Any users of Research In Motion’s Blackberry smart phones will surely relate to the title of this week’s piece; an outage that started off in Europe before spreading to Africa, the Middle East and North America (on and off) left many unable to access Blackberry services. MTN Rwanda was no exception and social networks could not have gauged the bitter taste in people’s mouth’s any better! But for all the animosity RIM is receiving for this outage, maybe Blackberry owners should look on the bright side: given the amount of sensitive business information you send on your emails, one can say with conviction that Blackberry is a safe bet.
Any users of Research In Motion’s Blackberry smart phones will surely relate to the title of this week’s piece; an outage that started off in Europe before spreading to Africa, the Middle East and North America (on and off) left many unable to access Blackberry services.
MTN Rwanda was no exception and social networks could not have gauged the bitter taste in people’s mouth’s any better! But for all the animosity RIM is receiving for this outage, maybe Blackberry owners should look on the bright side: given the amount of sensitive business information you send on your emails, one can say with conviction that Blackberry is a safe bet.
RIM handles message encryption on its own servers and that means unlike say, Android-operated phones, your phone is not vulnerable to attack or malware. However, that also means that when those servers go down-as they did last week-with them go your access to some services.
At the end of the day, your Blackberry is a reliable, secure phone (if that makes you feel any better about not making lunch plans on BBM all week!)
So, Apple released its new iPhone this week-the iPhone 4S; the verdict is not yet out on how ground breaking this upgrade is but it’s added feature of a talking personal assistant named Siri (seriously Apple?) seems to be the only hype about this new phone so far.
In other news, the Father of C programming language, Dennis Ritchie passed away after battling a long illness; Ritchie used C programming language to build the UNIX operating system that so much of the worldwide web is built on; most of the content on the web uses C and UNIX as well as any Apple products you might own which run on an operating systems underpinned by UNIX. May He Rest In peace.
The tech gossip world is abuzz with what was supposed to be an internal memo at Google but was posted publicly on their social network (Google+) by an engineer ranting about his dissatisfaction with Google+; the engineer blamed Google for failing to share the programming platform with developers, as is the case with Facebook.
This comes after news that traffic on Google+ has gone down 60% since September. A pat on the back Mr. Zuckerberg!
Closer to home, junior-level students all over Rwanda will soon have access to e-learning; the iSlate tablet to be introduced in Rwanda in partnership with Rice University, will enhance the learning process and expose students to state-of-the art technology early in their academic career.It will be able to run on solar power and will not require Internet connection hence making it conducive for use in rural parts of the country. I cannot contain my excitement as this is in addition to the One Laptop Per Child Programme currently in place.