Posts by ChrisStephenson

Why is technology uptake so slow in "The West"?

I guess Australia counts as "the west".

I live in Turkey. My ATM lets me withdraw and deposit 3 currencies (Turkish Lira, Euro, Dollar). True, I can only withdraw *coins* in local currency. Deposits have been "without an envelope" for so long I can't remember when it started. And the money is credited to my account immediately, not next day. So I can put in a hard-to-change 200TL note and get change. I can use the machine without a card, for many operations, verifying by mobile phone. I can pay a bill (even my friend's electricity bill) in cash and get change to the last cent. I can send money to someone without a bank account (they need a mobile phone - but everyone here has one)

An interbank money transfer takes around 30 seconds, and shows up in the recipients bank account (depending on bank) maybe ten minutes, maybe a couple of hours later. All ATMs accept all banks' cards (requirement imposed by the Central Bank - there is a fee). In the UK they are just starting "fast" bank transfers that take only a day. Still many transfer take *three days*.

Turkey's Central Bank, by the way, is a near to 100% Free Software operation. Even the desktops are Linux.

ATMs are not only located in bank branches. Local councils set up ATM parks in convenient street spaces and rent out slots in them to banks. This keeps the queues down.

The ATM machines (and the Central Bank's interbank system) are made by the usual manufacturers. So machines that can do all this are available worldwide. The interesting question is why are these facilities not used in what you might expect to be more "advanced" economies?

It's an ill wind...

The real story is the money that is being made from advertising on proxies that have enabled every savvy Turkish youngster to keep on watching lady gaga videos. And you can't find anyone under 25 here who hasn't learnt what a DNS server is.

First the ban was implemented by taking Google URLs out of the default DNS servers and redirecting requests to a site controlled by the state. So everyone learnt to change their DNS server settings.

Then "they" started blocking Youtube (and, by accident, other Google sites) on an IP basis and redirecting those requests to a web site showing the court decision. Then proxies like vtunnel and ztunnel became popular. They have been taking a lot of Turkish advertising and making lorry loads of money. Check it out.

By the way the comments about Turkey on this list are mostly pretty ignorant and bordering on the racist. Yes, the Turkish state has an authoritarian and dictatorial tradition that dates back to 1923 and before. But there is very strong opposition from the people. And, ironically, it is the soft islamist government, elected in 2002, that started to open things up here, democratically. Youtube bans (and the other 4000 banned sites) are mostly the work of the "old" bureaucracy, opposed to the present government. And the soft islamist president has tweeted against the ban. Two prejudices knocked down in one tweet - the islamists are not anti-democracy and they are not anti-technology feudalsist.

This government, too, may also have its authoritarian ambitions. But the people of Turkey want their freedom and their web access. There are active campaigns and whenever they have the chance people turn out to vote for democratic changes.

The recent referendum on changes to the Turkish constitution was an example. There was an overwhelming (58%) vote for changes that will reduce the power of the judicial bureaucracy that does things like impose YouTube bans. And the size of the turnout in the vote would make any European politician's eyes water.

The people of Turkey are lively, pro-democracy, pro-freedom and enthusiastic users of technology. An inter bank money transfer here takes a few seconds and has done so for most of the twenty years I have lived here. In Blighty they are just getting around to reducing it below three days.

The people of Turkey don't have the state or the government they deserve, but I think that, too, is beginning to change. The people of Turkey deserve your support, not your contempt.

Chris Stephenson

The reality of Office suite use

1. Trying to watch the video: a typical experience to remind me what life was like when I used to use MS software. The video is in Sılverlight. I am redirected to download the Moonlight plug in from Novell. I have to restart Firefox. (ahh restarting to get things done, a friend of mine installed windows 7 on a Toshiba laptop last week - the install that comes bundled with the computer - and had to restart *54* times during the process). Then the moonlight plug in refuses to play the video. No error message, nothing, it just sits and stares at me.

Then I notice that there is a WMV download option. Click that and Totem (Linux movie player) picks it up and plays it without problems.

2. Excel macros. Designed to be incompatible. Not surprising OO has difficulty. But OO should try to fix it.

3. Office use. My own experience, in a University, where almost all computer using employees are graduates, is that totals in spreadsheets are *routinely* added up using a calculator, then entered in. Yesterday I got a budget spreadsheet in local currency, dollar and euro from our highly intelligent admin assistant. All the currency conversions had been done by hand. In MS Word, *nobody* outside the Computer Science department uses styles. We use OO and convert, if we need to send editable documents to MS addicts.

Yes normal MS Windows users should all use Wordpad. It does far more than they need.

4. Compatibility. True, Open Office cannot read my archived Word1.0 documents. Neither can any version of MS Word after 2.0. My Word 2.0 install diskettes have corrupted, so I now have to mine the text out of these documents and reformat if I need to read them. True Story follows.

Two naive computer user friends. A: "I cannot open that .docx you sent me". B: "Oh you have an old copy of Office, but that's easy. Just download OpenOffice, then you can read the document and convert it to .doc". As most home copies of Office (with MS implicit approval) are illegal copies - updateing to the latest version is hard.

5. Finally, yes, OO is a bloated beast, too. The time has come for different ways of doing these jobs. The average user is only using 1% of the features in these Office suites. Excel is often used simply as a *layout* tool (amazing but true).