Ndiyo on ZDNet

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Andrew Donoughue’s piece about Ndiyo and the digital divide is now on the Web. The nice thing about it is that it sets our work in the wider context.

An alternative to both the refurbished PCs and the OLPC approach has been developed by two UK academics. Ndiyo, the Swahili word for “yes”, is a project that aims to allow multiple users access to the same PC. Rather than trying to push more bespoke devices on countries with meagre IT budgets, Ndiyo allows one PC to be shared by five to 10 individuals by turning it into a mini-server networked to a series of thin clients.

The brain-child of Quentin Stafford-Fraser, a former research scientist at AT&T Laboratories Cambridge, Ndiyo is based around the untapped ability of the Linux operating system (Ubuntu) to support numerous simultaneous users. Together with his partner, technical author and Open University professor John Naughton, Stafford-Fraser decided that the traditional idea of one machine per user was a model that just didn’t make economic or functional sense for the developing world. Instead, in the Ndiyo model, a Linux PC becomes a server to a series of “ultra-thin-clients” — called Nivos — which allow an extra display, keyboard and mouse to be connected to the computer via a standard network cable.

ZDNet UK caught up with Stafford-Fraser and Naughton recently to find out how their technology works and why it makes more sense than the strategies being developed by heavyweights such as Intel and OLPC…

Iraq death toll rises

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From today’s New York Times…

BAGHDAD, Nov. 22 — More Iraqi civilians were killed in October than in any other month since the American invasion in 2003, a report released by the United Nations on Wednesday said, a rise that underscored the growing cost of Iraq’s deepening sectarian war.
According to the report, 3,709 Iraqis were killed in October, up slightly from the previous high in July, and an increase of about 11 percent from the number in September.

The figures, which include totals from the Baghdad morgue and hospitals and morgues across the country, have become a central barometer of the war here and a gauge of the progress of the American military as it tries to bring stability to this exhausted country.

A dangerous trend has surfaced: Sixty-five percent of all deaths in Baghdad were categorized as unidentified corpses, the signature of militias, who kidnap, kill and throw away bodies at a rate that now outstrips the slaughter inflicted by suicide bombers. The report did not offer a breakdown by sect, and it is impossible to tell who is dying in greater numbers.

Indeed, the 52 bodies found by the authorities on Wednesday were far more than the 16 Iraqis reported killed in Baghdad and Baquba, a violent city north of the capital.

“We have a situation in which impunity prevails,” said Gianni Magazzeni, chief of the United Nations’ Human Rights Office in Baghdad, which compiled the report. “It’s critically important for the government to ensure that justice is done.”

Even daily life spoke of war and a society in collapse. The report painted a portrait of social calamity that included 100,000 Iraqis a month fleeing to Syria and Jordan, and schools in some of the most violent areas of the country almost completely shut down. Areas that are not mixed — Iraq’s Kurdish north and portions of its Shiite south — were far safer.

The figures illustrate in stark percentages just how deeply the killing has sunk into Iraqi society. They had been a point of contention for the government of Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, which suppressed them in September after criticizing them as inflated. The American military has also criticized the figures as high, but it does not release statistics of its own.

President Bush and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice are preparing for meetings next week with Mr. Maliki, in part to discuss the security situation in Iraq.

But the United Nations stands by the count, which tallies unclaimed bodies from Iraq’s approximately six morgues and from death certificates — required for burial and for inheritance procedures. If anything, the numbers are low. Figures from hospitals come from the Ministry of Health, which counts deaths only on the day of the attack. Victims who die a day later are not counted…

Reviewing BBC business coverage

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From today’s Guardian…

Sir Alan Budd, the former Bank of England Monetary Policy Committee member, will chair the BBC’s review of the impartiality of its business coverage.

Instigated by the corporation’s governors as part of a series of reviews, BBC staff, licence fee payers, unions and other interested parties will be invited to give their views to Sir Alan’s six-strong panel.

The other members are: Stephen Jukes, head of Bournemouth University’s media school; Chris Bones of Henley Management College; John Naughton, Open University professor and Observer columnist; Oxfam director Barbara Stocking; and Paralympic athlete Dame Tanni Grey-Thompson.

That Vista licensing agreement you were thinking of accepting

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Mark Rasch, an IT lawyer, has a wonderful essay on the problems raised by the Vista EULA. The nub of it is this:

The terms of the Vista EULA, like the current EULA related to the “Windows Genuine Advantage,” allows Microsoft to unilaterally decide that you have breached the terms of the agreement, and they can essentially disable the software, and possibly deny you access to critical files on your computer without benefit of proof, hearing, testimony or judicial intervention. In fact, if Microsoft is wrong, and your software is, in fact, properly licensed, you probably will be forced to buy a license to another copy of the operating system from Microsoft just to be able to get access to your files, and then you can sue Microsoft for the original license fee. Even then, you wont be able to get any damages from Microsoft, and may not even be able to get the cost of the first license back…

Worth reading in full. Many thanks to Chris Walker for the link.

The benefits of hindsight

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Google stock passed the $500 a share barrier yesterday. (It was $85 on launch day.) Ah! — isn’t hindsight a wonderful thing? Meanwhile, the NYT comments:

Google now has a market value of $156 billion, exceeding all but 13 American companies — icons of commerce like Exxon Mobil, Johnson & Johnson and Wal-Mart. It is worth more than any media company and all the technology companies except Microsoft, whose software empire it increasingly threatens, and Cisco Systems.

Google’s success has made its founders, Sergey Brin and Larry Page, the 12th- and 13th-richest people in the United States, according to Forbes — and, at 33, the youngest in the top 400. Their shareholdings are worth more than $15 billion each, on top of the more than $2 billion in cash that each has received for selling some shares…

Novell’s Faustian bargain

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Very good openDemocracy piece by Felix Cohen and Becky Hogge on the implications of the deal between Microsoft and Novell (memorably summarised by Dana Gardner at ZDNet in the headline “Fox marries chicken, both move into henhouse”)…

On 2 November, Novell and Microsoft announced a “broad collaboration on Windows and Linux interoperability and support”. The main aim was to provide reassurance and support to companies that required Linux and Windows to operate on the same hardware, in so-called “virtualisation” environments. But the small print revealed a patent licensing agreement and mutual covenant not to sue over patent infringements. This, many feared, would give Microsoft vital fresh ammunition for its steady fire of unsubstantiated claims that Linux infringes Microsoft’s patents. In effect, Microsoft had asked Novell the classic loaded question “when did you stop beating your wife?”, and Novell had unwisely attempted an answer…

Wacky panorama

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I was in Oxford today for a meeting at Queen’s and afterwards I walked briskly along Broad Street. The city was entrancing in the afternoon sunshine. It’s got so much lovely honey-coloured stone. I tried to take a panoramic sequence of Balliol as I sped along, rushing to catch a bus. The moral — as you can see from the result — is: never do panoramas in a hurry!

I love Balliol. It’s such an architectural jumble. I’m reminded of the story of Benjamin Jowett, the celebrated Master, coming out of the front gate and being confronted by some market stalls. He queried the price of some goods. The aggrieved stallholder protested to him that it was “impossible for an honest man to make a living, these days”. “Well, my good man”, said Jowett, “cheat as little as you can”.

I’d love to have known Jowett (though I am pretty sure the feeling would not have been reciprocated). He was a great reformer of Oxford traditions whose motto was “Never retreat. Never explain. Get it done and let them howl.” According to Wikipedia, a Balliol undergraduate described him in doggerel thus:

First come I. My name is Jowett.
There’s no knowledge but I know it.
I am the Master of this College,
What I don’t know isn’t knowledge.

Balliol used to be famous for producing graduates who ran the country (including a raft of British prime ministers, though not Tony Blair). Geoffrey Madam said that “at the top of every tree there is an arboreal slum of Balliol men”. In the 1930s it had a reputation as a haven for liberals. Evelyn Waugh and his reactionary friends once provoked a riot in an Oxford cinema by shouting “Well rowed, Balliol!” when a film showed a group of South American natives paddling briskly along in a dug-out canoe.

Is that my cow mooing or your phone ringing?

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Hmmm… I’m not someone who downloads ringtones (though enough people do to make it a $500 million a year market in the US), but if I were, I think I’d be interested in Phonezoo. It allows you to upload digital files so that they can be downloaded as ringtones — for free. I particularly like the one of cows mooing — especially as it is unlikely to attract the attention of RIAA lawyers.

Fleet Street’s maiden aunts

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Peter Wilby, writing in the New Statesman, has picked up on my rant about why young people don’t like newspapers — and taken the argument a useful step further. Here’s part of what he says:

Newspapers have never been good at picking up and responding positively to major social and cultural shifts

The Observer’s internet columnist John Naughton spoke the truth to the Society of Editors annual conference in Glasgow this month. Young people aren’t buying newspapers, he said, because the press portrays them as “hateful, spiteful, antisocial” criminals. To that, I would add that newspapers portray the schools, colleges and universities young people attend as incompetent and ill-disciplined. With standards plummeting, according to the press, A-levels and degrees aren’t worth the paper they’re written on. Half the courses are in joke subjects.

School leavers are illiterate and unemployable. The only decent young people, apart from soldiers, are those killed or beaten up by the savage creatures who make up most of their peer group.

Then there’s drugs and sex. You will find lots of pieces discussing the pros and cons of tobacco and alcohol, but cannabis and ecstasy are simply damned without reservation. Evidence that anybody under 18 is even thinking about sex – or being encouraged by teachers to do so – is taken as a sure sign of social disintegration. As for fellatio, news editors probably think it sends you blind.

A handful of columnists, such as the Independent’s Johann Hari and Catherine Townsend and the London Evening Standard’s Laura Topham, give an authentic hint of young people’s attitudes and daily lives. But they are lone voices among what resembles a chorus of maiden aunts, circa 1953…

Great stuff. Thanks to Roy Greenslade for the link.