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Google offering free Chromebooks to Indian schools

timesofindia.indiatimes.com

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Re: Google offering free Chromebooks to Indian schools

#41

Post by snowbunny »

patrickaljord wrote: post #31
auctiontheory wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

> 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-info…

When you do an dev unlock, it erases all data so you can't dual boot, it's all or nothing. The unlock method is awkward, and every single time you ever boot again, you have to click past a scary looking warning.

And people were complaining about UEFI secure boot in Windows 8, where all you needed to do was turn a checkbox off with the mouse in the BIOS settings.

Re: Google offering free Chromebooks to Indian schools

#42

Post by snowbunny »

shimon_e wrote: post #2

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

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?

Re: Google offering free Chromebooks to Indian schools

#44

Post by seiji »

salient wrote: post #7

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".

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

Re: Google offering free Chromebooks to Indian schools

#45

Post by chestnut-tree »

patrickaljord wrote: post #30
chestnut-tree wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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…

> 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.

Re: Google offering free Chromebooks to Indian schools

#46

Post by vezzy-fnord »

snowbunny wrote: post #42
shimon_e wrote: post #2

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

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.

Re: Google offering free Chromebooks to Indian schools

#47

Post by blubbi2 »

eru wrote: post #26
blubbi2 wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.

Re: Google offering free Chromebooks to Indian schools

#48

Post by [deleted] »

blubbi2 wrote: post #47
eru wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

[deleted]

Re: Google offering free Chromebooks to Indian schools

#49

Post by fidotron »

eitally wrote: post #35
pavanred wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 a…

ChromeOS is dumbed down so much more than that, insofar as nothing ever breaks, update reboots only take a few ( 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 a…

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.

Re: Google offering free Chromebooks to Indian schools

#50

Post by Mikeb85 »

pavanred wrote: post #21
rwbt wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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 a…

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.

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