The Ndiyo Blog

From Good Morning Silicon Valley…

Open-source software proponents may end up owing Microsoft a big, ironic thank you for finally getting Vista out the door. Release of the new version of Windows has forced IT folks in the public and private sector to make some serious plans about their upgrade paths, and that could be working in favor of Linux. Among government agencies, an important market for Microsoft, the Transportation Department has already put a moratorium on upgrades to Vista — as well as Microsoft Office and Internet Explorer 7 — while it examines cost and compatibility issues and looks at alternatives, including Linux. Now, according to Information Week, the top technology official at the Federal Aviation Administration is considering grounding Microsoft software in favor of a combination of Google’s new online business applications running on Linux-based hardware. “We have discussions going on with Dell,” said Chief Information Officer David Bowen. “We’re trying to figure out what our roadmap will be after we’re no longer able to acquire Windows XP.” Microsoft still has a chance to retain the business, he said, if it could resolve the compatibility problems and make a case for its substantially higher costs.

The cost of Windows upgrades and proprietary software is also leading to some re-evaluation in Japan’s Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry. Faced with replacing some 400,000 public school computers running Windows 98 or Windows Me (yipes!), the agency is taking a hard look at Linux and open-source software…

I’ll be giving a short talk on Ndiyo at the O’Reilly Emerging Telephony conference in San Francisco next week.

“What does Ndiyo have to do with telephony?”, you might well ask. Well, not a great deal, to be honest, though there are some quite interesting overlaps. But eTel is a fun conference covering a great deal more than just phone systems; come along and find out more!

When visiting another organisation’s office recently, I realised how much I had taken for granted as a Mac and Linux user. I discovered that a standard installation of Windows XP not only won’t play Quicktime movies, it won’t even play MPEG-4 out of the box, which meant that for many people, viewing our little movies about the trial installations we did last year in Bangladesh and South Africa was rather tricky.

To remedy this, I’ve uploaded the movies to YouTube, so you can find them embedded in the appropriate pages. Please have a look if you haven’t seen them already - they’re quite short.

• Attridgeville, South Africa
• Fultola, Bangladesh

We’re very pleased to start 2007 with news of a new team member. Before joining Ndiyo, Dr Michael Dales was designing new forms of high-speed networking at the Intel Research Lab here in Cambridge. Michael brings a wealth of relevant hardware and software experience, and we’re delighted to have him on the team.

Mohammad Yunus has won this year’s Nobel Peace Prize, along with Grameen Bank, the organisation he founded in 1983. His Nobel Lecture contains some inspiring stuff, which resonated for me as I think about Ndiyo:

I firmly believe that we can create a poverty-free world if we collectively believe in it. In a poverty-free world, the only place you would be able to see poverty is in the poverty museums. When school children take a tour of the poverty museums, they would be horrified to see the misery and indignity that some human beings had to go through. They would blame their forefathers for tolerating this inhuman condition, which existed for so long, for so many people.

A human being is born into this world fully equipped not only to take care of him or herself, but also to contribute to enlarging the well being of the world as a whole. Some get the chance to explore their potential to some degree, but many others never get any opportunity, during their lifetime, to unwrap the wonderful gift they were born with. They die unexplored and the world remains deprived of their creativity, and their contribution.

Grameen has given me an unshakeable faith in the creativity of human beings. This has led me to believe that human beings are not born to suffer the misery of hunger and poverty.

To me poor people are like bonsai trees. When you plant the best seed of the tallest tree in a flower-pot, you get a replica of the tallest tree, only inches tall. There is nothing wrong with the seed you planted, only the soil-base that is too inadequate. Poor people are bonsai people. There is nothing wrong in their seeds. Simply, society never gave them the base to grow on. All it needs to get the poor people out of poverty for us to create an enabling environment for them. Once the poor can unleash their energy and creativity, poverty will disappear very quickly.

Dave Richards refers to Gartner report G00140085:

The Gartner study shows that there is a 48% reduction in cost on the Microsoft Windows platform by moving it from an unmanaged PC environment to a centralized design with thin clients. 1/2 the cost, and no change in functionality. Imagine then what the savings would be if companies had the option to move to thin clients *and* Linux at the same. A major part of the cost in the white paper is licenses and software products. Imagine going into companies and telling them that they could save 60-70% on computing costs. Really, trying to shake off Microsoft Windows from their personal computers just isn’t enough to warrant a change for most people. It doesn’t offer the major cost reductions that are found with a complete, and stable re-design. Centralized computing using thin clients really works. There shouldn’t be so few of us implementing and being the voice.

Our aim at Ndiyo is to get the cost of computing as low as possible by sharing the processing power of a PC between several users. In our model, the screens often become the dominant hardware cost; we still need one of those per person, and though display prices are dropping, their cost will still be the limiting factor in some situations.

MSR India, in conjunction with the TIER group at Berkeley have been doing some interesting experiments with sharing a PC between young children simply by giving them multiple pointers and one mouse each.

On a traditional system:

The researchers found that without regulation, the comparatively richer, upper-caste within a group assigned to share a computer were almost always the ones that controlled the mouse. The mouse-controlling child controlled the learning, which in turn trickled down to the other kids who merely watched the screen…

More information about their solution here.

Over the next couple of months we hope to be getting the first samples of the next-generation Nivo terminal. This one does 1280×1024 at 24-bit pixel depth, but above all, it’s really cute!

Here’s the PCB:

It’s about 70mm square - quite a bit smaller smaller than a floppy (remember those?)

There’s lots to be done on both software and hardware before we can get this out into the wider world, and we’re running on very limited resources here, but we’re excited about this device. Many thanks to our friends at DisplayLink, especially Jason Young and Chris Ashton, who have been working to get this ready.

We’ll need to scale this up gradually, so we’ll probably have to start by only selling samples to organisations that might be interested in large future quantities. We’ll post more information here in due course, so please watch this blog…