I have been discussing these issues off-list w/ Greg Smith. I will summarize some of our discussion and then reply to Sameer about physical security for the XS and to the general suggestion that the XO can serve as an XS. I have paraphrased Greg's question, don't blame him if I have bastardized his phrasings.
Here is the quick gist, 1) a lot of poor schools can gather the funds to take care of the XS if shown the potential benefits and 2) IMHO using the XO as XS is not a good idea. Q: Are most of your target schools likely to have Internet and money/power to have a server? A: If the schools can afford to pay for the electricity to charge the XO's, then they can easily afford a server. Q: How did it go putting a server in schools and making sure they don't get stolen? A: This is true, it is hard to secure a server, but if a school can't provide a secure place for the server then they can't secure their copper electrical wiring, a wireless router, or any other kind networking equipment. If the school can't afford electricity, then the students who attend probably don't have electricity at home. Our requirement for working w/ a school is that the school already has electricity. A hosted solution can work as long as their is a really consistent Internet connection to the school. That can be hard in __a lot__ of developing countries. Frankly, I think it is much, much easier to secure the XS than provide a stable Internet connection to a remote school. Q: Perhaps we should focus on the poorest countries. Therefore no Internet and no server. The server can actually still add value even with no Internet but there is concern its hard to secure. A: Easy. If the school can't keep their electrical wiring from getting stolen, they can't keep the server safe. The copper in electrical wiring is quite valuable as thieves could easily repurpose it for home wiring. Q: What are some possible benefits to using a regular tower pc as XS? Virtually every Dept of Ed will want to put much more content on the XS than can fit on an XO. You can add external USB hard drives until it becomes one big kludge. Additionally, I am convinced that school administrators would see the XO-as-XS as a spare XO and distribute to kids who don't have XO's at their school or take it home to their own child. We can add a lot of value to the OLPC initiative through the XS, for relatively low investment of time and effort, but only if the XS hardware can be upgraded. The XO obviously can't be upgraded. A few examples: 1) e-mail for the teachers hosted on the XS. This gives teachers a bigger stake in OLPC deployments and in the making sure their Internet connection stays up. BTW, gmail is waaaay too slow across a slow Internet connection. 2) VoIP connection to the Dept of Ed., so the Dept of Ed can call the school, and vice versa. A great incentive to the school and Dept to maintain and fund that Internet connection. 3) Offline wikipedia, moodle courses, local copies of indigenous art and music resources, I could go on forever. There are drawbacks to the PC-as-XS, most notably power. However, you will have to to set up power backup anyways to maintain the Internet connection. There are some scenarios where an XS may not be feasible at all, but we must have a baseline requirement here for an XO deployment: the majority of the kids OR the school must have consistent electricity. Here in Nepal our base requirement is that a pilot school must already have electricity. -- Bryan W. Berry Technology Director OLE Nepal, http://www.olenepal.org _______________________________________________ Server-devel mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/server-devel