The K12 public school (I'm assuming Title 1 from the free lunches) comment struck especially close to home.
A few years ago, in helping my mother get ready for a new year of kindergarten teaching at a similar school, she asked if I could do anything about the computers (slow, unreliable, etc etc).
... In ~2013, the best processor of the four machine lot was a 2.8ghz P4. With 2GB of RAM.
It had obviously been cobbled together by a well-meaning local computer shop, as it used quality components, and yes, this was kindergarten. But still, my mother and her like occasionally liked to show kinds YouTube videos to reinforce lessons.
When the OLPC project came out there were a fair amount of notes about how technological progress can make things better or cheaper, and corporations always choose better (because margins, capturing value, avoiding commodity status, etc etc).
But that thrust leaves a lot of people ill-served.
Single core is a lot worse than I remembered. I had booted up my wife's college desktop with a P4 in it. Pretty unusable experience, I eventually gave up on trying to reinstall Windows before giving it away.
Pentium 4's pretty bad by modern standards, unfortunately. It's well over a decade old and wasn't all that great even when it was introduced. I think the cut-off for "good enough to be used today" is somewhere around the Core 2 Duo which was introduced a decade ago and was a huge step up from the Pentium 4.
A few years ago, in helping my mother get ready for a new year of kindergarten teaching at a similar school, she asked if I could do anything about the computers (slow, unreliable, etc etc).
... In ~2013, the best processor of the four machine lot was a 2.8ghz P4. With 2GB of RAM.
It had obviously been cobbled together by a well-meaning local computer shop, as it used quality components, and yes, this was kindergarten. But still, my mother and her like occasionally liked to show kinds YouTube videos to reinforce lessons.
When the OLPC project came out there were a fair amount of notes about how technological progress can make things better or cheaper, and corporations always choose better (because margins, capturing value, avoiding commodity status, etc etc).
But that thrust leaves a lot of people ill-served.