[OLPC India] Partnering with OLPC in India

[Joshua N Pritikin]

On Tue, Sep 09, 2008 at 07:32:09PM +0545, Dev Mohanty wrote:
> if they've even figured out how to replace broken hardware,

Repair centers are going up around the world. India could be next. Just 
google for data.

> or are they even thinking of tagging XO's anywhere close to the 100 
> USD figure sometime in the recent future, which to me sounds awfully 
> far-fetched right now.

An Indian G1G1 would make that possible.

> Well, if it's all about the education, then I firmly believe no number 
> should not be small enough for a pilot.

Being the tech contact for the pilot in my school, I can understand why 
we need to get to bigger numbers. The amount of effort required to 
manage the laptops is much more for small pilots than for big pilots. 

- Child ownership means that the teachers don't have to figure out how 
to uncustomize the laptop after the previous child customized it. The 
next release 8.2 is going to be much more customizable than 8.1.

- A school server is approximately the same amount of headache to set up 
for 10 laptops as it is for 1000 laptops.

- For hardware failures, we can't afford to deal with them because they 
are so infrequent. If there were 10,000 laptops then we could probably 
afford one full-time person for hardware repairs and troubleshooting.

This is just the tip of the iceberg. Big deployments make sense. Small 
deployments consume too much effort for the payback.

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