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.
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HPT
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