A Linux thin client for every child
Published: 05 Dec 2007 15:26 GMT
...the students in the physical local classroom. Or, if there was a classroom in London and another one in Liverpool, as long as there was IP connectivity between the server devices, you can manage remote classrooms as well as local ones.
All the tech support can be done remotely, as long as there is an IP connection. This applies to call centres too. If this was being used in a commercial situation, a call-centre supervisor could do the same thing with call-centre staff in terms of monitoring their systems.
Certain teaching skills are very rare in Macedonia — particularly science skills — so this technology allows one teacher in one location to teach multiple classes through real-time, online learning. It is really extremely cool.
Does your thin-client system require high-spec PCs to act as servers, or will it work with older machines?
[In terms of] what class of machine will support our solution, we recommend anything that contains hyperthreading technology or beyond — so a Pentium IV with hyperthreading is a very reasonable machine for this kind of technology.
PCs that are in the neighbourhood of three years to four years old are very adaptable to using the technology.
Which other countries' educational systems have you deployed this technology into?
In June, the Vietnamese education board announced that they had chosen our technology as the standard computing architecture for every school in the country and they intend to deploy it in the next three years. They haven't started deploying it yet because they are waiting on funding.
But it's also being taken up in the US. In North Carolina we actually sold two school districts in that state. Strictly by word of mouth, in six months 17 other districts decided to acquire this technology and deploy 13,000 seats over that period. That has to be one of the biggest viral deployments of technology ever recorded.
Given that this is such a powerful model and so many countries are deploying it, what has held it back until now? We have been told for years that thin client is the future.
If you take a look at how thin-client computing has been deployed up to this point, everything has been focused around enterprise users.
We have not had the PR impact that OLPC has, but in the past year we have sold half a million seats — and have two countries basing their whole computing infrastructure on our devices
If we look at the components that make this possible — on the software side, to be able to deploy multi-user computing, only three companies can do this. Citrix, a billion dollar company focusing completely on the enterprise; Microsoft itself through Windows Terminal Service — again focused on the enterprise; and, thirdly, VMware. These companies price this technology from $200 (£97) to $400 (£194) per seat just for the multi-user software.
Also, thin clients have traditionally been stripped-down PCs. However, our software infrastructure, which we call the desktop virtualisation infrastructure, has been a 12-year development effort with over 1,000 man years of development time. Compare that to machine virtualisation with VMware, where every user runs their own virtual computer with their own copy of the operating system and their own copy of the applications. Our technology takes a single copy of the application and the operating systems and allows multiple user desktops to be created sharing the same OS and the same physical copies of the applications, which results in incredibly optimised memory performance. VMware's guidelines are 1GB per user. We support seven users per gigabyte.
What we have said is that we are going to take this enterprise technology into an enabling technology, and it has been truly remarkable in terms of the uptake in education and other applications.
It is a very different model to that pushed by Nicholas Negroponte and the OLPC project. He claims that children will only really engage with computers if they have some sense of ownership of the device.
There is about 4,000 to 5,000 years of history and learning associated with teaching children in classrooms. Whether one-to-one usage of PCs versus investing in more teachers and classrooms makes sense — I don't know. There are often very limited economic resources available, and our approach has been to fundamentally reduce to the minimum the cost of the infrastructure. We would rather leave it to the educators and the politicians to decide how best to deploy the technology.
Also, we are a relatively unknown company. We have not had the PR impact that OLPC has, but in the past year we have sold half a million seats — and have two countries basing their whole computing infrastructure on our devices.
The last point I would make about introducing technology where there is not a substantial amount of technology existing is: who does the maintenance, who does the repair, who does the training? There are no IT ecosystems, there are no PC companies in these communities and in the OLPC model it requires the government to take those responsibilities. [It's different from] our model that allows a local IT environment to grow up around it. All our distributions have been done using local partners.
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