Re: [seul-edu] Typical costs paid by school districtsfor software ?

[Doug Loss <dloss@suscom.net>]

Culp, David wrote:
> 
> Even large school districts if they would stop listening to the consultants
> they hire that tell them they must have the latest and greatest machines
> could save a bundle.  Ive got a 400Mhz PII with 128MB of RAM and 10GB HD
> with an HP desk Jet 692C for a workstation as do the other teachers in the
> school who use it mainly to do email, surf and do wordprocessing.  This is
> way overkill as I have not even begun to tax the machine!  Going with an AMD
> processor, less RAM and smaller HD could save around $200.00 in hardware
> costs alone.  Which would equate to 1.4 million dollars for my district with
> their 7,000 machines!
> 
> This is where we should concentrate the cost savings, in hardware.  Of
> course this is just a surface examination with very little research.
> 
Here we have room for an interesting analysis.  Take a reference
scholastic network of workstations and servers (I'm assuming Microsoft
here, but the same analysis could be done with Macintoshes) and measure
the performance of selected applications such as MS Word, Excel, etc. 
Use whatever measurements seem most appropriate (time to open a file of
X size, time to spell-check entire document, etc.) to characterize
performance.  Repeat same measurements on a Linux-based network.  See
what level of hardware is necessary on both server and workstation to
give equivalent performance to the reference network (using equivalent
programs such as Star Office or ApplixWare, or AbiWord and Gnumeric). 
Show cost differences between hardware necessary for equivalent
performance.

This may be a bit difficult to actually do, but it would be very
interesting to have some figures of what cost differences a Linux
network of equivalent perceived performance would give versus what
schools are running now.

-- 
Doug Loss                 The difference between the right word and
Data Network Coordinator  the almost right word is the difference
Bloomsburg University     between lightning and a lightning bug.
dloss@bloomu.edu                Mark Twain