Saving money in Schools; saving money / environment with Koolu

Official Google Blog: Get your people talking

my brother works for a school, and he recently made a joke when discussing the horrendous cost of proprietary software licensing to provide groupware and communications services - even at the "reduced" prices.

what he said jokingly was "well why don't we use google?" then he actually investigated google apps, and had to immediately go and tell people "well actually I know I was joking but we CAN use google!"

so he got onto google, to talk with one of their people, just to get reassurance that things were correct - namely that shared calendaring, document editing, email, everything that they really really needed would be free. the answer was simple: yes. to schools: yes.

they've gone ahead and put the kids and teachers in front of google apps.

now of course, they have these monstrously heavy machines which cost them a fortune to buy and a fortune to run, which, for most of the time, they're only using a fraction of their capacity.

and they would LOVE to be able to recommend koolu computers, because these little machines are more than adequate to connect to google apps, and only use 5 watts of electricity to do it (by comparison, standard machines being sold today are typically supplied with 500 watt or 1,000 watt power supplies. over a hundred times more electricity can be consumed by standard desktop machines, to do the same job )

the one remaining issue is that there are certain school programs which are only available as proprietary software for proprietary operating systems.

if those applications were available for koolu, my brother's school would drop the heavy-handed hardware like the dead weight that it is.