₦airaland Forum

would you kindly try and read the earlier posts before jumping to wrong conclusions?

am not talking about your Linux prowess am talking about your digital camera issue, you said you want to confirm, this means you are not so sure.

Vista, the name reminds me of Mamman Vasta, i hope those Redmond guys are not gearing up for a coup. Anyway, Penguin Green Berets are ready to counter any insurgence from the Goliath.

Well entrepreneur's in the house, this is a very potential area, don't you think?

How many people will be willing to pay for this service, we Nigerians like free stuffs and that's why our image is well dented on the Net. Also the infrastructures that will need to be put in place will gulp a whole lot of money.

And for Christ sake how many of the company directors will want their dealings/down-low to be revealed. Getting these information is going to be very hard since most of the people running/own these companies have bad records and are mostly after how they can enrich themselves over night.

by the way Joseph, went to jail if i am not mistaken

That was the price he paid for not sleeping with that bitch, so maybe this guy may have to shelve travelling abroad too. Him fit make am for Nigeria too.

Big multinationals will hardly give their stuffs (most expecially their websites) to a local company. Reasons is that a website is their face in the Information age, if they get a badly designed/manged website they are in for a big trouble, can you imagine what will happen if microsoft.com, symantec.com, cisco.com are hacked. When you also look at the security side of most of these Nigerian designed website you will know they are lax, when you peruse the codes you will laugh and laugh. Even on MTN website, they used to lift codes before.

Nigerian so called webmasters need to get their acts together, those guys that designed vmobiles website did a helluvajob there.

we have what it takes to excel in such areas as call centre outsourcing and many others high tech areas

@okoegwale, am never against the deployment of fibre optics in Nigeria, i know some solutions like VOIP, VPN, IPTV etc can't be deployed over VSAT right now. What am saying in essence is that can the money to be expended on deploying fibre optic infrastructure is it justifiable with the ROI.

It's deployment is based on telcos, like in any other businesses they have to do their home work very well before proceeding, caution is the watchword here.

In the are of outsourcing how viable is the market nowadays, i hope you know the wrangling that's going on on it in the US congress, the general populate too are not happy with the ways foreigners are taking over their jobs. And when you put the Nigerian factor in the mix, which company will like to outsource their support department to a Nigerian company.

If you are an investor in this field you will know all am talking about.

New virus trick

---

From: helpdesk@tellumat.com  Add to Address Book
To: joftech@yahoo.com
Subject: Re: Order
Date: Thu, 25 Aug 2005 13:05:21 +0530

Thanks!

+++ Attachment: No Virus found
+++ MessageLabs AntiVirus - www.messagelabs.com

Attachments
Attachment scanning provided by:

Files:
all_in_all_newsfeed.zip (31k) Save to Computer - Save to Yahoo! Briefcase
Delete Reply Forward Not Spam Move...
Previous | Next | Back to Messages www.messagelabs.com
Save

---

The above message from my mailbox is a virus (Netsky). I doubted the message - I know a virus when I see one - but I still proceeded to open it and lo and behold Yahoo Mail was smart enough to detect it. It's a zip file and it was purported to have been scanned by "messagelabs". Can anyone see the ingenuity of this nicely crafted e-mail?

Now I have to block the downloading of zip files on my gateway; I only used to block exe, dll, cab, shb, vbs, etc before.

Like my security paradigm whether you know the sender or not think twice and be prepared before you open.

@Kazey, Nigeria need to move on, but the problem is that what is obtainable in Asia is no available here. Am sure most of the town and cities overthere are well laid out with proper town & regional plans. But here people build houses any how, also most residential houses in Asia a apartment building, so when a telco setup a distribution point to an apartment, they are able to reach as many subscribers as possible. Even in the USA Fibre optics penetration is not as much as what you have in Asia, this is due to the same reason of residential plans, since most people live in detached houses and not apartments.

When we talk about number of willing users too, how many people do you think can afford a PC not to talk about paying a montly fee for internet access in their homes. For any operator to think about running cables about, they must be sure about the potentials of having a huge customer base. If they have small subscribers the price will just be way to high in order to make up for the small number.

I own an Internet cafe here in Nigeria, and i know how much i pay monthly on bandwidth just for a VSAT link, i have also done my research on the fibre option too and the plan can't just pan out right now. The best option for a country like Nigeria is wireless connectivity, we all know how NITEL and NEPA installations are constantly been vandalised, when people get to know about how expensive fibre optics cables are, i won't be surprised to be seen roads been dug up overnight.

The only viale option right now is WIMAX, that's a better and more promising tech than fibre for Nigeria right now. Business is all about reality, what is working for others overthere may not work here. I will be a fool to go and invest in fibre connectivity right now.

One thing is this, certification does not mean you are well groomed in networking, a career in networking build on certification is nothing but a top down approach.

You need to know your onions first, once you are confident about you hand-on skills you can then proceed for certification. Cisco and MS know this and that's why the test questions in these exams bring your real world experience into the limelight, if you don't know the inner workings of these technologies and you are faced with questions that you have not come across before you are bound to melt like an ice in the Sahara.

Get the hand-on knowledge by working in companies that have these equipments first, but am not sure anyone of them will be willing to employ someone without certification, so this is a caught 22 situation.

All the same i wish you the best.

Any recommendations on Digital camera working with Linux? Looking at getting one today or tomorrow.

jogego, it seems you are still one of those doubting thomases, 90% of mainstream hardwares supported by windows are supported by Linux. Just make sure you get a distro with fairly recent kernel (2.4 >. Mandrake has good support for all these devices too. Just make sure you get a mainstream digital camera.

The first laptop I bought was a Toshiba. That was while I was in NIgeria. It was brand new and from day 1 I saw grief. It came with Win ME and not until I installed windows 2000 and later win XP on it before I had any sanity. That said, I don't know anyone who has used one without grumbling about it.

jogego, you are are talking about the software that was installed on it, if the software is bad, the pc is as good as useless. And who does not know that Win 95, 98 & Me are pieces of hacked up solutions by M$.

Give Linux a spin today!

Thank God finally Nigeria has fiber optics connectivity on her shore. But I want some people that maybe want to jump for fiber access to proceed with caution. There are many issues that you may need to put into consideration before taking the plunge.

The major and only advantage that fiber optic access have over VSAT is in the issue of latency. Latency arises in VSAT network as a result of the following: signals from satellites in orbit reach VSAT antennas after traveling 23,000 miles this causes some delay in getting a signal to a from a satellite in orbit, other causes are delays at routers and other connectivity devices on your way to a particular resource(s) on the Internet.

Except for the delay from the satellite in orbit there is little or no other delay that fiber access does not have to go through also.

If a VSAT network is well designed from the ground up, people using the a VSAT to browse the internet will notice little or no delay since the delay we are talking about here is in microseconds(ms). But if you have a badly designed network you get problem. In order to augment for this delay, VSAT service providers has been using features like TCP acceleration and caching techniques to boost web page delivery.

If you have a VSAT and fiber network that has very badly configured routers there’s bound to be a great problem.  A flapping or congested route will increase your ping time no matter your access connection type. So you have to put this things into consideration too.

Fiber optics cables are also prone to damage, and fixing them cost millions of dollars and it also takes a lot of time. Consider the recent outage in Pakistan: they had to reroute their connection to the outside world through VSAT.

Another major thing is the hefty price for bandwidth.  My brother, it's no child's play, and there is no way the price will ever come down.  Do some research on how much it cost the consortium to build the fiber network and how much it's costing them to maintain the network annually.

VSAT on the other hand is maturing and most of the operators have recoup their investments and they have large and growing subscribers which means bandwidth price will soon be tumbling down, unlike the SAT-3.

Send in your comments and lets rub heads together on this.

One thing about 419 is that it has been since time immemorial, it's just that some sharp guys just decide to exploit the Internet to get a "wider reach".

People have been complaining about Nigerian 419ers how about computer hackers in the US and elsewhere. They are even worst than these so called 419ers, to the best of my knowledge, Nigerians don't hack networks, the reason is simple, they don't have the knowledge, most of the so called "yahoo boys" know little or nothing about IT and the Internet. It's only that they are just using the internet to be more international in the outlook, internally here in Nigeria, 419ers have been operating for years, and we all know that if you are not credulous you will never be their victim. Same goes for anyone around the world too.

If you get an offer from anyone, confirm from your Local Chamber of Commerce and see if you can confirm the business deal from your embassy/high commision here in Nigeria too.

Remember if you see big figures in a business proposal / e-mail from nowhere Proceed with caution.

The major cause of unemployement in Nigeria is basically what i see as the over population of job seekers. A medium Nigerian educated family consists of 4 children when you put the parent in the mix you get 6 people. Most of the children were groomed to become Doctors, Lawyer, Nurse, Accountant, Engineers etc. Non are ever groomed be competitive, and we want our children to be conformist, if anyone of them rebel that he want to start a business we see him/her as a loser. The reason is simple parents want their children in official cars with AC, not a struggling entrepreneur.

Until the parents and youths of Nigeria can have a rethink/rebirth of their view about white and blue collar jobs, Nigeria will continue to grapple with the issue of unemployment.

And now since people have begun to realise that the jobs are no longer there, they have started doing some SME. Nigerian graduates must also try to get their hand dirty, and stop seeing people that are doing some SME as illiterates, if they can apply what they have learned "if any" in school, they can make their own SME to be a role model for others to emulate.

One last thing about Opera is the inbuilt RSS support, it's just dam too good. I have Nairaland on my RSS list now, so no separate RSS reader.

I have tried most of the available browsers am yet to find any that's as good as Opera. The following are one of the basic reasons why i like it so much:

1.) You can save your session, this enables you to continue from where you stop whithout needing to have many bookmarked sites.
2.) The tabbed browsing is not rivaled.
3.) It's super-fast and i can even get to see how my Internet link is going through the progress bar.
4.) I get to use some nice skins too.
5.) Automatic saving of sessions, this is really helpful when you use NEPA without UPS.

So Seun can u beat that. Though Firefox is the flagship of open source but i will rather go with Opera. The only drawback i have found with Opera so far is the Java thing, and i don't really give a fuss about that again since most interactive sites are now using Flash.

If this is true, ol boy make u run o. Don't you know that step-moms don't want anything good for their rivals children. And besides you are a boy/man, if you do it forget about travelling and ol boy she fit go use your "thing" do juju sef, so even if you travel sef na so so suffer suffer.

Just tell her to go to hell and make play your game like Joseph.

I have done some research on all the companies purporting to be offering credit cards in Nigeria, a lo and behold their names are not on the list of approved credit card issuer by some of the credit card companies they claimed to represent. Can somebody pls clarify these issues pls.

Who does not know that banks in Nigeria are one of the biggest fraudster.

Wise people would have love to invest in Nigerian companies but when you look at what is available you will have to Proceed with Caution.

Some vital information that investors need to be able to make good tradings on the stock exchanges are just not there.

Unlike in the US where you can get the down low on companies through EDGAR and some other tools, the Nigerian Stock Exchange does not have anything close to that. If i want to know if there is any heavy insider trading going on in any US company i can easily do that with the click of a mouse, but how do i do that on a company in Nigeria. Most of the data and information on the Nigerian Stock Exchange website are not up to the minute, so how does one make informed judgement about a company's health.

I as a person i don't believe one should just buy some stock and wait for dividends at the end of the year, you have to be actively trading in order to shore-up your investment portfolio.

I think the NIGERIAN STOCK EXCHANGE and NIGERIAN SECURITIES AND EXCHANGE COMMISSION should try and do better in these respect so as to make core information on publicly traded companies on the floor more public.

Kazey, now i know you don't really know what is obtainable here in Nigeria today, is it just so easy to get a job in bank in Nigeria these days.

So how does one without some skills get a job. Recently Mr. Biggs opened a new branch close to my town. I don't know if you will believe this, 2000 candidates appllied for just 2 slots; All of them graduates. So where does one without some skills stand. An ordinary Nigerian university education today in Nigeria does not guarantee a job, it's only a visa to nowhere.

An in been an entrepreneur, you have to make some nice sacrifices, I think you should read more on what Bill Gates went through when he was in New Mexico, a boy from a rich home sleeping in a cramped office. That’s part of the sacrifice he has to make to bring Microsoft to the world.

There is a guy in Michael le Boeuf’s “The millionaire in you” he could not “afford” cable TV in his home, and even have to watch the stock quotes in the evening in a neighbors house. He died with millions in his investment portfolio, and he did not even have Cable TV. He made a sacrifice there, or do you think he did not have one because he can’t afford it.

"But that should not be an excuse to run away from education, or even deny yourself the comfort of life." - kazey (m)

Kazey, is like you are getting me wrong, am not saying education is not good, am talking about education in Nigerian parlance, and if you are in Nigeria today you should know what am talking about.

Of what use is a degree holder in computer science that can't code a functional simple program.

Before finishing my secondary education I have always been saying it that I will not attend any Nigerian tertiary institution, and I hope anyone reasonable enough should be able to catch my drift.

Anyway while still at school I don’t used to attend classes “normally”, I only go to the library to read encyclopedias and books about/on computing and anything related because I consider normal subjects as too boring.  I enroll at a computer after the first week of finishing my WAEC exam. Couple with my knowledge on reading about computers, I was soon on my feet in the IT world when my mates where still grappling with NECO, WAEC and JAMB.

After some time I found myself working in an Internet cafe, this really opens my eyes to the potentials of the Internet. Because the Internet is the biggest University, Library, Church, Mosque, Market, Bank and Research facility anyone can ever wish for.

While working my mates think I don’t have any better things to do with my life since am not making attempt to get to the university like them.  But since they don’t know what I know I only used to pity them, because what you only get from the university is a piece of paper “certificate” which certify that you are learned, but me I get proper education by properly harnessing the power of the Internet to my own advantage.

And since I don’t pray to work for/under anybody in my life, am yet to see a reason why I need a “certificate” from a university yet.

So for anyone that want to be an entrepreneur you must have the inbuilt willingness to work for yourself and not under anybody, because what powers an entrepreneur is the willingness to take risks, these risks include letting go of some things like a university education, comforts and enjoyment and many other things.

One must know that the world over there is nothing like having a smooth start in any business. Even people that have endless Venture Capitalists (VCs), you still have to pay your dues. So in Nigeria too, you must be ready to pay the price. Because when there’s no pain there’s no gain.

The only thing is that for the government to improve the IT sector in Nigeria, she should improve on the area of power generation and supply, this will really bring out the best of the IT potentials in Nigerians.