, primarily photography, and I spend a fair bit of time on them. The first one where I spent quite a lot of time was www.dpreview.com, which has decent camera reviews and forums where you can discuss all manner of photo-related topics.

It’s a good place to get information and share views, but it can eventually get you to thinking that you could outdo Ansel Adams if only you could get rid of your current camera and get the latest upgrade. It won’t, of course, but that doesn’t stop you scanning the adverts and wondering how to convince your spouse/bank manager as well.

Another site that I’ve been enjoying lately is flickr.com, which I’ve mentioned before, but which I’ve recently gone back to. It’s basically a photo sharing site which offers generous free accounts to store and display your photos so that others - you choose exactly who - can view them.

You just could use it to post the latest family pictures but there is a lot more going on under the surface, than just that. There are a large number of groups specialising in just about any type of photography that you could mention.

You start by uploading a picture to your Flickr album and then you can post it on one or more appropriate group pages. You could post a picture, let’s say it was a black and white of a tractor, to the black and white group and to the tractor group. And you can create your own group specialising in photographs of Andean pottery, if you like.

Group membership is entirely voluntary and so you can be sure that the members like the same sort of pictures that you do. You can then leave comments on other people’s pictures and they can do likewise to yours.

You know you’ve arrived when members of groups you’ve never even heard of, invite you to join them and post your picture on their group page. All groups have a built-in discussion forum where you can discuss tractors and tractor photography, for example, with fellow devotees.

I enjoy the whole thing very much, and have learnt an incredible amount from fellow Flickr members, but I try keep it in my head that it’s the getting out and taking photographs that’s important, not sitting at home online. It’s sometimes quite hard to remember that, though.

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Added later: There's also the chance that, if enough people see your picture, someone will like it enough to pay you enormous sums to feature it in the latest VW advert.

Declaring e-mail bankruptcy

Today, we turn to the problem of e-mail and the problems faced by people who get too much of it to be able to cope.

A recent USA Today article reports that nearly 40 billion e-mails are sent by people to other people over the Internet every day. Add to that the over 40 billion spam messages and the 17 billion automated alerts that are sent each day, and you end up with a staggering amount of e-mail flooding around the place.

There are some souls who only get a message or two a day and who probably feel quite lonely as a consequence. They should really be pleased, however, because all that e-mail has to go somewhere and it means that there are people out there who are getting more than their fair share.

And that’s even worse than loneliness if you’re one those unfortunates, because all those e-mails want you to do something and, as the recipients soon realise, there isn’t enough time to do it all.

The action required might be anything from just reading the message to replying to it, or buying some BIGDIK tablets at the urging of the odd message which slips past your spam filter.

I’m personally at the stage where I’m just about managing to cope with my incoming mail. Messages asking me to submit my invoice are always answered immediately but others take a bit longer, sometimes up to several weeks (occasionally months), for me to get around to.

I thought I had problems keeping up with my mail but it seems that there are people who have it far, far worse. The e-mail overload has even given rise to a phenomenon which is known as declaring e-mail bankruptcy where badly affected individuals delete the entire contents of their in-boxes and start again from scratch.

I recently became aware of the phenomenon thanks to the vanessafoxnude.com blog (no, there are no pictures) where she wrote that she’d first heard of the practice on another blog and seized on it as a solution to her in-box which had ballooned until it held 15000 messages.

In May this year, she apparently moved all the messages older than a month to a separate folder where they were out of sight and out of mind, and then set about organising and dealing with the rest.

The problem of e-mail overload is apparently quite widespread because a lot of people are thinking of ways to overcome it. There are a number of firms in the US, for example, that are beginning to implement e-mail-free days every week, where they take the novel approach of ignoring e-mail and going for face-to-face meetings instead.

A post by Vanessa earlier this month reported that the world did not collapse into a burning inferno because of her mass email extinction and that anyone who actually needed her to reply, had just sent another message.

She does note that things are still better than before her bankruptcy, but that messages are already starting to multiply; maybe she’ll need to repeat the experience annually.

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Happy endings

This week, I found a wonderful website that is dedicated to the belief that sad books are bad books and that childrens’ books should only have happy endings.

The website, at thehappyendingsfoundation.org, is apparently operated by The Happy Endings Foundation (THEF,) which was founded by Adrienne Small after reading a Lemony Snicket Unfortunate Events book to her daughter. The depressing tone of the story apparently had a negative effect on Adrienne and on her daughter, especially after she went on to read all the books in the series.

The site declares that Small has abandoned her career in the tax office to concentrate on furthering the aims of THEF by rewriting the Lemony Snicket stories and giving them happy endings. In the meantime, visitors to the site are presented with a list of books with suitably happy endings including Pollyanna and Famous Five.

A notice declares that THEF has decided not to suggest that the way forward is by burning bad books and another invites readers to voice their concerns to people owning copies of the Lemony Snicket DVD and, if necessary, to hide the disc where the owner is ‘unlikely to find it for sometime’.

Site visitors are invited to share their happiest moments and Jane Tanner had this to say: “My happiest moment was when I woke up all snuggly in my bed - it was a very sunny day and my cat looked at me as if to say ‘The world is a beautiful place and you are a beautiful happy person without a care in the world.’ I cried I was so happy.”

THEF has been featured in a number of newspapers and on the BBC and has been the cause of a lot of comment in childrens’ book circles and in those opposed to burning books. A lot of comment, and it took a blogger (www.inkygirl.com) to find out that THEF is a marketing ploy by the publishers of the Lemony Snicket books (egmont.co.uk).

The tongue in cheek is pretty obvious when you know the secret of the site but I reckon it would have fooled me if I hadn’t already known. I’d have figured that people who were whacko enough to have a webcam focused on a gerbil cage, would be whacko enough to want to rewrite books with sad endings.

In any case, I have a sneaking feeling that they’re right about sad books, but that’s from someone who avoided James Hadley Chase because, sometimes, the hero died. And that’s not even counting the case of post traumatic stress disorder I acquired when I read the story where Modesty Blaise dies.

There have been a few dark mutterings about the mean-swine publishers and publicity relations people who dreamt up THEF, but I have to admit to being heartily amused. Let it serve as a lesson to us not to blindly believe everything we read.

If you’re wondering about the gerbils, they are the activists Lionel and Gertrude, who allegedly help THEF by shredding sad books.

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(Radio)heading off at a tangent

Last week I talked at some length about the perils of this job and how easy it is to waste lots of time reading about interesting but non-relevant topics when researching the current week’s column on the web.

One of my usual stops when wanting to find out what’s new in the online world is the blogs section of the UK’s Telegraph newspaper. I went to www.telegraph.co.uk as usual, clicked on the blogs link, and started scrolling down the list to find the technology-related ones.

The first headline to strike my eye was “The man who saved the world” and, of course, I clicked on the link to find out more. It turns out there is a Russian pensioner called Stanislav Petrov who deserves the heartfelt gratitude of every single person on the planet.

He was on duty one night in 1983 in the Soviet nuclear bunker when his screens suddenly showed what looked like a massive incoming American missile attack. He could easily have pressed the panic button and precipitated nuclear war, but he wrote off the blips on his screen as a malfunction; and prayed like hell, I would guess.

With that distraction out of the way, however, I found a very interesting article on a development that could turn the music industry on its head. I have always resented the high price of recorded music, even in the days when we could pop along to Record King or the music bar at Game, and buy the latest vinyl disks for R4.99.

I thought that the resentment was just a consumer thing but it seems that singers and musicians are also miffed about the large difference between what they are paid and the prices the consumer is charged.

Record companies had the clout because there was no way that a singer or group could handle the marketing and distribution of their music. Not, that is, before the rise of the Internet made it possible for musicians to sell their music directly to their fans and potentially eliminate the record companies.

A fair of bit of this sort of thing is already going on but now the major group Radiohead is about to market its next album In Rainbows over the Internet. It can be pre-ordered as a boxed set with two CDs and two vinyl records, or as a download.

I freely admit that I wouldn’t know Radiohead if I bumped into it performing in the street, but I must say that I do like it’s novel ideas on pricing. The boxed set will set you back £40 and only enough of those will be made to fill orders received.

Things get more interesting when it gets to the digital download version because the band is prepared to accept whatever its customers feel like paying them for the music. The order form was a bit wonky at the time I wrote this, but I did see with my own eyes, the blank spaces where you can fill in the amount you want to pay.

I think it’s a very smart marketing move and I’m pretty sure that the group will end up doing well because most people will respond by paying a realistic figure for the music and few will bother to pirate it.

I imagine that the move is likely to inspire other musicians to go down that route unless the industry radically alters its pricing structure. The film industry will hopefully also catch the hint and bring down DVD prices, or is that too much to expect.

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