[Csped] Re: CSPED Digest, Vol 3, Issue 4

[David Hertenstein]

Once we find all of our cheap components and our open source software,
whatever these might be, how will our system be built for mass distrobution.
For example, if we have 1000 people in africa who want our system, who is
going to put these systems together... us? Are we going to pay some company
to assemble it? Similarly, how will the software be installed once the
hardware is assembled? I imagine that this part of the project, I think it
would be called the distrobution aspect of our system, will need to be
figured out.

My idea is this, we find the component hardware that we can buy in any
quantity online or from all the individual companys, such as the keyboard
and the mobo and the memory and proc etc. For all of these we can find the
cheapest yet most powerful combination that exists in the commercial market,
but not worry about doing assembly ourselves, but instead create a very
detailed manual for assembling the box yourself. So the person who needs the
system, orders all of the parts themselves, but quickly and easily because
we have the parts all tabulated and instructions on ordering and shipping
and all of that. We could maybe even have different options in components
that we have found based on how much they can spend?

Doing this would require users to either be somehwat handy, or we would need
a badass manual for assembling the system...

Once they do this we could have a bootable thumbdrive to hold the linux
distrobution and whatever software package we come up with, like word proc
and spreadsheet and drivers for the hardware. I'm not sure how we would get
them the thumbdrive, maybe this is what we do the inhouse assembly on. Or we
could do something where they "rent" a thumbdrive" kind of like netflix, no
late fees just charge for each month until they send it back. This way they
don't foot the cost of buying the flash drive, they dont have to download
the package from an already working computer/internet connection, they don't
actually have to have an internet connection, and they don't have to burn a
cd or even have a cd-rom drive.

Please feel free to correct me on anything here it's just some initial
thoughts that I figured I'd share with the group.

David H.
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