Computing In Poorer Countries!

Computing In Poorer  Countries,

Here we are 12 years since all the computers in the World were suppose to stop working.....

The year that Microsoft created 2,000 OS or so I am told, and all the nuclear arms in the world were to launch themselves destroying the earth's population.

According some news stories in 1999 due to MAJOR COMPUTER MAL-IF-FUNK-TIONS!!!!!

The cause the motherboards internal clock was not programed to go beyond 1999 according to thinking of the time but they rolled over into 2000 on their own as the earth was saved at least that is the story as I remember it. Now most people don't even remember how the world nearly came to an end.

We had the Fireworks in every country in the world and nothing eventful happened and the world was at peace for a day.

All 747 airplane's would fall out of the sky as they are the first commercial aircraft to be fly by wire designed to take off and land by auto pilot not human hands 1968 computers did this. (Bet you didn't know that; one of the perks of being an airplane buff and Private pilot)

So what has happened in the world of computers well we have 8 core processors from both AMD and Intel for a large price. Intel now has a new processor called 2011 (Really don't know why I am still building computers with 775 socket motherboards; though processors are getting harder to find for these boards, as are the boards.)

We have now newer versions of processors for the 1155 series which are only 2 years old and near the cost of the old 775 processors in many of the old favorites. A little more expensive but the price of fuel for the ships that travel across the seas to the manufacturing plants has increased 50% in the last 2 years.

The world economy in on the skids and the rich just keep getting richer world wide not just here in America, so you ask what does this have to do with Computing in Poorer Countries well everything.

I am going to use one of the poorest countries in Asia to example this in this post the Philippines. To give you some background I have been there several times, my wife was from what many of us revere to as P.I. so I will use this form in future reference during this post.

In the P.I. the most popular subject to take on a collage level is Computer Science that is if you are able to go to collage only about 5 % of each high school graduating class gets to at the expense of the government which award a full scholarship to the top 5 students in every high school public and private.

The population is fanatical about 3 things Basketball the national sport, Cell Phones or should I say text phones as no one there talks on their phones they text while eating, singing, dancing, in the CR yes the CR or COMFORT ROOM as it is called in the P.I. the restroom to us Americans.

Sometimes in their sleep you can hear texting not snoring.

Why not for 10 pesos we can get a load for just texting and text for 24 hours non stop from Smart Brothers or Globe wireless providers.

Third thing Computers.

For computing there hundreds of Internet cafes all around the country even where there is nothing but rice farms and if your Smart Brothers wireless broadband router can receive a strong enough signal you can set up an Internet cafe 10 /15 kilometers from the nearest town 4 computers but at what cost, you see computer parts at retail stores in the P.I. are the same price as here in the states from the big 3 suppliers New Egg, Tiger Direct, Directron, and hundreds of other computer parts outlets in this country.

There are several computer manufacturing companies in the P.I. most laptops are made there some are imported Sony and Acer, these companies may have factories there. I have a CD ROM that is made in the P.I., that I took out of some computer it still works or is it a floppy drive, oh well.

How do I know, I have been there and as I have a great interest in computers, which is why I have this blog; I have priced the local inventory in relation to U.S. dollars.

I set up my niece with her own Internet cafe which is also a small store in the northern part of the main island of the P.I. Luzon in the land of the Ilacano as it is referred to as that is what the people who live there are called. I also taught her computer repair and provided her the books that I used to learn what I know about repair, building and installing, Operating Systems weather, Windows or Linux /Unix distro.

With her Computer Science degree I hope she will do well. Without my help she would not have that source of income to go along with  the family's small store and her Load Business, that she sell broad band and cell phone loads to all of her neighbors who are farmers, police officers, owners of other Internet cafes, construction workers, fishermen, students, and all around hard working people that have an average monthly earning of 1,000 pesos or $22.00 in the farming area where she lives.

My sister-in-law's store earns about 500 pesos a day at around 20% profit, their farm land yield around 30% if a typhoon does not destroy the rice crops days before harvest time so they have a little better income and my brother-in-law drives a motorbike with a side car that is a taxi, has done so for years and does odd jobs in addition to his farming. The few tools I bought him over the years, the electric drill 1/2 " chuck and a $90.00 welding machine made him a big man with his neighbors.

When I was visiting in 2006 my niece had 2 computers, both she received from the government as part of her educational scholarship, one had windows 95 and a old 20 pin power plug on the MB, the other had a 24 pin plug and had windows XP home.

Neither were working good thing Carmencita and and her son Brian came up from Caviti ( I hope I spelled that right) for a visit now Carmencita had been a Computer Programmer for the National Government in her younger years before quiting to raise her 2 sons.

Her oldest son Brian started fooling with all the old computers he could dig out of the garbage cans and became a self taught computer tech, in high school he was repairing all the computers in school. With a 4.0 grade average he earned his scholarship and was working at the time for a major business in the P.I. earning 10,000 pesos a month and working on his Engineering Degree.

In short Brian took the computers apart pulled out all of the electrical connector to the MB replaced them 3 times then pulled the memory cards asked for a pencil with an eraser cleaned the grime off the gold plated contacts on the chips reseated them 3 times plugged in the computers which booted ran some DOS commands for self test and both computers worked again.

Said to me for a friend that is 60 pesos for a business 6,000p; when I get tired of doing my work and want to take a break I tell my boss that the computer need to be reformatted which really doesn't  and it will take 10 hours all I do is defragment it and he does not really know what I am doing so I go spend time with my girlfriends. Age 21 at the time and already had a degree in Computer Science doing computer programing and repair in the IT department.

Which got me to thinking "I got to learn how to fix these things myself".


As this is starting to get a bit long in the tooth I will stop here and continue with part 2 at a later time.