Kenya's Harvest Of Old PCs

When Charles Ng'ang'a tills his land, one can assume that he's
not thinking about the Windows Vista "wow" factor or about the
translucency of the Aero interface. Nonetheless, the new operating system could
indirectly affect him and people like him.

Ng'ang'a's farm near Nakuru, a highland city in Kenya's
Rift Valley province, is as technologically innovative. While his western
counterparts take advantage of GPS-guided fertilizing and crop planning
software, he is using an older technology from a local weather station to help
hone his crops and keep his farm above the poverty line, a report in The
Guardian said.

In a country where 80% of the land is dry, the farming community
has always relied on government assistance. Ng'ang'a, eleven years ago,
decided to turn things around using hard numbers. He had been collecting his own
weather data for years and was working with professors at the local Egerton
University manually to analyze historical weather patterns.

Now, Kenya's central meteorological department hopes to see
weather analysis technologies spring-up across the country.

The Kenyan Meteorological Service has been channeling used
computers from the UK to its local weather stations.

The Nakuru station's modernization benefited Ng'ang'a, who
can now combine the data from the Nakuru station and hone it with his own. While
data processing on paper allowed him to map out different weather scenarios,
doing it on a computer now gives him better information, which lets him plant
different types of crops that don't rely so heavily on the rain.

But the question now arises as to what does Windows Vista got to
do with any of this? The demanding new operating system calls for the latest
machines and would crawl along on any of the old machines that is shipped from
the UK.

One could, therefore, either give it to someone else in the
house, sell it for peanuts online or channel it to someone like Ng'ang'a,
for whom any sort of processing power could mean the difference between a poor
or nonexistent crop and a successful one. That's one calculation that you don't
need a computer to do for you.