``...we are talking _villages_ here, not urban universities with computer science dpts. plus, with almost a billion people, chances are that a few of them are worth being hired in the us...'' jc helary
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"I know. It was a bit of sleeze on my part. But I sincerely hope that rural communities are using something like one of the unices to run whatever computers they have managed to get hold of."
Chuck and others, I think you have missed the point I was trying to raise about computers and political struggle. I will try and make it another way.
The most demanding user of computers and hence the end point of design, is not business nor universities.
To make this clearer. Business is the least demanding, it simply wants a computer to do tasks it is already doing, it requires that the box deskill the workforce (yes we can all think of exceptions to this, but they are by nature very rare). Hence business puts up with the worst designed OS in existence (Windows) on a box which was designed out of spare parts and despite all the developments poured into it. Yes serious computiong requires UNIX, but the vast bulk of business relies on Windows despite its obvious flaws. This is the key to its character.
Universities, on the other hand need to get to the guts of computing and hence something like UNIX is preferred, the specialist nature of university users (focussing on specific aspects) means practically that UNIX can grow in overall complexity but not make anything anybody is doing more complex, as they can ignore all the "other stuff". Thus UNIX flavours grow in rich chaotic abundance, programlets multiply with abandon, programs run depending on a miriad of small obscure code-fragments - this typifies the character of universities.
Hence when business gets serious it adopts the university approach and UNIX, when universities need more generalisied computers (for word processing etc) they tend to business type solutions. Now this for the most part defines the world-view of computer debate, including I think this one.
My point is that the most demanding user is niether business nor universities, but perhaps that villager in the backwaters of rural India. You see this person (a symbol of ordinary folks everywhere) does not need a computer to do anything specific (unlike both business and universities). There is no need in doing accounts, the few letters written could more easily be done by hand, the internet may prove interesting but hardly consistutes a need, etc, etc.
Yet all round the world, people make enormous sacrifices in order to get a computer - hence it is not at all that unlikely that a peasant from a place which has little to recomend it in terms of modern convenience may well buy a cheap computer, perhaps instead of more practical goods. You can speculate on the reasons for this, the conscious motives and they will be many and varied, but the underlying motive is not:
The computer is seen as a means of human expression. Its very deskilling nature makes abilities available which would otherwise never exist, and people gain enormous joys out of these small achievements and rightly so.
The point is that such people because they have no specific reason to have a computer are also the most demanding of computer users. They do not need a computer to do "A and B", they desire a computer which can further extend their reach, in otherwords they don't want to do much specifically but do "everything".
At heart the technology is very political, it will no-doubt become the cornerstone of political organisation across the globe, but to do so properly we have to break the socio-technical barrier in which we are trapped.
Such a computer has to be flexible and reliable (hence Windows is not the way, nor MAcs even though they are not in the same league), UNIX is both these things but it comes at a great price - it is inordinately and unreasonably complex. Few can become experts in using UNIX without expending enormous time just on this one task, very few UNIX users employ anything but a small fraction of what is available, and often to find even this, they have to be told by someone where to look in the first place (the complexities are such that simply mucking-around leads to becoming hopelessly lost within the system).
Our example of the isolated villager defies that this being a useful path to follow. That villager needs an elegant but powerful system, flexible, reliable and understandable. S/he cannot be confined to simply a GUI, nor confronted simply with command lines, there needs to be a shift which allows tinkering with the insides, complete customerisation, modest to complex coding and powerful off-the-shelf software and hardware. Obviously it will take sometime for such a combination to become cheap enough to picked up and bought at reasonable prices (even if the companants are dated), but the overall direction we need to move technically is beyond the business and university bias we now have.
Elements of a solution are in the making, XML, TAOS, SHEEP, AMIGA stem from a user driven desire for better computing to combine them into accessable power, but as far as the industry is concerned these developments are (with the exception of XML) beneath comment. But consider the power of virtual CPU programing (TAOS, uses a virtual CPU which is translated to combination of real CPUs), addressable programs and componants (AMIGA and SHEEP) which have tiny footprints and make modest demands on RAM and CPU time, an elegant Desktop approach where the command line is seemlessly itegrated (AMIGA). A single scripting language that can be compiled but also can address any program or componant and allow for infinite fine tuning of a working environment (SHEEP). And most important of all a universal format for data (XML).
Add to this an environment which can be hosted (LINUX and WIndows - more to follow) or run indepenantly maximising the hardware.
It may fail, it has before - but that is not the real question - it is the direction that it points to. Most of all remember that villager, not as a secondary beneficiary of developments made for other reasons, but because s/he represents the very purpose of design.
Greg Schofield Perth Australia