Paw Prints: Writings of the maddog

I recently came back from Ghana, Africa after speaking at the Idlelo conference there.

Ghana is one of those “emerging economies” that I sometimes discuss, with people trying desperately to get ahead and utilizing Free Software to get there.

Ghana has more problems than just trying to decide whether they should use Free Software. The Internet backbone to their country (and surrounding countries) is inadequate for the number of people it serves, and the prices for the Internet is pretty daunting, so downloading a copy of any of the distributions is both expensive and slow.

Fortunately I was able to get my friends at Red Hat to sponsor about 500 Fedora CDs for the conference and some university training that I did after the conference. That was the good news.

The bad news is that reading documentation and downloading large amounts of code over the Internet is still very slow and expensive by standards in the Americas, and web browsing is not a happy experience.

One of the things that has always made me happy about Linux is that we do generate some distributions that recognize the older and slower systems, keeping these systems viable for a long time. One of the things that I hate about Flash and modern-day websites is the amount of time it takes to load the information that you don't need, just so you can get to the information that you do want. While this is annoying in areas of high bandwidth, it becomes painful in areas like Ghana, and often creates a situation where you give up in disgust before actually accessing the information you need.

Many years ago IBM did a study that showed if people could get the answer to a simple question in less than one-third of a second, their mind stayed focused on the problem at hand and did not wander to other topics. Once the mind had “wandered”, it took real effort to get it to focus again, particularly if it had wandered to areas involving the opposite sex. Therefore it was a goal to keep every “simple” query to less than a third of a second (acknowledging that some more complex queries might take more time to answer).

It is not just about “emerging economies”. There are places in New Hampshire (and I am sure other states in the U.S.A.) where broadband has not reached, and people are accessing the World Wide Web via dial-up lines. Even if you do have broadband, the total bandwidth is not unlimited (either wired or wireless), nor is “off server” bandwidth unlimited. Most people want information two ways: fast and faster.

If you design your web site, applications and documentation for the “bandwidth challenged”, most people will be happier, and some will be ecstatic.

Carpe Diem!

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