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HP Markets Cheap 4-User PCs To African Schools
Kracs writes "HP are supplying their low-cost multi-user 441 desktops to African schools. Running Mandrake Linux, and sporting four screens (1xTNT2 AGP, 3xTNT2 PCI), keyboards and mice (1 PS2 set, 3 USB sets) they provide relatively cheap computer access for up to four users (of particular interest to schools in low economic zones).
However, according to this article on New Zealand's Xtra news page they've only manufactured enough to outfit schools in South Africa. HP has commented that they're talking to several organisations and are hoping to bring the PC to market in other regions but have stated they will only be marketed to developing countries." (Remember, there are also home-grown methods to achieve similar results.)
No, not the car... the computer. The fact that a system like this (while not exactly thin-client X-term material, nor a WYSE text box) would get produced indicates that when the going gets tough, the thin(er) client model makes sense. How soon until someone expands this to 8 terminals? (All you'd need is a PCI-expansion slot and a higher bus speed.)
With this, you can still have the decently-performing graphics of a direct VGA connection, while enjoying to cost benefits of reduced CPU-boxes. w00t.
Hire a Linux system administrator, systems engineer,
Now that I read it again HP are charging these schools, shouldn't HP do this for free =/ You'd think they have enough money by now!
Have you metaroderated recently?
I think that 1. it is really great that SOMEONE is doing something to help children in developing countries, people in the US get so much more exposure to technology (in general) than developing countries and it is really great to see a company try to help out the children and 2. I think it is great that they are using Linux, I personally think that for education and stuff like that Linux is way better, the only time I really need windows is for high performance games that neither WineX / Wine support, but in a school enviroment you dont need those kind of things so Linux is a great solution, stable, cheap, and lots of great free software
oh right, profits
what use are PCs in African schools? They've been no use where I am. They just plonk them there so parents think the school is good.
And I've seen South Africa's attempts at computer literacy.
Imagine a mud-strune shanty town. They bring in a mobile bus full of computers. There is hardly anything in computing in the particular group's language. Then someone steals the power cord.
These people don't need computers. They need an environment safe from crime, corruption & pollution. They need clean water. They need to stop getting aids.
Computers cost vast amounts of money. Multi-lingual efforts are negligable because programmers couldn't care a stuff about supporting multilingualism. What is an African living on a couple of dollars a day meant to do with his taxes being spent on thousands of dollars computer equipment? When he doesn't have a phone? Doesn't speak the language 100% of the software is in? Is he going to gain some magic from browsing all several dozen webpages in his language?
There're far more important things in life than computers.
Every time I read about some computer company offering to save poor people by offering them technology, I get so dismayed at how the geek community falls in line and agrees how great it will be for these kids. Southern Africa **does not** need computers, it needs to end corruption in the various governments so that education can be given a budgetary priority.
Jason Conrad
Follow the troll bread-crumbs to the dirty truth behind slashdot
HP and low price are incompatible terms.
Now they invented a new way - make a 4 head single CPU computer and sell it to developing countries... instead of knives and mirrors... for the price of 4 non-brand computers.
AFAIK, South Africa is not the poorest African Country.
If you really really want to do something good, make a cheap monitor, compliant to all health standards, harmless to children. It is easy to do nowadays, since nobody wants CRT monitors anymore (except for special cases).
As for everything else - many companies would gladly pay to you for taking away their outdated equipment, which is still good for schools and is definitely more powerful than 1/4 of cheap HP.
Old monitors are bad for eyes, it's the only thing that needed. And no HP, please.
four screens (1xTNT2 AGP, 3xTNT2 PCI), keyboards and mice (1 PS2 set, 3 USB sets)
(Remember, there are also home-grown methods to achieve similar results.)
That sounds pretty home-grown to me. I understand there is time to be saved in just buying it from HP, but this seems like a fairly obvious solution to the problem at hand.
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Crudely Drawn Games
Not that I am a huge fan of windows, but I thought it was at least worthwhile to mention that a similar solution is available for Windows computers and/or Windows labs. I have been thinking of investigating something like this in leiu of thin clients for data people at work that are very low-impact on their computers.
Please bear in mind that about a year ago, Micro$oft offered a plethora of Software to the schools for *FREE*. This was part of their schools project. The result is that schools were not interested in running alternate OS's, as they didn't have the price factor for software.
With this type of installation/solution, it addresses the issue of Hardware. Funds are needed for PC's, and the less you have to spend on hardware the better. This solution *DOES NOT* run Windows - period. So this is the type of footholding we in SA like to see. Once the kids leave school - Linux will be a comfortable OS for them to use - unlike people numbed by the MS "Experience" .
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... or gates there :)
I don't know why they are targetting this at Africa. There are plenty of other countries where schools don't have enough computers. The UK for instance - many schools in the UK struggle with very low IT budgets. This would be great of them.
Perhaps they are targeting Africa so they don't tread on Microsoft's toes too much?
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Ever consider that maybe some schools in africa dont have an IT budget at all?
Even though, I dont see why they taking on South Africa. South Africa is developing, and well, and hopefully soonl, this wont be a problem. It would be nicer to see this hapen in other countries that are even less developed.
Maybe we find the next linus
"The Linux desktop is quite different from what students are used to in (Microsoft's) Windows. For that reason, I can't see a quick changeover," he said.
I didn't know that pointing and clicking was quite different in either system.
Moreover, users with elaborate computing needs would probably shy away from a multi-user machine like HP 441, said Nikos Drakos, an analyst with tech consultancy Gartner.
"Elaborate" is a bit of a vague word here. I don't know any software that is so elaborate that Linux couldn't handle it.
Nothing that uncommon that WINE couldn't handle anyway... and if it's elaborate enough to be clustering or scientific programs, Linux is vastly superior to Windows on that front.
Whose paying Gartner these days anyway?
"That's why South African schools make sense. But it would not work for the general knowledge worker who needs to run software programs written for Windows," he said.
Well I grew up using an Apple ][e, and somehow that never affected my ability to use Windows in the office today.... but it did make me good at the command line in Unix/Linux.
READY.
PRINT ""+-0
It certainly sounds good at first glance to bring computers to classrooms in Africa. But take a look at what's happened in the States.
Companies donate (usually old) machines to schools. The schools then get caught in the software upgrade cycle and end up spending more than they would if they didn't have the computers at all.
In a lot of countries a computer isn't what the schools really need anyway. Textbooks would be a lot more useful in most cases.
The man who never alters his opinion is like the stagnant water and breeds Reptiles of the Mind -- William Blake
Not only are HP helping the developing nations, they are promoting Linux to future generations, who will not have already been bought by MS like the whole of the west has been. I would favor schools in the west running both Linux and Windows - if kids are taught both from the start then they will (hopefully) not be prejudiced either way and when faced with a problem can choose the right system as a solution.
Another good thing is that this is helping the environment - a single 4-head machine takes less resources to build, contains less toxic materials, contains less plastics (which come from our limited oil resources and end up in the landfill) and sucks less electricity.
We need more of this stuff - while we need powerful machines as developers, the secretaries, etc, who use their machines for surfing the web and word processing have no use for a 2GHz machine - I used to run MS Office 97 on a P200 (all those years ago before I ditched MS completely) and it was perfectly fast enough.
http://blog.nexusuk.org
South Africa is no "low economic zone" compared to almost every other country in Africa. I like SA but, hey there are other options that make more sense.
The HP project is targetting South Africa specifically. South Africa is a developing country, not a third world hole in the ground. Yes, the majority of the country suffers from poverty, and AIDS is a serious problem, but as far as I know even the poorest areas have food and water (unless an unusual disaster occurs), and the people there know perfectly well how to farm. This isn't Sudan, and it isn't Zimbabwe.
What South Africa needs is better education and better resources in the poor areas - because this more than anything else is what is going to improve them. If we insist on basic aid only and reject offers of computers and telecommunications equipment, we will end up with a nation of ignorant people living in the stone age, and ripe for exploitation by the rest of the world, which has moved on.
I think it's debatable if the nation can ever reach anything that could be called prosperity if it doesn't keep up with technological advances. Not all new technology is frivolous luxury. I think that internet access is a valuable tool which can greatly improve people's lives.
Earlier posters have ridiculed the idea that access to the internet can be useful to people in rural areas, since they don't speak English. However, most people in South Africa have the opportunity to learn basic English, and nothing improves your command of a language like reading lots of it every day.
I have a concrete, practical example of how the internet can help a poor person improve his life: programming skills. A person with no resources other than the internet can learn how to program in a number of languages - and this skill is potentially worth money. It may not be suited to everyone, but the opportunity is there.
I can imagine businesses that could be interested as well. A lot of offices where I have worked in Belgium, people sit in blocks of 4 and each has its own PC. They use this mainly for browsing, email, excel, word and one or two specific programs.
Almost never at the same time. It makes sense to share the PC with 3 other people. A lot is already either calculated on the server anyway and stored there, or requires less then the full attention of the PC to process.
In callcenter there are a lot of people working who do not even have their own PC, yet each workplace has its own box.
I understand that it will not be usefull for each and everybody. I however think that what most people do in an office sharing 1 PC should be enough. Perhaps HP rather wants to sell 4 then 1 box. The question is will businesses rather have 4 DELLs or 1 HP?
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
This thing ran an Oracle database, mail/web servers, did nfs/nis, supported two dozen X-terminals and at least 50 text terminals. We would run out of memory only very occasionally, when people started doing stupid things like run their window manager on the server itself rather than use the one built-in the X terminals.
The machine was not fast, but it ran to the department needs and people weren't less intelligent because of this. Maybe quite the opposite in fact: since you didn't want to compile your progamming assignment every couple lines, people were more considerate about writing quality code in the first place and make use of the resources we had more efficiently. This produced a generation of programmers who were concerned about writing good code.
Today, any a 2GHz+ PC with 1GB+ of ram would put the machine we were using back then to shame in terms of raw computing power and even i/o, with the proper supporting hardware (fast scsi disks, cyclades serial ports board, etc.)
One last thing about Linux IIRC, part of the memory used by programs is actually shared if two or more users use the same application, so memory utilization is efficient in a multi-user setup.
"Earlier posters have ridiculed the idea that access to the internet can be useful to people in rural areas, since they don't speak English."
That's because they don't know what they talking about. Almost every person I've met, even in the rural areas, where one of my previous jobs took me all the time, could speak, or understand at least a little bit of English or Afrikaans. This is because English and Afrikaans have always been (and still is to a large extent, although that's changing) the dominant languages to do business in. Even if that business is buying a loaf of bread, or standing in line for an ID book or to register to vote in the election.
And for what it's worth, a look on the KDE website will teach you that translations are available for a number of languages spoken in South Africa: Afrikaans, Venda, Xhosa and Zulu. I'm sure more are at least under early development at our universities. This is enough to get someone going on a computer.
As for the internet, there are a many websites available in local languages. Even google provides support for Afrikaans, Sesotho, Xhosa and Zulu. And that covers a very large percentage of the population.
The idea of bringing internet to rural areas is not so that poor hungry unschooled people can check their stocks or CNN or whatever. It's rather to aid communication and provide access to educational facilities like UNISA (www.unisa.ac.za). Education is really what it's about.
sigaar
Dear Luddite,
Just a few points:
1. Water is collected from a nearby stream. It is pure and unpolluted by development found here, were one is advised NOT to even take a bathe in the water around. That's fine as long as Typhoid Mary doesn't live upstream.
2. Medicines are extracted from shrubs. Let's see how that works when the next Ebola outbreak occurs. It doesn't seem to be doing much for the AIDs epidemic, either.
3. In a nearby village, one white man visited and never went back to the UK! Another Luddite, perhaps?
Look, there are many things in Africa that access to modern knowledge and thinking would help. There are constant stories of people in Africa killed because they were witches and "cursed" their neighbors. Many sections of Africa still practice female circumcision which is really just nothing more than mutilation. More people starve to death in Africa than on any other continent in the world. AIDs and most other STDs run rampant; simple education about condoms would go a long way.
Don't make Africa out to be paradise; it isn't!
I could go on and on too but, as you said, offtopic!
I wonder what happens when those 4 people start browsing and using openoffice at the same time.
the same thing when 10 people do that on the test machine/server I have here at work.
it just has a higher memory useage at that time.
Linux is multi-user, if you have the horsepower, you can have 10,000 people browsing and using openoffice at the same time. Linux could really care less.
users of Linux Terminal Server have been doing this for a really really long time. a simple Dual P-III 866 server with 1 gig of ram cancomfortably support 10 users on X terminals running open office, mozilla and evolution all at the same time.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Ah, Open Source software bloat...
We really do need some mainstream distros willing to say "the hell with this, we've got users on junk hardware out there, let's scale it back a bit". Instead we've got the moving targets of KDE and GNOME, getting bigger and bigger and bigger...