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20/06: The OLPC Project - call for localization
I recently attended Microsoft's Pakistan Developer Conference which attracted IT experts from all over Pakistan alongside various other government officials.
There, I met Dr. Habib Khan, who is working for the OLPC [One Laptop Per Child] project in Pakistan. We had a brief conversation about the project when he was leaving and he requested that all those who can help should come forth for localizing OLPC for Pakistan. This will ultimately benefit the poor people in Pakistan who don't know English language and for whom the currently English-based OLPC project is useless since they have no familiarity with the English language. He sent me a couple of links for those who are interested:
OLPC News
OLPC current events
For those software developers; Pakistan-based or otherwise, who are interested in localizing OLPC project to Urdu and other local languages, please post what you can contribute in this thread on Linux Pakistan site. Once there are a few people interested, I will direct Dr. Habib to the thread/site so interested people can interact with him and he can then further guide them.
I request all those interested in this to step forward for the betterment of the cause of OSS and the very people of Pakistan who will use this OLPC project for gaining knowledge and ultimately improving their lives.
For those who can do it, please forward this information to other communities and forums too where people might be interested to help.
10/06: P2P networks; a blessing or menace?
File sharing is a rather old concept. It has evolved over time to the current P2P and torrent networks. Napster and Kazaa were very popular file sharing services at the turn of this century. Millions of internet users use file sharing predominantly for downloading pirated software, movies and music amongst many other things. This illegal sharing dominates the volume of legal sharing like that of open source software including Linux based distributions. By some estimates, 35% of internet traffic today is caused by BitTorrent alone!The world’s population is around 6.5 billion out of which 1.115 billion have access to the internet. 35% of 1.115 billion is 390.25 million people. The total internet users indulging in file sharing constitute a larger number of users than 390.25 million since BitTorrent is just one of the ways for file sharing. If you are providing web hosting services or running a popular website, imagine a healthy percentage of more than 400 to 600 million (a rather conservative estimate) hits in a short period of time. Welcome to the world of DDOS (Distributed Denial Of Service) attacks!
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