Category: Mauritius

Congrats Bruno Julie!

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Inf

Bruno Julie Punches!

As a fellow Mauritian, it is my duty to congratulate the Mauritian Magician (or the Creole Crusher, or The Dark Horse, …). He is a man of many nicknames, but with an undeniably powerful punch. Powerful enough to bring Mauritius it’s FIRST Olympic medal.

Bronze it is, but a medal is a medal. It’s value is no less. And this man got it! You have shown the entire world that Mauritius exists on the world map, no matter how small our island is.

The apparent hit below the belt, the controversial judge decision has prevented you from bringing us the Silver medal, but we know you would have won anyways. We know it. The commentators know it. For us, you won! It’s a good start. A very good start indeed!

So CONGRATULATIONS to

BRUNO JULIE!

NetPC, Low-cost AMDs, Asus Eee: Which one is best for me?

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Inf

A number of interesting developments occurred in a short time in Mauritius. Of these, the oldest was the introduction of the NetPC by Mauritius Telecom. Recently, the Minister of IT and Communications of Mauritius, Mr. Etienne Sinatambou announced that a deal was made with AMD (yes, the CPU maker) to provide low-cost computers to Mauritius at around Rs.10,000 a machine. Again, not bad.

The NetPC and the AMD initiative as I shall call it are good moves, but they each have their respective advantages and disadvantages, which you will learn in this post. You will also learn that there are other alternatives, which are either cheaper, or offer much more value for money at nearly the same price. Ready? Read on…

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Orange UK sees subscribers leave

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Inf

The Register has an article about Orange UK’s subscribers leaving it for other, more juicy ISP offers. Here’s the article:

Customers are continuing to desert Orange’s ADSL offerings, the firm’s results revealed today.

In the six months to 30 June 44,000 net broadband subscribers quit the firm, leaving it with 1.06 million. Orange said its UK broadband customer base was “levelling off”, but figures released in February showed that just 4,000 net subscribers were lost in the last three months of 2007. On its own numbers, Orange’s decline is accelerating.

Despite the toughening economic conditions, the rest of the big six ISPs have maintained the positive trend in their customer base as the market approaches saturation. Orange has claimed that its failure to capitalise on market growth is a deliberate strategy to allow it to sort out problems with its network.

Revenues for the UK Home Communication Services unit, which also includes fixed line voice telephony, fell 7.7 per cent. Much of the sales slide was due to the industry-wide decline in traditional home telephone usage. The proportion of margin-boosting unbundled ADSL lines rose from 23 per cent last year to 40 per cent, however.

I’m not very surprised though, considering the huge amounts of complaints made by Orange users in Mauritius.

Well, I hope that this “exodus” of subscribers as The Register termed it will influence the folks at Orange MU to offer some better services instead of low speed connections (megabit for the masses is a dream!) and weird capping and monitoring policies.

Comments please?

Jumpy start for UoM 2008 academic year

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Inf

Student Union\'s Interview

Cancelled Courses at UOM

Mismanaged Cafetaria

Hello readers! I found 3 interesting articles in Le Mauricien newspaper of today. Guess what? They all talk about UoM, our dear University of Mauritius. Two of the articles do not flatter UoM, and the third is the interview of Miss Aartee Beekharry, actual president of the Student Union.

I’m sorry for the lack of quality of the pictures, it’s due to the crappy quality of my camera. I couldn’t get the article about the management of Cafeteria due to the page layout. Quite a good article, try to read it.

Alright, so my point is this: University has not even started, and it’s already receiving criticism! This is rather humorous, considering all the claims of “we are ready” already said by UoM management. Now, I’m eager to see what will actually happen when all the students flock in on the 11th. Let’s see!

As students, many of my friends and myself are not too reassured as to how the management will cope with the increase in students. It was estimated to have around 40% increase, but not this article comes and says that courses are canceled due to… lack of students. Lol?

Canceling courses is an abomination. Many students work through their HSC years with a view of what they want to do at Uni, and just as they set foot in there, they find their course canceled. Their options? Go to another university locally, or go abroad and add to the brain-drain of Mauritius. What about their already-paid fees? Who knows…

Another comical issue. If you read the article, apparently UoM needs to wait for orientation day to know “how many students registered for a course”. Ok, I may agree that O-Day represents the actual number of students that will attend the course, not those that registered and went elsewhere. (“mass registrations to land one uni seat, UoM as backup” strategy) But it’s still weird. I wonder what the “not enough students” mean. What’s the minimum number of students for a class to run?

Next, the cafeteria issue. I gotta agree, cafet sucks. No truly! There is nothing for me to eat there! (I’m veg). I’m not even sure if the “pain au chocolat” is actually veg, even if it’s mentioned on the window-display thing. There is still some vegetable pickles and bread, but still nothing much. There are loads of French cakes, gotta admit, but I doubt anybody will have a lunch on French Cakes, are they? (Napolitan lunches… *drool*). They could at least provide some good, hot meals. This would mean less students eating at MIE cafet, and more at UoM cafet. Let’s wait and see.

Note that the article actually deals with how the cafeteria is actually managed, not what food is served. You will see mentions of how the caterer and the VC are “close together”, and some other matters. Note that the complaints were made by the SU “viva voce” as commented by Le Mauricien.

The last article is about SU president’s interview. Makes a good reading material if you want to know a bit about what student union was doing, is doing and will do. Nothing really detailed, but ok, you still have some more info about SU. Happy Birthday SU, 37 years huh? (old!)

That’s the end of this post. Drop us some comments please, specially UoM students.

DCL to introduce Wireless Internet in Mauritius

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Inf

DCLWireless

 

I found this interesting article in Le Mauricien today, and I thought I might share it with you folks, if ever you may have missed it.

As you can read, it’s about DCL (Data Communications Ltd.) introducing a wireless Internet connection here in Mauritius. Nothing surprising here, since you might say that Network Plus’ Nomad is already here.

Even I say the same thing, and we all know that whatever the ads may say, Nomad still has some problems in some regions of Mauritius. Can’t blame them if Mauritius is a mountainous country, and if wireless signals can’t go through mountains so well.

Due to the short length of the article, not much details are provided just yet. It appears to be long-range, but there are no details about the underlying technology, for example whether it’s WiMax or something like that.

What is mentioned is “haut débit” which I hope is better than the 256K and 512K that we currently have now (for users like me, megabit is out of price!). I wouldn’t mind a megabit, wireless connection if it’s fairly priced and uncapped (or high cap).

Another good thing. The creation of DCL Telecoms, so this could probably indicate the coming in of another ISP on the national market. DCL was already there, and it’s just that the company *might* dedicate more efforts to Internet now. This is just my opinion, huh! 😛

There is not much info now, so let’s wait and see what happens, and if ever the project can survive.

45% increase in students at UoM next year!

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Inf

This is the astounding news that the L’Express Newspaper reports today to us, starting with those lines as the article header.

L’UoM se propose d’accueillir 4 467 nouveaux étudiants, soit 1388 de plus que l’année dernière. Elle offrira par la même occasion davantage de formations : 23 licences supplémentaires et sept maîtrises de plus.

I’ve been at UoM for a year now, and my year 1 class had around 110 students. The labs were nearly packed full. The cafetaria could barely contain the crowd during peak hours. Common room was often so full that there were no chairs or tables, so students had to find somewhere else to hang out. Same goes for Raised Plaza.

Now, I see this article about a 45% increase in the number of students at UoM and I tell this to myself: “Are our decision-makers insane?”

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Budget 2008-2009: Points of Interest

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Inf

As you probably know, the 2008-2009 budget was presented today by Dr. Rama Sithanen. So for this post, I’ll be dissecting the budget to see what truly concerns students and people involved in IT in general. There are not many sections about these. According to me, if I had to resume the whole budget in one key phrase, it would be “The Poor’s Budget”. If you read the budget speech, available here, you will notice how many times the words “poor”, “needy” or “poverty” are mentioned! It’s just astounding!

So, Mr. Speaker Sir, I will now move on to dissecting the speech, and putting up the relevant sections, which according to me, are most relevant to the title. Of course, if you found anything worthy of being added or something that interests you in the speech, you can still post it via comments and I’ll add it here. Here goes:

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