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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.)
XD it would be nice if this sort of thing was introduced in the states, but alas MS has a strangle hold it seems on pcs loaded with an OS. I for one would welcome the day you could walk into best buy and get a this. Of course maybe i should go to best buy... http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/07/06/014423 6&mode=thread&tid=187&tid=98&tid=9 9
this is the sort of thing that "restores your faith in the world" so to speak.
if hp are genuine in their efforts in helping developing/poor nations by providing them with low cost computers then this is great news.
and in answer to the question on everyone here's lips, yes, it runs linux!
I wonder what happens when those 4 people start browsing and using openoffice at the same time. Not to mention technical stuffs like matlab (which runs on java)
This would be what I call context-switching.
a couple of years ago.
Some very good people were running that booth. They hadn't decided exactly where it was going to be sold, but they knew who they wanted to buy it.
It was running Mandrake there, but certainly an older version. The way it came off, was that Mandrake had been chosen due to its popularity in Europe, and that the original solution was coming from the labs in France.
When it was explained to me, they were talking about giving an option to poor families in developing countries. Looks like they took a different direction.
This is the perfect use for the idea. Schools are so important, to give a less expensive option that isn't just our throw away Pentium systems is a wonderful idea.
My mom says I'm cool.
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?
At the time my opinion was that Free Software was better than donating money, as it can help third world economies become sustainable, in line with teaching someone to fish rather than just giving them a fish. I couldn't back up my opinion with hard examples though. I think I will be using this story as one of my examples in the future. Does anyone else have similar examples?
Wouldn't be much of a problem with a halfway decent amount of RAM. A lot of perceived slowness is in load time, which is helped out by more file cache space. And shared libraries contribute some efficiency as well. Projects like Linux Terminal Server handle scores of simultaneous users with ~2GB of RAM. I'd think that, even in a low-cost market, this kind of machine would have enough RAM to handle 4 users.
I had a computer lab in my classroom when home computers were rare. Some of the students spent many hours in that lab after school. They all ended up in different places after they graduated but some have really prospered. It is a small number but I am certain that some of my students are where they are because they had access to a computer that they could use any way they wanted.
Never mind that there are few web pages in Bantu or Swahili, Get the kids going and soon you will have many.
Never mind that only a few students' lives will really be changed by having a computer. Those few students will have a big effect on society.
The important thing is that the computers should be available outside of school hours and not just to the students. Check out the 'computer in a wall' project in India. Check out how the students in Iceland are using computers to preserve their language and culture. As long as the teachers don't get in the way, good things will happen.
This sounds great for classrooms etc, but how do you deal with peripherals such as USB-memory sticks, CD-ROM drives etc. What happens if I pop my USB stick into the computer when three other users are also working on it? Is everything shared? Or is it possible to have a USB-hub per "workstation"?
Isn't it possible to save money by running half as many video cards, each running 2 X servers? I often run both VGA ports off a single card but both on a single X server with Xinerama, but maybe there's some X limitation that prevents 2 X servers for the 2 ports on the same card. Is this possible?
I am assuming that one of the reasons that HP intends to market these in developing countries is that the prices they will ask will be lower than what they could expect to get in developed countries. So, even with a discount from the purchase price after a year of use, there is a possibility that the computers could be resold to purchasers in developed countries (hobbyists, user groups, etc.) at a price point close to what was originally paid for the machines or sold at a point below the purchase price to neighboring countries even less well off. The money earned from the sale of the "old" computers goes to buying newer computers (perhaps from HP if they do their marketing right and don't stifle the resale market). In the meantime, the computers help to establish an educated populace (possibly with world access via the Internet) and the business processes involved in the export work in a small way to help establish a middle class. It has been argued that both of these factors, an educated populace and a middle class, are instrumental in the development and preservation of constitutional liberal democracy.
Bureaucracy loves company.
Now put those books on computers and suddenly each student can access their own book (perhaps even make notations in the book) and have it up-to-date each year.
The cost of books is a very real problem. There have been plenty of reports of poor schools in developing region where students had to share books that had been donated decades ago from the west. While you might think that a book on math from 30 yrs ago is as good as as one printed today many teachers would disagree. Especially when the old one was printed in a foreign language.
There are two ways to use computers in teaching. One is the old "computerlab" most of us will have seen wich are mainly used to teach computer skills. But a far more usefull way of using computers is to replace books and paper and their high cost and non-updateableness. Over here we can "afford" to require new text books each year. Other countries are not so lucky.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
These days you can even get rid of all the wiring and do screens/keyboards/mice/VGA over 802.11g. I'm actually playing with some kit like that at the moment, very unproductively of course, since my brain keeps on going off someplace imagining a huge number of people connected to my little Celeron! Seriously tough, one can think of many applications. I'm toying with some ideas re Point of Sale lanes sporting this kit. Hmmm...
What about median income (Nigeria vs. South Africa)?
The basic computer tasks of "web browsing, word processing, e-mail, and instant messaging" do not require 3 GHz machines. I mean, they haven't requires the latest-and-greatest hardware for a long time, but the hardware is growing MUCH MUCH faster than the baseline requirements for these tasks are.
So, it makes sense for a single PC to serve multiple users simultaneously.
People have pointed out that old UNIX machines did just this, but the ironic thing is that these uses are for the exact opposite reasons. Used to be that CPU time was so costly that it was necessary. Now, CPU time is so cheap that one can't help but buy more than they need, and splitting it up across users is ideal.
would be great to the this stuff in the office as well, you really don't need a 2+Ghz machine each. Sharing one would be fine - home dirs on a fileserver etc etc.
Would dramatically reduce TCO for deploying a new technology on the desktop..
You had monitors?
When I was a lad, we had mark sense cards -- like punchcards, but you had to use a pencil to mark each character. Only in 2nd year of university did we get to use a terminal, then it was ed -- 3rd year we were allowed to use vi in full screen.
That's a good question. Most likely you would see that the average per capita income for SA would be a bit higher than Nigeria, but this is based on opinion, not fact. I'm sure a good Googling will clear that up to some extent.
Once you start mucking around with multiple USB soundcards you will see that they get ennumerated by devfs as /dev/sound/dsp* where the "*" is the device number. This is true for OSS. Alsa sound is a bit different (alhouth the OSS emulation layer also sort of does it this way).
Christ, South Africa is so much richer than Togo its difficult to comprehend. South Africa (in the white parts) is much better off than Western Europe.
The problem with SA is that the country is in efect two things. The white and the black parts. The white parts have great tech, great roads (certainly better than in Germany where I live) and the standard of living is MUCH higher than in Germany, at least (and I live in a wealthy town). The black part is a total nightmare though. Thats Apartheid for you, but then I sometimes think people should remember that the country would have ben much worse off without it.
I have something like this setup at home.
:)
A 2 console setup with 1 athlon 2000+, 512 MBs of RAM, 2 soundcards and 2 nvidia graphic cards. I use USB keyboards and mices. I am using the 2.6.0-test9-ruby kernel, and afaik this ruby patch is going in to the official linux tree. (makes it possible to have separate USB keyboards for separate X servers). The stability is great and it really feels like 2 separate computers. I have had this setup since last December.
Multiconsole is great because when my computer was fast and fairly expensive it suddenly became 2 computers using only an used monitor, old pci TNT2 card and a cheap USB keyboard+mouse. Hardware movie acceleration and openGL works on both consoles, however the TNT2 PCI card is not directly überfast - it works fine with older games like opengl doom tough. (local pingtimes are nice
This can also have potential in the office world, I believe, where cheap computer setups is something very attractive (at least at those places I have worked at so far). In the office environment people also tend to use "low requirement" office applications anyways - that often only requires lots of CPU power at peak times. I think an office worker would not notice if he was the only one using that computer or if he was sharing it with 3 others.
A standard motherboard with 5 PCI slots, 1 AGP port, onboard graphics and audio could theoretically house 7 consoles if everyone shares soundcard - and 4 if every console has its own soundcard.
What I am really looking forward to is VIAs new northbridge which makes it possible for motherboard manufacturers to have one AGP and one PCIe port at the same motherboard, or maybe that the manufacturers started to make motherboards with multiple PCIe 16x ports, alternatively graphicards with PCIe 1x interface.
This could make it possible to have a setup with several good openGL consoles, which would be nice to have for the families, etc..
Ah, anyways, great stuff! Nice to see a company using it in its products.
You think you are "kidding"!
I can remember when China bought about a million Timex Sinclair computers for schools: tiny little 16K doorstops with an uppercase membrane keyboard and a TV connection for a 40-character x c. 23 line display.
And why not. My first computer where I learned BASIC. And I LIKED IT!
I have a P3-866MHz in my company with some 20+ users running Oracle. Some of them use VNC. It does a lot of nuber crunching, and runs any assorted software that people need which cannot run in Windows. I have never seen that computer using more than 3% CPU.
Our biggest problem in maintaining that machine is disk space. People are reluctant to trust their windoze machines after getting used to the reliability of a Linux server, so they start uploading a lot of stuff that should be kept in their own personal computers.
A quick Google for similar initiatives in India pulls up a huge number of hits, one good example being the Linux Localisation Initiative in Bangalore. The point is that HP have realised that with Linux one can empower people to do for themselves. Kinda like the "don't feed the man, teach him how to fish" story, but that is exactly what Open Source enables us to do. You should see the look in such people's eyes when they realised that they have just solved a problem not just for themselves, but for a whole community of people. Priceless stuff.
1979, Amdahl V7. 32Megabytes of RAM, running MTS (Michigan Terminal System) ran at a bit less than 2MIPS. Maxed out at about 700 simultaneous logins, but it was slow as molases at that point. It could handle about 500 users with good response time.
Granted, it wasn't quite a PC. That monster cost a few million dollars (cheap in it's day for what it could do). Along with it's hard disks, and other peripherals, it took up about 1/3 of a floor of the General Services Building at the University of Alberta.
Then there was the Xerox 9700 laser printer that could print 2 pages per second (as long as you paid attention to complexity limits). Proportional fonts and all sorts of other things... Ooh, what a toy!
Free Software: Like love, it grows best when given away.