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Comment by angusgr | Hacker News Reader

After my initial excitement of "wow, cool" and "wow, tiny" and "wow, cheap" wore off, I'm also becoming skeptical about what niche this fills for educators.

Why? Because an old PC with equivalent specs is essentially free (anything from ~2000 onwards.) Thousands of them, desktop and laptop, will be being recycled or landfilled every day.

Linux on x86 hardware is standard enough that you can effectively call it a standard platform for developers, already, same as this.

The remaining key advantage (I guess) is size. And maybe the fact that it's easier to get kids excited about playing with a tiny brand new board than with a 10 year old computer.

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It may cost more than $25 per computer to collect computers being recycled, evaluate them for suitability, clean them up, and install a fresh copy of Ubuntu on them.

Also, the size difference could be significant, as well as allow novel ways of using it. For instance, if the goal is to get this machine into areas outside cities were computers are more common, shipping costs could be significant if recycled desktops/laptops are used instead.

I can imagine that you can conduct a class where kids take these computers home, along with a school-supplied keyboard, for use with the TV set they have at home, to work on computer (programming) assignments. This would allow the school to avoid the cost of acquiring monitors.

As an educator, I would LOVE to have access to these. One of the hardest things I have found is to provide a development environment for the kids at home that is the same as they have at school. You can tell them to install Ubuntu and Greenfoot on their machine at home, but there is no way to help them get things set up, or fix configuration problems unless you have access to their machine.

With this, they use the exact same machine at home and at school, and it is easy for them to carry back and forth. The only downside is that they would also be easy to lose, so there would need to be a big lanyard attached so they can wear them around their necks.

EDIT: I added some explanation of the problem.

Thanks for explaining, I hadn't thought of that.

Could you set up and provide them a Vagrant box that's pre-configured?

With respect to size, you could easily get a suitcase full of these into any developing country, while a suitcase full of "pentium-class machine" contains only 1. You can also own and carry these things without making yourself a target.

On the power front, the power requirements are minimal, allowing them to take advantage of the solar infrastructure in places that rely on car battery power (central america is covered in solar). Also to run on 12V SLAs which are a common feature in places with unreliable power.

You might be surprised to learn that your city may have a recycling contract with the landfill. Those thousands of landfilled PCs are effectively unavailable to you or anyone else, no matter how feel-good the project.

I think this is a Good Thing and I hope it becomes available to everyone.

I'd say that is definitely true, especially in America and the like.

In the developing world though, I imagine there are some huge advantages to the power consumption of this. These may make it feasible to run a computer lab off of solar panels.

There are already computers that draw low enough currents to do this now but they are quite expensive. ($3-500 as I recall)

I don't think there is any possibility that you could provide a large number of students recycled computers with similar hardware capabilities for essentially free.

Why not? When we recently opened our Hackerspace a friendly e-waste dealer gave us 10 SFF Pentium 4 1.8Ghz Compaqs. He said they're not worth the effort of selling any more, and to let him know if we need more. He had palette-loads.

Last week my coworker bought an ex-government ultra-small-form-factor Dell PentiumD 3Ghz for $30 in an auction, they were selling dozens that way in single quantities for between $20-$40. 3Ghz PC with 1Gb of RAM!

A friend showed me the disposal tunnel at the local unversity, they have palettes stacked 1m high with old Pentium4-era computers and old CRT monitors waiting to be picked up for recycling. The university pays for them to be taken away.

I'm in Australia, but I expect if you look around most developed countries you'll find this is the situation - old computers all over the place scrapped, resold or shipped off-shore. The developing world is where a lot of those computers end up, so in those countries a $25 USB-stick-computer with no excess shipping cost may still be a better option than paying for shipping a crate of old machines. However, I guarantee you there is no shortage of old hardware out there.

There are many, many thousands of school kids. Once you started putting those kind of demands on the market they wouldn't be going for free anymore. Not to mention the quality control problems.

I think you've missed my point a bit. My point is that if all that is needed for schools to expand CS education is cheap commodity computer hardware, it already exists.

If educational "demands on the market" don't exist for P4-era used PCs now, are they necessarily going to exist for the USB stick PC?

The availability of hardware on a completely ad-hoc basis gives nothing for developers of software and curriculum to target. The potential deployment of thousands of these devices to children at once and the awareness and cooperation of the education department would completely change what you could do with it.

Perhaps the problem with a big black box P4 is the infrastructure requirements. Mind you they're not a lot smaller if you still need a flat screen and keyboard but I can see it being easier to find space in a school ... you also get a system that is going to be usable at home/library for a lot of children in more developed countries/regions.

What you're describing works great on a small scale if you've got a few interested geeks to help out, but as soon as you have to support it in the large, homogeneity becomes very important.

Well, I think the immediate advantage is that you can make sure that every PC has the same hardware configuration, which makes 'fleet' management much easier. Also, now the school pays for screens and keyboards that stay, but when they decide to upgrade the computers in three years time, it only costs $25 per student to do so.

If anything, at least we could give one to each child much more easily than a desktop or laptop.

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