January 19, 2003

Laos’ Jhai Computer

Lee Thorn of San Francisco and Lee Felsenstein are the architects of the Jhai computer in Laos, which is powered by bicycle pedals and used WiFi and antennas nailed to trees to connect to the Internet. More in this story from SF Gate:

The bike-pedaled generator will power a battery that in turn runs the computer, which sits in an 8-by-10-inch box and has the power of a pre-Pentium, 486-type computer. Felsenstein designed it to run on only 12 watts — compared to a typical computer’s 90 watts — so the bike power would be up to the task.

“It has no moving parts, the lid seals up tight, and you can dunk it in water and it will still run,” Felsenstein said. “The idea is to be rugged, last at least 10 years and run in both the monsoon season and the dry season.”

The computer will hook up with a wireless card — an 802.11b, the current industry standard — to an antenna bolted on the roof of a bamboo house, and the signal will be beamed from there to an antenna nailed to a tree on top of a mountain. There the signal will be bounced to Phon Hong, which sits 25 miles from Phon Kham and is the nearest big village with phone lines. The phone lines then hook to an Internet service provider.

Felsenstein crafted the Jhai to run on Linux software, a system which, unlike some other software, will not be obsolete in 18 months.

Through the Internet connection, the Jhai Computer will be able to not only do e-mail, but also run a two-way telephone system VoIP.

I’ll be writing this week in my Tech Talk on the ecosystem which low-cost computers can proliferate.

Continue reading Laos’ Jhai Computer

59 million Chinese Internet Users

From WSJ:

The number of people on the Internet in China reached 59.1 million by the end of 2002, according to the latest survey by the China Internet Network Information Center, as the world’s second-largest Internet user population continued to grow. The Internet user population increased by 13.3 million people since the center’s previous survey at the end of June 2002, Cinic said in a statement Thursday.

Chinese Internet users now make up an estimated 9% of the global Internet population, and about 4.6% of China’s own massive population.

The government-backed group predicted that the Internet user population will grow 46% during 2003 to hit 86.3 million by the end of the year.

In a report late last year, the United Nations estimated that China already had the world’s second-largest Internet population, far behind the more than 140 million in the U.S. but edging ahead of the roughly 58 million in Japan.

Linix in Data Centres

From Newsfactor, quoting a Goldman Sachs report on Linux:

Linux will emerge as the dominant operating system in corporate data centers. IT buyers will use Linux to take advantage of lower-cost, higher-performance Intel-based servers and to avoid “premium-priced proprietary systems.” Eventually, systems running Linux will displace systems based on Unix and RISC processors.

“Many observers confine Linux’s enterprise opportunity to the market for low-end ‘edge’ servers such as file, print, Web, and e-mail servers,” the study, entitled “Fear The Penguin,” notes. “But we are confident that the technical developments and market forces are in place for it also to become the dominant OS on the higher-end servers of the enterprise data center.”

MIT Spam Conference

From NYTimes:

Spam traffic has grown from 8 percent of Internet e-mail in 2001 to as much as 40 percent in 2002, according to Brightmail Inc., which provides filtering products for several major Internet service providers.

Spam is costly for everybody. It costs about $250 to send a million spams, but about $2,800 in lost wages, at the federal minimum wage, for those million spams to be deleted, Yerazunis estimates.

Altogether, spam costs U.S. businesses $8.9 billion and European businesses $2.5 billion annually, according to a study released this month by San Francisco-based Ferris Research.

The article says that “William Yerazunis’ presentation on his CRM114 Discriminator language was a centerpiece of the conference. His filtering technique hashes the messages, matching short phrases from the incoming text with phrases that the user previously supplied as example text, catching spam that might not exactly match standard spam text. He claims that the system has higher than 99.9 percent effectiveness; it can be downloaded for free.”