last week was Nicholas Negroponte’s unveiling of the $100 laptop designed to meet the needs of people in relatively poor countries. The other day, Patrick noted that “… the minimum order [of the computer] is a million units, thats 100 million US dollars” and that this seems to be quite a massive outlay for some poor countries. While that is true, one of the characteristics of such states is that there is a struggling “official” market system with thriving black markets of various kinds. The point of the huge investment that has to be made is not to make the barrier to entry too high but rather to ensure that the computers become so ubiquitous that the market value on the street trends towards 0. One thing is sure – it will be very interesting to see where this goes. I wonder if CIDA or the IDRC in Canada has any formal involvement with this project? Canada has been involved with many computing and networking initiatives in Africa, and it seems that this would fit in quite well.
Archives for November 2005
One of my favourite
writers when I was doing my Master’s degree was Vine Deloria Jr., whose writings taught me many things about Indian identity and politics that were essential for my academic and personal development. I learned this morning that Vine Deloria died on Sunday in Golden, CO. Yet another truly original voice that shall be heard no more.
A couple of weeks ago
I asked for advice on how to filter emails such that known spam was deleted immediately from the server, while keeping a record in case of false positives. I hoped to do this directly in Apple Mail, but based on my research I found this to be impossible.
So I’ve gone back to using Spamfire, a program from Matterform that does just what I need. I have used it for a while, but in the past few months I started having more and more problems with it – in particular, it seemed to corrupt the mail spool on the POP server I was using. I hope it works better this time around.
The nice folks at Boing Boing
have posted a handy roundup and time-line of the news related to the Sony DRM fiasco. Word is that Sony has started a limited recall.
The news is out tonight
that Peter Drucker has died. Drucker was clearly one of the 20 or so most influential people (in North America at least) of the last hundred years, and he lived to the grand old age of 95.
