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posted by martyb on Sunday August 30 2020, @01:32PM   Printer-friendly
from the of-course-it-is-impossible-to-get-online-using-a-desktop dept.

US Laptop Shortage Could Derail Remote Learning:

As students and teachers prepare for a return to in-person learning for at least some of the time this fall, many of the nation's schools are facing shortages and delays for laptops and tablets needed for online learning, an Associated Press investigation revealed.

Lenovo, HP and Dell, the nation's largest computer companies, have informed school districts that they are short nearly five million laptops.

[...] Last month, at the request of President Donald Trump, the U.S. Department of Commerce imposed sanctions on 11 Chinese companies, including Lenovo, AP reported. School administrators have asked the Trump administration to devise a solution because remote learning without laptops is impossible.

Lenovo has informed school districts of the supply chain delays and the trade controls set by the Commerce Department, which would cause another slowdown. Lenovo declined to respond to an inquiry from AP.

Have any Soylentils run into this?


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  • (Score: 5, Informative) by Grishnakh on Sunday August 30 2020, @01:35PM (13 children)

    by Grishnakh (2831) on Sunday August 30 2020, @01:35PM (#1044164)

    No, because I only get refurb business-class laptops, when I do get them. Computers aren't getting any faster, and haven't been for a long time; they're just adding cores (which only helps with parallel workloads, not so much with just using a web browser), and decreasing power consumption (which is good because you get longer battery life, but otherwise isn't too noticeable). So you don't need to be on an upgrade treadmill.

    If you're having trouble finding a laptop, then just look on Ebay.

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  • (Score: 3, Informative) by canopic jug on Sunday August 30 2020, @03:10PM (1 child)

    by canopic jug (3949) Subscriber Badge on Sunday August 30 2020, @03:10PM (#1044186) Journal

    Another place to look is at expired or expiring Chromebooks as they are offloaded at a discount. PCWorld has compiled a handy list of 77 Chromebook models about to expire [pcworld.com]. You can get them for a substantial discount and then upgrade to coreboot firmware [mrchromebox.tech] and then install the GNU/Linux distro of your choice.

    The down side is that you will need some kind of external storage because the SSDs on the Chromebooks are very small and the hardware often has no physical spare room for a longer SSD with more capacity. However, that is not much of a problem for school work since most classes and schools have already arranged for online storage somewhere. It might suck but they have it for the duration of the class and somtimes a little while afterward. If you are doing something instead for the SOHO, then there are a lot of options from SFTP to Ceph to Samba to NFS depending on your situation.

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    • (Score: 2) by krishnoid on Sunday August 30 2020, @07:48PM

      by krishnoid (1156) on Sunday August 30 2020, @07:48PM (#1044298)

      External storage [amazon.com] of a sort is reasonably inexpensive, and usually is available on Black Friday specials as well. ChromeOS's standard Open/Save File dialogs also provide Google-Drive as a standard (if slower) source/destination.

  • (Score: 3, Insightful) by jon3k on Sunday August 30 2020, @04:24PM (3 children)

    by jon3k (3718) Subscriber Badge on Sunday August 30 2020, @04:24PM (#1044208)

    Computers aren't getting any faster, and haven't been for a long time

    Yes they are. AMD has given us double digit IPC improvements multiple times since Zen launched in 2017.

    • (Score: 2) by FatPhil on Monday August 31 2020, @04:40AM (2 children)

      by FatPhil (863) <pc-soylentNO@SPAMasdf.fi> on Monday August 31 2020, @04:40AM (#1044485) Homepage
      What IPC did they have before the improvements?
      What IPC did they have after the improvements?
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      • (Score: 3, Funny) by Osamabobama on Monday August 31 2020, @05:10PM (1 child)

        by Osamabobama (5842) on Monday August 31 2020, @05:10PM (#1044642)

        I just poked around looking for that answer, and discovered that generally, IPC is measured in % improvement over an ever-shifting baseline. However, I did find actual numbers between 3.1 and 3.6 for some processors. There was also a vague reference to a theoretical maximum of 4.0, with current architecture (at the time of that article-Skylake can allegedly reach 5.0).

        But in common numbers, the AMD Ryzen came with a 52% improvement in IPC over the previous, obsolete crap that was on the market before. And these days, 18% improvement is typical. NB this paragraph is entirely composed of useless, outdated, unsourced trivia. I include it to illustrate my frustration with IPC benchmarking.

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        • (Score: 2) by FatPhil on Monday August 31 2020, @07:09PM

          by FatPhil (863) <pc-soylentNO@SPAMasdf.fi> on Monday August 31 2020, @07:09PM (#1044686) Homepage
          Double digit *percentage* improvements would make sense.
          I was scared by the concept of double-digit IPC improvements. Not that I've been following architectures for nearly a couple of decades since DEC was ruling the roost with their Alpha, and figures approaching 4 were the target back then.
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  • (Score: 2) by barbara hudson on Sunday August 30 2020, @04:25PM (6 children)

    by barbara hudson (6443) <barbara.Jane.hudson@icloud.com> on Sunday August 30 2020, @04:25PM (#1044209) Journal
    What, desktops aren't "cool enough" for students? When it's a choice between a desktop or nothing, take the desktop. It's not like you actually have to put it on a desk.
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    • (Score: 2) by c0lo on Sunday August 30 2020, @04:41PM (1 child)

      by c0lo (156) Subscriber Badge on Sunday August 30 2020, @04:41PM (#1044220) Journal

      You can tell there a difference between portable and transportable, can't you?

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    • (Score: 5, Insightful) by kazzie on Sunday August 30 2020, @05:28PM (2 children)

      by kazzie (5309) Subscriber Badge on Sunday August 30 2020, @05:28PM (#1044235)

      There's a slight argument that laptops don't require as much space to set up - they're not sending desks home with the students too, are they?

      Plus, if you're doing any teaching by videoconferencing, you'll need to source extra hardware and get the students to plug it in. Laptops typically have the webcam and microphone built-in.

      • (Score: 5, Interesting) by JoeMerchant on Sunday August 30 2020, @09:04PM

        by JoeMerchant (3937) on Sunday August 30 2020, @09:04PM (#1044339)

        We're using a laptop as the home schooling computer, but still have a wired big monitor, keyboard, mouse and webcam plugged into it - ignoring the bits on the 2014 Dell which probably cost $4K new - simply because the $20 keyboard/mouse and $25 webcam work better than the stuff built into the laptop. Granted, it's a bunch of wires, but they don't get in the way where we've got it installed - and that installation provides a clear "we are doing schoolwork here" area which seems to help with focus and attention, and resignation to forget about outside interests while doing schoolwork.

        On the Raspberry Pi in his bedroom, our 10th grader may watch a homework video - but he's always wanting to open other tabs and do other things while the homework is playing, something about the defined schoolwork space makes a big difference - even if it's just in the middle of the family room.

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      • (Score: 3, Interesting) by barbara hudson on Sunday August 30 2020, @09:20PM

        by barbara hudson (6443) <barbara.Jane.hudson@icloud.com> on Sunday August 30 2020, @09:20PM (#1044343) Journal
        So do like other schools are doing - give out $100 smartphones. There's no shortage, and the kids already know how to use them.
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    • (Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 30 2020, @10:07PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 30 2020, @10:07PM (#1044362)

      I think they're talking about bulk inexpensive laptop purchases for an entire school district, not individual purchases.

      Our district has been providing a $150 Chromebook to every student when they enter high school. With COVID-19 they wanted to extend that to all students in all grades, but couldn't get that many additional Chromebooks on short notice.

      Getting a desktop, keyboard, mouse, and monitor for $150 is also a challenge. You can certainly manage it on the used market - or at least you could in February, I imagine demand has surged since then. But I doubt they could equip the whole district that way either.

      And for example, I have four kids and I work at home. Since I'm in the tech industry, I already had four desktops and three laptops in the house, so we're fine. But I imagine many families with N kids have N-1 or N-2 computers, and that makes remote learning a challenge if all of the kids are supposed to attend Zoom conferences at the same time.