Google offering free Chromebooks to Indian schools | Hacker News Reader

Google offering free Chromebooks to Indian schools

timesofindia.indiatimes.com

65 pointskshatrea49 comments

I see there's a mini-shitstorm going on here, but let's say Google is in fact a business acting in its own self-interest to some degree, which seems reasonable. Let's say they're giving away Chromebooks because a) they wish to do good in the world, and b) they'd like to get more people using Google services, and this seems like a rather effective method of gaining long-term users. Now, ignoring the fact that you can indeed use crouton, enable dev mode, or otherwise "hack the platform" so to speak, where's the actual issue in having these kids using Google services? Google's offering them free computers. Does we honestly think that a poor kid in India wouldn't eagerly give written consent to become a user of Google's services, letting Google benefit from that as they do from any similar user, especially when they're not being forced in any way whatsoever to continue doing so in the future?

I'm a goddamn middle-class American, I believe I have a reasonable knowledge of what Google will get out of this deal (as they do every day from my heavy usage of their services), and I would accept the free computer. Even at that, poor kids without regular access to the internet aren't your average highly tech-literate, open-source-aware HN user, and I really doubt they care about Google's relatively responsible* use of collected information in exchange for a rather nice free netbook, even if they were fully aware of its implications.

*Sure, I understand this is an arguable definition, but in the larger scheme of things, it seems fair to say that Google doesn't have a malicious use of the data in mind.

I love quoting RMS. "What schools should refuse to do is teach dependence. Those corporations offer free samples to schools for the same reason tobacco companies distribute free cigarettes to minors: to get children addicted. They will not give discounts to these students once they've grown up and graduated."

Surely this applies only if you consider chromebooks as free and this not true atleast by RMS standards.

It's interesting that Google is hardy being scrutinized for using exactly the same tactics for which Microsoft was vilified a decade ago.

This deal was probably made pre-Snowden revelations. I doubt any of the world's governments are so eager to deploy US-controlled machines in their institutions and schools, especially if they are "cloud-only".

But it's free!!!

So was the Trojan Horse.

What? The NSA wants poorly written papers by school children?

It must be so different going to school these days. I feel excited for our future kids!

I remember going through the majority of my primary education in the 2000's and being dismayed by the gap between public school education and the resources of the internet. It was such a weird, and unfortunate, period of denial. Maybe we're still experiencing that chasm between the way that society functions and the power of the internet to enrich our lives, but it seems like we're definitely inching closer to my childhood idealizations.

I'm currently doing my A levels in a small school in the Upper Palatinate. The problem is - at least in Germany - that some schools have to invest the money they get in fundamental thing only, like sanitary facilities. The school I'm attending doesn't even have WARM water AT ALL! NOWHERE! On the other side, there are new built schools that can invest their money in Smart Boards and video projectors. Another point is that most of the "old" teachers simply don't know how to use these fancy new things (including computers in general) and there are also teachers that are so fascinated by Facebook and BayernMoodle (http://www.bayernmoodle.de/) that they more or less force their students to use it on weekends in order to give them exercises. More or less, when I tell my mother about the lessons (she went to the same school as I do), I often realize that sometimes neither the teachers nor the way eduction is being done changed all. I would be happy about new books, some on mine are far older than myself. Maybe others have different experiences, but there is a lot of room for improvement.

Don't waste your time worrying about school too much. Make sure you get into things like https://www.deutsche-schuelerakademie.de or http://www.deutsche-juniorakademien.de.

(Their Alumni organisation (http://www.cde-ev.de/) is actually open for everybody, and I can only recommend joining. https://mind-hochschul-netzwerk.de/ is also worth a look.)

Wow! This is great! I've already been to a so-called "Ferienseminar für besonders begabte und interessierte Schülerinnen und Schüler", an event I've been invited to and which I can only recommend, but these links are great! Thank you! Since I'm doing an additional test, I'll try getting into some of these programmes.

Oh, none of these programmes are tests. If you a into that kind of thing, you should also compete in the Mathematik-Olympiade (and physics and chemistry olympiad, too). There are also Bundeswettbewerb Mathematik and Bundeswettbewerb Informatik, that are fun to take part in.

Drop me a line (email in profile), if you want to learn more. I grew up in Germany, but ended up all over the world, currently I'm in Singapore.

What's so exciting about running a browser on a artificially locked down and crippled OS where you're forced to upload everything to the cloud where you have minimal control over your data, instead of running it on Linux or even OS X or Windows?

This is what I would like to know, as well.

But actually, even ignoring that, I don't see how giving kids free electronics is so exciting. Public school is heading towards obsolescence, and arbitrarily handing out gadgets to students demonstrates a profound misunderstanding of technological advancement and its role in education.

This isn't any better than the state of California trying to patch its failure by handing out free iPads, although I guess it's more practical, given the poverty rate and extreme wealth disparity in India.

I think a much better ethical investment would be XO laptops from OLPC, Internet-in-a-Box devices, and grants to train local teachers on how to use both.

I commend Google for it, but my inner voice is somewhat skeptical that this is a great way to get kids hooked on Google's services. Then again, having a Chromebook is way better than some crappy linux machine/cheap windows laptop. So I think its a win-win for both parties.

Then again, having a Chromebook is way better than some crappy linux machine/cheap windows laptop.

Why? It's a much more limited device with much less potential for learning essential skills.

A Chromebook can only be used to surf the web. It's the polar opposite of what an educational institute needs.

Indeed, a bootable browser has little use outside of... web browsing. Even an old machine with an old OS is more usable, especially when there's no network connectivity. That happens a lot more than you think with a laptop.

Really? Have you ever tried to use good 'ol run-of-the-mill Firefox to browse files, photos and videos? Or open local HTML or JS files? Etc...?

There's HTML5/Javascript IDEs which run entirely client-side which you can install in the browser's cache, or keep the file in your file system. You can give web apps native features and define how it installs/behaves using the App Manifest.

A browser nowadays can do nearly as much as a full OS, even within a full OS.

It depends. A regular laptop can do more things, but most of the time students just need a laptop to research and write articles and the Chromebook does that very well, without exposing the internals of a traditional desktop system.

If I'm a college student, I really don't want to deal with OS upgrades, malware and other things. I just want something that works out of the box and Chromebook does that perfectly. If I really want to tinker, it's not that hard to install a linux distro in a Chromebook and not everyone desires to tinker with their computers.

I think Linux (Ubuntu or Mint) would be great, so students can help build what the big corps are trying to crush and the fact that it really is an outstanding platform to learn from. I wish people would see how these proprietary boxes are not only crap but undermine the open-source community.

The comment "I really don't want to deal with OS upgrades...", does not make sense, as I would think a student (at least when I was one) we wanted to upgrade our OS and for free made it even better. You can also customize a Linux REALLY easy, and that is something as a student I was looking for. So low cost and great power is what at least a tech student would be looking for.

Say you use Windows, 1. Turn on automatic updates (default option, I think) 2. Use something like MS Security essentials

And, if you use Linux, 1. Update regularly, again I guess most distros have a default option to check for updates on boot. And, you don't need to upgrade your OS unless you want/have to.

How much more do you want to dumb it down? For basic use as you mentioned, to research and write articles, you are almost doing nothing already with windows/linux

ChromeOS is dumbed down so much more than that, insofar as nothing ever breaks, update reboots only take a few (<10) seconds, behavior encountered is always 100% predictable, and with a browser being the only available interactive display mode, WYSIWYG. My wife has a MacBook and I have a cheap Acer Revo mini-PC, but she also has a new HP Chromebook and I spend most of my time on either the Pixel in my office or the Samsung Chromebook I'm typing on now. Except for things like needing a traditional OS for random third party hardware support (e.g. Fitbit sync, printer, scanner) or extremely rare requirements for MS Office or photo management, we'd function very well with just browsers.

I know this is an aside, but one of the things that irritates me most about the modern web, and Google's "solution" especially, is photo management. Picasa on the desktop is simplistic but generally 100% ok, but Google+ Photos leads to horrifically unpleasant workflows, and god help you if you want print anything or share on non-Google properties.

I can't upvote strongly enough about the photo stuff.

Recently I discovered that Google+, Facebook etc. all like to interpret "sharing" a photo to mean sharing a link to the page with the photo on it, not to actually share the photo, which is what the user really wants to have happen, not to mention the PITA this is to automate because it suddenly means these photos are behind authorisation walls. (This is on top of how aggressively Google tries to get any photos you take, or send via Gmail, into G+ in the first place).

Quite honestly I've had it with any cloud service that acts like this, and now choose to spam them with irrelevant nonsense of no consequence.

Ugh. Windows always decides to update at the worst times. On University computers we'll do tests on computers for some subjects, and sometimes the computers will be updating or randomly broken somehow...

As for Linux, it's great, doesn't even need to boot to check for updates (I never turn my laptop off, just suspend - doesn't get rebooted for weeks), and you can lock it down sufficiently to prevent tampering/breaking, but there's not many consumer computers with a full Linux distro other than the Raspberry Pi - which would be great, but still 30 dollars each + peripherals is much more than $0.

It's a little hard to tell from the article what the goal is. If the goal is just to use the computers as a means to some other (non-tech) educational end, e.g. as browsers for accessing online information, then Chromebooks seem like a reasonable method of doing so. If the goal is computer education, then I agree they're suboptimal; even something like a Raspberry Pi might be better for that kind of education.

One lingering unease I have about the first use-case, though, is that it forecloses some unplanned exploration. I largely got into tech by fiddling around with lightweight programming on machines that weren't explicitly bought to teach programming. Perhaps web-based dev environments will fill that gap, though; someone with a Chromebook can still experiment with anything from Codeacademy to jsFiddle to sketchpad.cc.

Apart from the good points that other folks are making, this isn't necessarily targeted at engineering students.

A decent screen, a decent keyboard, comes with a word processor, is low maintenance, doesn't get viruses (theoretically at least) and it can access the web. That sounds pretty good to me.

With everything javascript, a browser can get you quite far. You have :

- repl for a handful of languages from javascript to haskell with lisps in between.

- jsfiddle to learn ~basic client-side webdev.

- canvas/webgl to learn ~basic graphic programming.

- if you dig deep enough you have VPRI OMeta for parser/metaprogramming.

- if you're not in a hurry you can even learn ~basic unix (busybox, gcc 4.3) on Fabrice Bellard's jslinux

I don't think you can learn prolog easily though.

If you install crouton, you can learn prolog or anything or if you just hit Ctrl+Alt+T you already have access to bash and chroot into any linux distro or ssh to a cheap vm.

I know, I said that as a snarky conclusion. It's just that you really don't need a full OS in these days of 'everything in the browser' to learn. I say to learn, because web-based everything is often a little bit too slow and resource consuming as of now, but to learn you don't need snap fast interfaces and interpreters.

Funny how people believe things that get repeated, no matter how false.

> A Chromebook can only be used to surf the web. It's the polar opposite of what an educational institute needs.

Chrome OS is a highly customized version of Gentoo at its core. When you activate developer mode, you get access to a full Linux distro. Some people use Portage to install extra tools, some use Crouton to install Ubuntu alongside Chrome OS (they share the same kernel as opposed to dual-booting).

Heck, even if you don't use developer mode, there are some cool JavaScript programming tools that you can download and run locally in the browser.

Think of the hundred of millions of kids who've been hooked onto Microsoft's products. Why shouldn't kids have a choice?

I think we should strive for not repeating the Microsoft situation with a different brand. Like someone else commented, a Raspberry Pi seems like a better solution. Chromebooks are extremely tied to Google services.

rPi might seem ok at first, but I'm really not sure it's the best solution for cases like this, I find it's too much of a 'hacker' device? Sure if it works, it gives you a pretty usable general purpose OS (kinda slow though) but if it breaks (and it will sooner than the ordinary laptop/PC, either in software or in hardware) you'll have to have quite some linux experience in order to fix it.

I agree with your last sentence though. One single device tied to a single OS is a bad choice. I'd rather give them a laptop that dual-boots Linux and Windows. That at least gives children a taste of the real world where more than one OS is used and learns them how to use both.

> Why shouldn't kids have a choice?

With chrome you can develop for the web which is the most open platform that works everywhere. And if you want to develop in native, you can install crouton and do whatever you want. Chromebooks are not locked in or "jailed", they all come with a dev switch that is documented by google and encouraged for anyone who wants to use it: http://www.chromium.org/chromium-os/developer-information-fo...

This is the way it should be in my opinion, the possibility to mess up with your device should not be enabled by default to avoid confusing noobs. But, if you're a tinkerer, it should be as easy as pressing a few keys and the process should be duly documented by the manufacturer and it should not breach the warranty. This comes from a happy pixel owner who enjoys hacking on Golang, js and even ruby among other languages on my chromebook. Best environment I've had after 10+ years of ubuntu and some osx :)

Even better is wiping the chromebook and putting linux on it!

It already comes with a Linux. You might want to put a different flavour of Linux on it, if you care enough. It's pretty easy, at least if you are willing to boot from external media.

Hopefully the kids learns exactly this. How to get rid of the Google lock-in, and installs something that unlocks the full potential of the hardware.

Google actually has lots of documentation on how to do that.

You should create something better than Linux and distribute it for free.

A Chromebook is essentially a cheap linux machine.

"I commend Google for it..."

Why? This initiative is clearly in their own self-interest. That's not meant to be a cycnical jab, but just stating how it is.

Much more disturbing to me are the privacy implications. Since you cannot use a Chromebook without signing into the OS, Google has the potential to track everything you do on a Chromebook. And now they're giving these computers to kids.

Just stop and think about that for a few seconds. Over the course of a year, Google will potentially know every single website you visit, every document you print (even to your desktop printer), how ofen and when you use their online apps, and who knows what else? Their vaguely-worded privacy policies simply don't tell you what they track and record.

The privacy implications are horrendous in my view. Until Google clearly and unambiguosly state what they track and record I would never recommend using ChromeOS (that, plus the limited capabilities of the OS).

> Since you cannot use a Chromebook without signing into the OS, Google has the potential to track everything you do on a Chromebook.

Pixel owner here. You can sign in as guest without a google account and use chrome without a google account then. You can even run as incognito in guest mode if you really care.

You're right, but a guest account won't allow you to use Google apps - a key part of using ChromeBooks. But more importantly, why should you have to use a guest account in the first place in order to avoid sending your online activity to Google?

I know many posters here have no qualms about Google tracking their online behaviour, but at the very least I would expect Google to clearly state what they track and record when using ChromeOS. That's not an unreasonable expectation. It's something that Google does not provide.

Using ChromeOS is just like using Chrome so it's the same thing. Both are open source and you can check and disable what kind of info Chrome sends to Google.

Is it possible to install regular Ubuntu or something on a Chromebook? I'd absolutely hate to see kids use computers whose operation they do not control.

Developer mode. Chrome OS = Gentoo, and you can use Crouton to install Ubuntu or another distro alongside Chrome OS (and they share the kernel as opposed to dual-booting).

They're probably hoping for something like this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X3ipm3fDU60.

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