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$795,000,000 / 9000 computers == $1258 per computer. Pick a reseller at random - http://www.ple.com.au/homesmall.php - and look for a suitable PC: $1040 inc GST. Lop off $149 for XP Home OEM since schools effectively won't be paying for that to get $891 a seat. OK, where's the other $367 going?
When you remember that the $891 is a retail price for just one machine and that you'd expect *much* better pricing for 9000 of the suckers, the problem gets much worse.
I can supply Athlon64 machines with a full gigabyte of RAM and 200GB hard disk for those prices at quantity 1000 up.
Where has all the money gone?
Con Zymaris reminds us that Extramadura (in Spain) was aiming for three times the computer-to-student density that Bob Carr is here proud of, using only Linux-based computers. Extramadura is not a rich place. Has Paul Keating's banana republic finally arrived?
Extremadura, Spain "... has a ratio of 1 PC per 2 students."
FLOSS deployment in Extremadura, Spain
<a href="http://europa.eu.int/idabc/en/document/1637/470">http://europa.eu.int/idabc/en/document/1637/470</a>
"Based on a distribution of a minimum of 40,000 copies of the LinEx software in schools, the project has calculated to save a total amount of €30 million compared to more closed or non-free software solutions."
Ideal context for using Linux Terminal Server Project. Oregon public schools in the US have had great success with that. Low costs, low / easy maintenance, and no security problems. You can buy cheap diskless machines for less than $100 each and have two dual Xeons or dual G5 Xserves (running linux) to serve the applications.
http://www.ltsp.org/
Whoops, dropped a major decimal there! )-:
39,000 computers * 4 years == 156,000 computers.
$795,000,000 / 156,000 computers == $5096 per computer.
For that much, they can have dual Athlon64s, a couple of GB of RAM, DVD burners, a pair of RAID1'ed 200GB hard drives dual 17" flatscreens and a glow-in-the-dark video card to drive them. And I'd still take home a whopping >150% markup.
If they spent half of that money on support, that's still more than $600 per seat per year even with the whizz-bang hardware. I'd be startled if I had to spend $60 per seat per year, but maybe I've been free of MS Windows for too long? Even if they had to build a $200,000 computer lab complex for every 100 computers they shipped, it's still too much money.
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If governments replaced every second Microsoft seat with a Linux seat, the ratio of computers:students would go up significantly. People would still have their Windows, while learning how to use desktop Linux (it's easy) and finding out how better off they really are. :)