Looks like that open letter from the guy at Mandriva, in which he lambasted Microsoft for stealing the contract, may have made a difference. Cool.

Dr. Nguye Matumba So-Sumi
Director,
Project 'Intel Classmate PC' Implementation
Babatunde office complex, Ikoyi,
Lagos, Nigeria.

E-mail: sosumi@hotmail.com

STRICTLY CONFIDENTIAL

Dear Sir/Madam/Tranny:
I take the utmost pleasure in writing to you on behalf of myself and my colleagues.
Your particulars were given to me by a deputy at the Secondary and Collegiate Mentorship (S.C.A.M) division of the Education Ministry, who happened to attend an induction ceremony of the World Father-Son Despotic Tyrant Teams Hall of Fame, recently held in your country. (BTW, congratulations!!! Georges H & W have now joined illustrious company such as: Hafez & Bashir Assad, Kim Il-Sung & Kim Jong-Il, Papa & Baby Docs Duvalier. Luckily for the Georges there were no stringent IQ requirements in place.)

I am endeavoring to seek a confidential cooperation with you in the execution of the deal described hereunder for the benefit of all parties; and hope you will keep it top secret:
as you may have already read in the press, there are projects underway to supply the world's neediest children each with an inexpensive laptop computer. And as you may already have also read, there is a fierce competition under way over which Operating System will be preinstalled-- leading Microsoft to pay us(under the table, of course) the sum of Fourty-one Million, Eight Hundred Thousand U.S Dollars (US$41,800,000.00) in order to be designated the exclusive sole Operating System(Windows) provider.
However, at the very last minute, our Minister of Education disallowed Microsoft-- due to its very bad reputation and numerous legal problems the world over.

Fortunately for us(and unfortunately for Microsoft-- ho, ho, ho... merry new year to them!), Microsoft has no realistic recourse to recover this secret, illicit payment... which anyhow was quite an insignificant drop out of their kazillion cash reserves bucket.
However, to folks like you and I, this payment is not at all insignificant-- consequently, we now need to transfer aforementioned funds abroad; although of course, with the assistance and cooperation of a foreign company and/or reliable foreign individual / non-company account to receive the stated funds on our behalf.
We would need your approval to remit by Telegraphic Transfer (T.T.) to any foreign account you will provide-- a good company's account, or actually, any other offshore bank account. Thusly, we are seeking your assistance in swapping of account numbers, changing of beneficiary & co-signer, as well as other necessary forms of documentation.
These processes have been internally arranged with all my other colleagues involved, thusly I have been granted their collective authority to propose that-- should you be willing to assist us in the transaction-- your share of the sum will be 31% of the US$41.8Million, 62% for us and 7% for miscellaneous expenses such as transfer fees, unforeseen last-minute palm greasing, etc.

The business deal itself is 100% safe, provided you treat it with the utmost confidentiality.
I hereby repose my confidence in you, and hope that you will not disappoint me. You can communicate with me through my e-mail address above.

Yours faithfully and awaiting your anticipated co-operation,

Dr. Nguye Matumba So-Sumi.

STRICTLY CONFIDENTIAL

It is amazing how people think that because they have "Dr." or "PHD" before or after their name that they should be taken more seriously and deemed intelligent. However, the opposite happens most of the time.

Surely, someone I would not want to do business with, whether individually or a country. Furthermore, this demonstrates just how corrupt these governments are, and can be.

athome, did you somehow miss the joke?

afraid they will be caught.

I see this as a loss for the rest of the world, as the Nigerians need to be victims of the scammers and malware that comes from them too.

I mean, it's all about equality and freedom, man!

Linux supporting more hardware then Windows, thats a joke.

It is only a joke to M$ drones who know nothing about computers.

I didn't realize *nix users had such a funny sense of humour

In the very least, it looks like Linux has superior spell-checkers though.

I guess M$ did not bribe high enough in the food chain? Lesson learned for next time. I have little hope this "change" will stick.

In the end, what is best for Nigeria is Linux, no single vendor lock in, no proprietary formats and protocols, and a more secure OS that supports _more_ hardware than Windows.

It only supports more hardware IF you want to compile the drivers on your own, the average user doesn't want to do this (nor knows how), sure Linux may be more secure and free, what you neglect though is a stupid user can corrupt ANY OS and since Linux is entirely open, it doesn't prevent against stupid.

It also requires a little extra work and TIME (which costs A LOT to most people) to get favorite programs working or using half assed versions that work with the OS.

IN the end MS is easy and anyone within earshot knows something about it and can help the user resolve the issue, Linux you'd be lucky to find one person in 100 who has even heard of it.

Unfortunately it also provides facilities to make it really easy to send millions of spam messages without bolting on anything (just install sendmail or postfix, and perl).

"Linux you'd be lucky to find one person in 100 who has even heard of it."

That's just not true, I know tons of people (at work and otherwise) that know what it is. As soon as they see it on my laptop, they say oh mac? no.. must be Linux, COOL.

Not that it's a household name or anything, I'll absolutely concede that.

Keep dreaming fanboi.

Whoa, and what planet have you been living on in the past five years? Time to leave the Redmond campus, dude.

"That's just not true, I know tons of people (at work and otherwise) that know what it is. As soon as they see it on my laptop, they say oh mac? no.. must be Linux, COOL."

Both your own account and his are anecdotal. The market share resembles the mind-share pretty closely usually, so... maybe 6 people in 100? ;)

*terminalx*, I wish I could say you were wrong. I cannot. You're entirely accurate in your assessment.

I just posted elsewhere here that Linux geeks seem to be entirely clueless to the concept of time costing money. I cannot begin to count the hours I have to throw at Linux in situations which would cost only minutes in Windows.

Until the Linux geeks one day realize that most people have far more money than time, they'll continue living nothing more than a pipe dream to have Linux on anything more than a very limited number of desktops.

Hint to Linux geeks: Money is far cheaper than time these days. Yea, hard to believe but true. (That's what Bill G. figured out with M$. Look where it got him.)

You can say many things about Microsoft and Windows the one thing you cannot say is learning it in a nation like Nigeria isn't a good idea.

While I might disagree with some things Microsoft does, I thin they should have this contact, so those people in Nigeria can learn Windows and in the end get better training.

To be honest I think should just give the user a choice, as long as both are the same price, it would be a fair for everyone.

Windows is use by most of the world for a reason, granted it might because people feel they have no choice, it also might be the fact in the end Windows actually might be good.

Of course Windows has some issues, what OS wouldn't have issues that attempts to support nearly 10 year old hardware. There is a price for Windows being able to work out of the box with nearly any pc on the market. That price of course is code that is sometimes not as secure, because you just can't get rid of the old code, if you want to support the old hardware.

I mean do we really need to support dial-up at this day and age? Granted there are people in the world that are limted to dial-up but they should also push companies to expand into their area.

I hope people are able to take what I say, for whats its worth. For what Windows attempts to do its really great. Your able to boot to your OS everyday. Unless you download a hostile program, your system will continue to work, and this could happen on ANY OS. Just beause Windows was built for anyone, and this really means you can't make stuff complicated which means the security will suffer.

Finger-print access on laptops is not for the average day user. Lets be honest the greatest security features are often not simple to adjust, whch means your grand-mother would have a problem with it.

One thing you failed to realize is that Windows is much higher maintenance than Linux and this is an environment which isn't as developed as it is here in the West.

"One thing you failed to realize is that Windows is much higher maintenance than Linux and this is an environment which isn't as developed as it is here in the West."

Where...in the twilight zone?? Windows is much easier to administer then linux...which means maintenance is much easier...especially for people that don't know how to use computers...

No, he means you can hire someone off the street and blame them instead of having to hire an MCSE to blame.

...much cheaper. :)

Oh no, MS have lost the Nigerian market, this is surely the end of them.

Let the scammer scum try to figure out open source.

Let that scammer nation choke on Linux, that's all they deserve.

Ouch! I take it someone isn't a fan of open source! :o

or spam :)

mostly spam actually..

I don't know why you people are so down on Nigeria, why only yesterday they sent me an email offering to make me lots of money for nothing, all I have to do is give them my bank details :-)

The USA is the world's largest producer of spam.

Link?

We may GET the vast majority, hell, the zombie systems in the US may actually send the majority, but that totally ignores the origination point which, I assume, is what you are getting at with words like "producer".

We don't make the majority. We just forward it. :)

Didn't they also bring HIV to this country