Playstation, Dreamcast And The 3rd World

NaturePhotog writes: "CNN has an intriguing article on using Playstations running Linux to give people in developing nations access to information on health issues such as AIDS, clean water, etc. Playstations are cheap compared with PCs, hook up to a TV set, they're rugged, and could be hooked up via satellites using Globalstar phones. Ship along some of those low-cost solar panels discussed earlier on /., and you'd have a pretty sweet setup you can use almost anywhere. For serious research, of course..." And as neema points out, Sony isn't the only choice here: "Using the modem port, students from Nagoya University hooked up a homemade IDE board and installed a hard drive. The Dreamcast is running NetBSD for the Dreamcast." Here are the instructions (with schematics) on how to add a hard drive to your Dreamcast.

Comments

Wow, people really are dumb

[JohnZed]

Well, I was going to go off on another "health care, literacy, electricity, food, and telephones before computers" rant. But I'm sure many other people will do that to. So let's pretend that, hypothetically, it was a good idea to invest in PCs for the third world, and let's see how goddamn dumb this is from a technical perspective:

• Serious hacking will be needed to get this to work. The Linux playstation port is still in its infancy, and you'd have to create a nice, durable package that included the harddrive, playstation, and monitor. Of course, playstations don't support monitors out of the box...
  
• As we all know, Sony sells these things at a loss in order to make money on game licensing. So they'd be none too happy about this plan, whereas another, traditional vendor might actually be supportive.
  
• There are way better, traditional alternatives out there. A barebones Celeron 400-or-so can be had for about $125 bucks (with case, floppy, no RAM). Like a Playstation, it will need all the peripherals to be added. However, it's less than half the cost, it runs x86 software, and it can use cheap, standard components. Even after adding RAM, a hard disk, keyboard, etc., you can still squeak in under $300, which is cheaper than the PS2 before the necessary additional components.
  
• Using an expensive Playstation CPU for an education PC is a ridiculous waste of money and resources. Much of the PS2 cost goes into ultra-high performance graphics acceleration, which these PC's don't need at all. The cheap Duron/Celeron alternative will provide quite good performance for all the apps that this type of machine will run.
  

Damnit, people! Can't journalists and policymakers consult with a geek before they spout of ignorantly on technical matters?

Did you read my post?

[Carnage4Life]

If you really feel that this will be helpful, then that's great. However, some of your points just don't make sense. First, you say things aren't as bad as we make them out to be.

Where did I say things aren't as bad as people make them out to be? I said

It is true that most African's live in the kind of abject poverty that most Westerners can't even imagine let alone endure. It is also true that [we lack] basic infrastructure like regular power supply, potable water, health care services, etc. but this doesn't mean that this should somehow preclude African's from the fruits of the 21st century.

which in my opinion clearly states that things are bad but doesn't mean that we shouldn't be allowed to use the Internet and computers until we are as advanced as the Western world was in the 20th century.

You then say that it's in "poor taste" because the society is desparately in need.

I said

It is in extremely poor taste for you to bash them for donating their time and resources to a society desperately in need.

meaning that it is in poor taste to bash the people who are trying to find cheaper alternatives to getting Africans access to PCs.

Since when does having access to the Web count as "desparately in need"?

Lacking access to information does count as desperately in need. For instance, ignorance has caused AIDS in Africa to reach epidemic proportions. If a lot of these people had access to information just a few years earlier the devastation would not be as widespread as it is today. The same goes for a large number of diseases as well.

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