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

[Hemann, Jason]

Ok, its about time I weigh in here. 
I had a couple of things that we might take into consideration to further refine along the lines of where I think Tim's going.  We might try to get a bulk discount, and talk specifically to manufacturers or resellers and see what they'll do for us. If we're buying 1000 graphics cards, we might be able to get a couple of bucks off, and in that quantity, it makes a difference. 

We also want to produce something that is going to be manufactured for a long time. The benefit to having a standardized system is that it's easy to maintain -- if you fix the problem on one system, you know how to fix it on all. Limiting the components we are dealing with would help that. We aren't likely to run into this issue immediately, but we don't want to buy from Shady Graphics Inc., because if they go out of business we have to get some replacement part, and suddenly have to support more possible incompatibilities. 

As for the other stuff, I'd like to work on the wireless microsensor networks or quantified relevance logics teams. Since those don't exist, I have a little experience in Hardware and Apps install, and I think I'd be ok helping out there. I don't have a whole lot of OS experience, but I could help out there if needed.

JH

-----Original Message-----
From: csped-bounces at sol.cs.trinity.edu on behalf of Tim Nunamaker
Sent: Sat 03/02/2007 13:18
To: CS Professional, Ethics,Design Course Discussion List (Howland)
Subject: Re: [Csped] Re: CSPED Digest, Vol 3, Issue 4
 
On Sat, 2007-02-03 at 11:45 -0600, David Hertenstein wrote:
> 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. 

That is indeed an important thing to consider. Worst case scenario, it
will be an ongoing project for the CS department for years to come. More
likely though, I think the P2P group would be taking care of that,
wouldn't they?

> 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...

I think you're overestimating the end user's ability to assemble a
computer. Don't forget that they probably won't speak perfect English,
and they might not have ever even seen a computer. Also, allowing the
hardware to be chosen by the user will make it very difficult to manage
a large amount of these machines. 

Who's actually paying for these machines? Are we designing a low cost
system to make it easier for the users to purchase them, or are we
designing a low cost system to make it easier for people to give it to
them? In either case, I think allowing the user to pay for a better
machine would be kind of out of the scope of this project.

> 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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