[dundee] Taylug Weekly Articles 8 - POMS

[Robert McWilliam]

On Tue, Feb 05, 2008 at 02:32:05AM -0800, Gary Short wrote:
> > You can quibble the numbers (I mostly made them up) 
> 
> I do. You base your arguement on the unit cost arguing that you
> couldn't get much of a teacher for $100; true enough. However, I
> argue the point on the total development cost, all the R&D all the
> shipping, everything. I believe the total must come to millions of
> dollars. Now that would buy you a lot of teachers in the third
> world.

I was talking about the investment per pupil[1]. How do you think the
numbers change just because we are talking about a large number of
pupils?  

	 Robert


[1] And yes, ignoring the NREs since they wont be particularly large
compared to the unit cost at the kind of numbers where you're giving
every child a laptop. Even if they get no where near that and only
ship a couple of hundred thousand units the millions of dollars in NRE
comes to a lot less than the unit cost so wouldn't shift my numbers
anything like the multiple orders of magnitude needed to change the
conclusion. I also ignored shipping and admin and other things, lets
be pessimistic and assume that all of this comes to another $100 per
unit, this means you might get 20 hours of a teachers time (being very
optimistic on this side) for the same money. I don't think that's
enough of a difference to change the conclusion.

________________________________________________________
Robert McWilliam     rmcw at allmail.net    www.ormiret.com

Friends help you move.
Real friends help you move bodies.