Based on the claim of 4% of 4GB (i.e: 160MB) in 2h, upload speed was ~180 kb/sec. Which is only marginally slower than what passes for broadband in lots of rural Canada (i.e.: Bell Alliant's best offering is 640k/s upload speed for a DSL, in very limited locale, they have 50+ Mbps upload fibre but coverage is tiny.)
I was working at a university in rural Kenya for a while, and remember getting 4mb/s download speeds. This was kind of disconcerting, as the total bandwidth for the university was about twice that! The university networks were difficult for students to get access to, and the faculty and admins had little experience with using it. Additionally, super high prices for mobile internet meant people watch their data usage very closely, and are less likely to explore and discover new content sources.
This was the main idea behind the South African nukes as well. If memory serves, the country had only 6 nuclear warheads, but they were never meant to be anything but a deterrent (and probably a display of power and capability).
In South Africa, Pascal and Delphi are still taught in schools... In fact, the University of South Africa actually has about 2 Delphi semester modules also, along with C++.
Some schools have switched over to Java, and most other universities have jumped onto the Java/.NET bandwagon.
So in a nutshell, I think it's still pretty prevalent in 3rd world countries. It's not a bad starting language to introduce students to programming concepts, although I would prefer Python for a first language.
I agree. When learning to program, one should first learn the mental activity oc solving problems with code. Then maybe learn all the boilerplate and BS associated with a language like Java. Pascal is simple enough that students can learn fundamentals first. Same with industrial BASIC. Both are like pseudocode.
Many people are turned off to programming encountering Java, C++, etc because they think programming is inherently that difficult.
I remember there used to exist a South African magazine about game development in Turbo/Free Pascal and Delphi.
It is quite nice that those universities still teach it, as that way at least those students will learn that C and C++ aren't the only way of doing systems programming.
Most South Africans are multilingual, and English is commonly used (especially in urban areas. Rural tend to skew Afrikaans). "English is South Africa's lingua franca, and the primary language of government, business, and commerce"[1]
However, only 9.6% of the population use English as their first ('home') language. Zulu has the highest proportion with 22.7%
I don't think Stallman would submit his work for a PhD, mainly because one's PhD work becomes the property of the university. It's against everything he stands for.
> Who holds ownership of the copyright to my thesis?
> In most cases the Institute will hold ownership of the copyright to a thesis. In general, students may retain ownership of thesis copyrights when the only form of support is from (1) teaching assistantships (the duties of which do not include research activities) and (2) NSF and NIH traineeships and fellowships (although the trainee or fellow may be required to grant certain publishing rights to NSF or NIH). See the current Specifications for Thesis Preparation for more details.
> Students may request a waiver of the Institute’s copyrights by written application to the Institute’s Technology Licensing Office (NE25-230).
> You may choose either open access or traditional publishing. If you choose Open Access Publishing, the published version of your dissertation or thesis will always be available for free download to anyone who has access to the Internet. The Traditional Publishing option works on a standard copy-sales and royalty-payments model. We sell copies of your work (in any format) and pay royalties as described in the Publishing Agreement. Either option gets your graduate research out where other scholars can find and use it through the ProQuest® Dissertations and Theses (PQDT) database, subscribed to by more than 3000 libraries worldwide.
Stallman has an honorary degree from the University of Glasgow. Pulling up the first PhD thesis from http://theses.gla.ac.uk/cgi/latest I see "Copyright and moral rights for this thesis are retained by the author." The same is true from the couple of other theses I looked at.
He also has an honorary degree from Sweden's Royal Institute of Technology. I pulled up three PhD thesis from http://www.kth.se/en/ict/forskning/ickretsar/publikationer/r... . Two of them had a copyright statement by the PhD candidate, one had no explicit statement.
So it's not the case that thesis copyright transfer is a major issue preventing Stallman from getting a PhD.
So what you're saying is that Stallman doesn't like the way in which universities work -- so he gets to make his own rules, and claim that he's equivalent to someone who did play by the rules?
I defended my dissertation, and then spent another six weeks editing and revising it in order to be accepted by my advisor and committee. If I hadn't spent those six weeks editing, and declared that their rules were unfair, and stopped right there, then it would be dishonest to say that I had finished my PhD. (And I should note that six weeks of editing is very little compared to what I've heard other people do.)
If you say that you have a PhD, you're saying that you followed the rules at an institution. Stallman is an impressive person by any measure, but he hasn't followed those rules, and is thus being disingenuous to use the title.
For anyone interested: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/8248056.stm