Outside the electronics shop window, several dozen Cubans, faces pressed against the glass, gawked at the wares inside. Others fell in line to get in. It wasn’t the latest game console or smart phone they were straining to see. It was a personal computer. Strange as it might seem, up until Friday last week, it was illegal for Cubans to buy a PC for home use. But after assuming power from his ailing brother in February, the new president, Raul Castro, promised to remove many of the restrictions that Cubans have lived under for years, including a ban on cell phones, DVD players, motorbikes—and personal computers.
THE One Laptop per Child project had hoped to persuade governments in developing countries to buy millions of XOs and hand them out as educational tools, but that has not happened in a big way for a number of reasons. What’s more, products such as the Classmate PC and the Asus Eee PC—a Linux machine with a less cryptic interface—compete for much the same educational market, so it is far from certain that the XO will lead the revolution Negroponte envisioned.
LEAVE it to Bill Gates. There’s a reason he’s the richest man in the world. On a visit to China last week, he announced a program that would sell a $3 bundle of Windows XP and MS Office to governments in poor countries that subsidize computer purchases by students. “All human beings deserve a chance to achieve their full potential,” Gates said in announcing Microsoft’s latest program to bridge the digital divide. It was a public relations coup and a shrewd business move besides. The $3 offer comes at a time when the open source Linux operating system is becoming increasingly popular as a free alternative to Windows on desktop and notebook computers. By aiming its program at developing countries, Microsoft seems determined to head off Linux in markets where the free alternative is most likely to thrive at Windows’ expense.
IN an industry where acronyms are de rigueur, it seemed inevitable that an old computing concept would get a new name.
Last November at the United Nations World Summit on the Information Society (which goes by its own unwieldy acronym WSIS), FOSS was on everyone’s lips as a way of bridging the divide between technology haves and have-nots.
FOSS stands for “free and open source software,” and it’s increasingly seen as the answer to everything from piracy to the lack of computing resources in Third World countries.
Free software that just anyone can copy or download over the Internet? What a crazy concept! Would businesses want to use software that nobody sold or supported? The surprising answer is, many of them already do—without knowing it.
LAST month, I wrote about a battle for the future of the Internet that most people still don’t realize is already being waged. On one had, you have the big US telcos who want to divide the Internet into a fast and slow lane, and charge big online companies such as Yahoo, Google, eBay and Amazon and video streaming Web sites more money for “premium” services. The rest of us—small companies, bloggers, and individual Web site owners—would be relegated to the slow lane.
WHEN I was first learning about the Internet, one of the most difficult concepts to grasp was that it belonged to no one. There was no central authority managing the network. Nobody owned or controlled it. Not even Bill Gates. And because it belonged to no one, it belonged to everyone, and millions of Web sites flourished, the small growing right alongside the giants. In this hothouse environment, small, nimble companies quickly grew into giants in their own right to challenge traditional, Old World corporations. This egalitarian approach also gave rise to an unprecedented exercise of free expression, where anyone could make his voice heard by thousands or even millions, by creating a blog and going online. All that’s going to change, if large American carriers have their way.
Developing countries including the Philippines continue to lag behind industrialized nations in the use of information and communications technology (ICT), putting them at a serious disadvantage in a world that increasingly uses the Internet.
Instead of spending money on telecenters to give rural folk access to computers, countries should simply find ways to distribute more mobile phones, the Economist says. The digital divide that really matters is between those with access to a mobile network and those without, and that gap is rapidly closing, the magazine adds. Is this the way forward for the Philippines?
Sacha Chua was hopping mad. The 20-something programming maven and former instructor at the Ateneo de Manila University had received an application form for the Search for the Digital Pinay 2005, organized by the Philippine Computer Society and Media G8way Corporation. “Read it all the way to the end,” she urged people on a number of mailing lists after she posted the entry form on her blog. “You may start out amused… I hope you end up horrified that such a thing could have been thinkable.” I downloaded the form and saw why.
The Commission on Information and Communications Technology (CICT) is working to ensure that the 1,501 municipalities in the country would have access to affordable Internet service by 2010.
CICT Chairman Virgilio L. Pena said the nationwide information technology program would create strategic impact on education, jobs, government service, health and business.
THE government is working on a “people’s PC” program patterned after the successful Thai project that drove prices of desktop PCs and notebooks down in that country. The goal is to encourage more people to use computers by making them more affordable, said Secretary Virgilio Peña, chair of the Commission on Information and Technology (CICT).
Digital Life is a blog that features a technology column by the same name that appears every Tuesday in Manila Standard Today, a national daily from the Philippines. This blog gives readers easy access to the column, which started in November 2002. Copyright 2009 Chin Wong.
THE One Laptop per Child project had hoped to persuade governments in developing countries to buy millions of XOs and hand them out as educational tools, but that has not happened in a big way for a number of reasons. What’s more, products such as the Classmate PC and the Asus Eee PC—a Linux machine with a less cryptic interface—compete for much the same educational market, so it is far from certain that the XO will lead the revolution Negroponte envisioned.
IN an industry where acronyms are de rigueur, it seemed inevitable that an old computing concept would get a new name.
WHEN I was first learning about the Internet, one of the most difficult concepts to grasp was that it belonged to no one. There was no central authority managing the network. Nobody owned or controlled it. Not even Bill Gates. And because it belonged to no one, it belonged to everyone, and millions of Web sites flourished, the small growing right alongside the giants. In this hothouse environment, small, nimble companies quickly grew into giants in their own right to challenge traditional, Old World corporations. This egalitarian approach also gave rise to an unprecedented exercise of free expression, where anyone could make his voice heard by thousands or even millions, by creating a blog and going online. All that’s going to change, if large American carriers have their way.
Instead of spending money on telecenters to give rural folk access to computers, countries should simply find ways to distribute more mobile phones, the Economist says. The digital divide that really matters is between those with access to a mobile network and those without, and that gap is rapidly closing, the magazine adds. Is this the way forward for the Philippines?
Sacha Chua was hopping mad. The 20-something programming maven and former instructor at the Ateneo de Manila University had received an application form for the Search for the Digital Pinay 2005, organized by the Philippine Computer Society and Media G8way Corporation. “Read it all the way to the end,” she urged people on a number of mailing lists after she posted the entry form on her blog. “You may start out amused… I hope you end up horrified that such a thing could have been thinkable.” I downloaded the form and saw why.
