NComputing

The recent global economic recession has compelled companies to cut down on their operating costs. Most multi-national companies like General Motors (GM), Toyota, Volkwagen, and so on had to close some of their plants or lay-off a number of workers. Small and medium enterprises had to pull back on their expansion or modernisation plans. However, the use of computers in the daily operations of a business could not be sidelined since it has become such an integral part of business activities. Be it in communication amongst the staff, control of huge machinery in a factory, monitoring a plant using security cameras, advertising on the Internet, keeping financial records and doing research on new products in the market, computers in have become inevitable in business operations.

One way of reducing the cost of business computing ,in this hard economic times, is by the use of a recent technology known as N- Computing. Today's computers are so powerful that the vast majority of applications only use a small fraction of the computer's capacity. Modern desktop computers sit idle while we check our e-mail, surf the web, or type a document. N-Computing technology taps the unused capacity so that it can be simultaneously shared by many users. Each user connects to the shared PC through an access device. The access device has no CPU, memory, or moving parts—so it is rugged, durable, and easy to deploy and maintain.
An example of an N-Computing product is the Userful Multiplier. It takes 1 ordinary desktop computer and turns it into 10. Just install the Linux-based software, add monitors, keyboards and mice - and you can support up to 10 independent users at the same time on a single computer. Userful Multiplier is a good solution for many industries that require to cut down of operations cost. Another example is the L-series from 'Ncomputing Ltd'. This is ideal if your users need to be more than 10 meters away from the shared computer. The L-series connects across a standard Ethernet local-area network, that is, by connecting via a switch or router. Users just snap into place and can be just about as far away from the shared computer as you like. As illustrated by these two examples, there are many products in the market that would suite your business needs.
This technology also has other areas of application. For instance, in education, it can be used to lower the cost of setting up a computer laboratory. Digital Solidarity Fund (DSF) from Switzerland has been using this technology to broaden the
scope of computer access in developing countries.
“NComputing offers huge potential to expand the reach of computer access
in developing nations,” says Mehdy Davary, director of DSF. “Even refurbished
computers can become expensive, not to mention the costs of keeping them
running. NComputing access devices require almost no maintenance and
that’s a huge plus.”

Role of Closed Source Software

Closed Source Software (CSS) has been the benchmark of software development for many years. Microsoft, for instance, has been used in training institutions to teach computer literacy programs. In the recent years, the advent of Open Source Software (OSS) has changed that position, especially in the emerging economies. OSS provides a cheaper means to an end. Many servers run on Linux and UNIX operating systems that require no or less expensive licenses.

However, CSS still has a major role to play in the ICT world. In fact, CSS and OSS can co-exist harmoniously and develop superior products. One good example is the Cisco Call Unified Manger that runs on a Linux box. This means that the service is cheaper thus affordable, though one has to pay for the Cisco software. Imagine Cisco had their own server to run the software; it would have been beyond reach in cost. Just to paint the picture, a single Unified Communications site requires 7 call manager servers. Thus an increase in server cost by say $200 leads to $1,400 increase in cost i.e. Shs.112, 000 per site.

Usually, CSS has resources to vet and troubleshoot projects that can eventually be packaged into products for the market. Some of these projects start as OSS projects and sometimes companies are formed around them. OSS encourages innovation, where developers come together to exchange ideas.

The Internet

The Internet is probably one of the most remarkable of human beings' innovation. Most of the people still don't know what it is or how it works. Technically, its just transmission of data over a network of encoded channels from a digital source to a digital sink. Lots of scientific research has gone behind ensuring that the message sent is received as intended.

Now, lets understand how it works. The most synonymous term to the Internet is a computer. It is often the source and destination. Digital systems, like computers, work on a different number system from humans. For digital systems, its known as binary system while for humans its called decimal system. The decimal number system has ten symbols; 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 and 9. A binary number system, one the other hand, has simply two symbols; 0 and 1, called bits. Simple ,right? These two symbols are used to represent anything, I mean anything – numbers, letters, words, images, videos, symbols, voice and so on.

To understand how this happens, we start with an illustration. Using two binary bits, we can represent decimal numbers 0, 1, 2 and 3 as follows; 00 01 10 11. The right most bit is called the Least Significant Bit (LSB) while the left most bit is called Most Significant Bit (MSB). From the LSB to MSB each step corresponds to an increase of the power of 2 by one. Similarly, in decimal number system, each step means an increase of the the power of 10 by one - say 10 and 100 means and increase from 10¹ to 10² . You follow?

Take an example. John from Texas, USA wants to send a number 2 to Otieno in Kisumu. When he presses 2 on the keyboard, the computer encodes it into two binary bits - 10 (or other code depending on the standard in use). The two bits are processed, encapsulated with the Internet Protocol (IP) address of John's Internet Provider Mail Server, say Verizon (a Mail Server is a high capacity computer dedicated to storage and processing of e-mails). The Mail server detects the destination e-mail address and sends the message to a Mail Server, say Wananchi On-line, in Kenya via satellite or fiber optic cable (undersea cable). The Mail Server knows Otieno's e-mail address and put it in his Inbox. When Otieno opens his Inbox, the computer decodes the binary bits into 2 for display on the monitor.

In practice the American Standard Code for Information Interchange (ASCII) code is used to represent any sort of information for transmission. The ASCII character table contains various translations from binary to character or decimal. For example, a decimal number 10 is converted into 00001010 and a character C is converted into 0101001. Its a bit complicated to represent images, voice and video - sampling and quantization techniques are used to do this.

Despite the type of information being sent, the basics in transmission are the same. There are differences where information requires encryption, compression and error correction. For instance; if a message is secret password then its encrypted for anyone else not to see it ,if its a video then its compressed to reduce on bandwidth requirements. If its a synchronization message, error detection flags are incorporated ,if an error is detected then error correction is carried out or retransmission of the message requested.