High Plains Thumper <highplainsthumper@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> espoused:
> Roy Schestowitz wrote:
>> High Plains Thumper on Sunday:
>>
>>> http://resources.zdnet.co.uk/articles/features/0,1000002000,39291282,00.htm
>>>
>>> A Linux thin client for every child
>>> Andrew Donoghue
>>> ZDNet.co.uk
>>> Published: 05 Dec 2007 15:26 GMT
>>>
>>> [quote]
>>> They will be rolling out 180,000 student seats, of which
>>> 100,000 are being done right now over a five-month period.
>>> They are going into high schools because those students are
>>> the closest to entering the workplace and they want them to
>>> be computer- literate. Next year 80,000 additional seats are
>>> being rolled out into primary schools.
>>>
>>> These 180,000 seats make up 50 percent of the students in
>>> the country because they don't have enough classrooms for
>>> all the students, so in essence half of the students go to
>>> school in the morning from 6am till noon, and the other half
>>> go from noon to 6pm. This way, 180,000 seats service nearly
>>> 40,000 students.
>>> [/quote]
>
> I believe 40,000 is a typo, it is meant to be 400,000. 180,000
> seats servicing 400,000 students as two shifts makes more sense.
>
>> The are pooling the resources. I love it. I stated this before
>> in COLA, but a nice thing to have would be a 'supercomputer'
>> that has a strong, high-bandwidth wireless signal. PCs can
>> then connect using embedded cards and 'borrow' CPU and memory
>> from the 'supercomputer'. If some day in the future the
>> connection's throughput and reliability is high enough, you
>> could then do exploit a good analogy of 'multi-player'
>> virtualisation. In fact, a year+ ago, a Sun executive (IIRC)
>> said that the world only needs (/will need) 6 powerful
>> computers. Time will tell...
>>
>> Web services are an interesting thing because you could use
>> devices as only input/output displays (a la X server) with a
>> network connection, leaving everything else for the servers to
>> handle.
>
> I think that thin clients are the wave of the future. Thick
> clients have always been a liability except for those who require
> intensive local desktop computing power and data rates, like CAD,
> laboratory analysis and simulations.
>
> By being on a server makes backups a whole lot easier. Patch
> management and software upgrades are simplified. Client goes
> dead? Swap out with another, set-up is minimal.
>
> This type scenario also can be used to bring new life into older
> PC's.
>
Total virtualisation has to be the best way forward, but it does require
an entirely different economic model than we have at the moment. Who
will pay for all the CPU cycles on some central machine? Who will pay
for the bandwidth between? How will billing be performed? How can one
uniquely identify someone using a Nokia 810 or an Asus Eee and sharing
processing power?
Unfortunately, I suspect that the shared cycle theory could be too
utopian to be practical, at least in our present environment.
--
| Mark Kent -- mark at ellandroad dot demon dot co dot uk |
| Cola faq: http://www.faqs.org/faqs/linux/advocacy/faq-and-primer/ |
| Cola trolls: http://colatrolls.blogspot.com/ |
| My (new) blog: http://www.thereisnomagic.org |
|
|
