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Windows Cheap Enough For $2B Aussie Laptop Deal
An anonymous reader writes "Windows-based netbooks aren't too expensive to be ruled out of the Aussie government's billion dollar promise to give a laptop to every school-aged child, according to several education departments. The admission follows an earlier report that open source machines based on Ubuntu or Mandriva are the only option to deliver up to four million computers to students for under $2 billion. Microsoft itself claimed it will keep costs per unit down by hosting a lot of the educational software in the cloud rather than on the netbook devices."
This seems like apples and oranges... With Ubuntu (for example) they're storing their files locally, with Windows they're going to be stored on Microsoft's servers somewhere, it's not really a comparable solution.
I agree absolutely, and Microsoft will have to cave in because the thought of every school kid in the country using Linux and OpenOffice would give them nightmares. I would like to see the Education departments really use Linux laptops, but they do not have the guts to carry it through.
to give a laptop to every school-aged child
No, the policy is to give upper high school children in years 9-12 a laptop not "every school-aged child".
Note that the article is about Australia; one Aussie dollar currently equals 66 US cents and after the various middlemen get their markup the value of a computer in AUD is often double its USD value.
(funny how every time the AUD approaches the USD, something happens to the stock market to bring it back down :p)
This is in Australian dollars (approx. $330 USD) and includes a maintenance contract.
For millions of units of something made in Taiwan, it shouldn't be terribly difficult to get a reasonable price on it in Australia. At that volume, you can rent your own ship. If you're the Australian government, you shouldn't be paying customs. Etc.
-- The act of censorship is always worse than whatever is being censored. Always.
And when you use a more efficient Linux environment as LXDE the maschine gets faster and more eco-efficient. If teaching applications move the cloud as Microsoft pretends the client operating system does not matter.
Unfortunately it doesn't work that way.
Yes, the stuff is made in Taiwan or somewhere else in South East Asia, and yes, that's closer to Australia, than it is to most of the US, but we still pay more for everything.
It's just the way things are. Just about everything is more expensive here.
Oh dear. You're not familiar with the Australian government are you?
For a start, the majority of the cost on computers is luxury tax. Yes, the tax man in Australia still considers computers to be a "luxury".
Secondly, if the education department was to opt not to pay the luxury tax on these laptops then the revenue department would claim a shortfall. Ever wonder why government employees have to pay income tax? I mean, shit, their salary comes from the government. For a while I thought the defense force had got it right and didn't tax the wages of soldiers and airmen and such. But no, my confusion was from the advertising for the army reserve. Apparently that's just a carrot. I don't understand how they figure it's a carrot, but apparently it is. Oh, and for added hilarity, did you know that you have to pay taxes on unemployment benefits received from the government? Typically you don't.. because benefits are so low that it puts you under the tax free threshold.. but if you're unemployed for 6 months and employed for the remaining 6 months of a financial year, your combined incoming (benefits+salary) is taxed.. and you'll pay sales tax either way, and import taxes and luxury tax. Double, triple, quadruple taxes.. the ATO has no shame.
How we know is more important than what we know.
Er... Linux Standard Base, anyone?
Though it's hardly been announced to great fanfare, work is being done to standardize a certain amount of the Linux kernel across the various distributions. This should help to bridge one major gap.
Unfortunately, solving the packaging system is going to be much more difficult. It'll likely become a two horse race, between APT and RPM, but that still leaves us with a race to be done (and inevitably, for some people to be burned by).
Unless we want to school all APT distro users in the use of alien... let's stop right there, that isn't going to happen.
And neither will Linux on Aussie netbooks, unless people realise that while F/OSS is free, professional 24/7 support isn't. And don't think M$ is just going to fight fairly - if need be, it's going to be throwing money at the government to secure this deal. They've played this game many a time (most recently, the OOXML fiasco) and won most of them, and they know how short-sighted government officials can be.
Bottom line is, when M$ is trying to secure a market, F/OSS is free but M$ is better than free.
It's only afterwards that people realise what they've done, but a contract is a contract and I doubt there's many ways to wriggle out of that.
While Australia's wired access in rural areas is lacking, we have pretty much ubiquitous access to fast mobile (wireless) broadband. In fact, you can get 7.2mbit access pretty much everywhere in the country.
That's soon going to be 21mbit, the first large scale roll-out in the world of that particular mobile technology.
Really? The best Telstra can do is 3mbps download. If you want to pay $125 a month you can get a 10Gb shaped download plan (shaped to 64kbps if you exceed this). Sounds expensive.
Most of the plans are capped at 1Gb or less (25c a MB if exceeded).
I'm an accountant and this is wrong. There is no luxury tax on computers. It is certainly not the majority of cost on computers.
There is no luxury tax. I'll let you work out if it's a taxable supply for GST purposes. Suggest reading the GST Act.
The tax legislation takes the view that it is income. I don't think that's unreasonable.
You are putting the blame in the wrong spot. The Australian Tax Office's prime responsibility is for the administration of the tax system. They make some rulings, and the courts decide definitively on edge cases but ultimately the tax legislation has been determined by parliament and is contained in the various tax acts.
With respect to the US, this was debunked time and time again.
Yes, US is large. But most of its population is still gathered in very densely populated areas. Regardless, even within those areas, broadband saturation is nowhere near as high as it is in similarly populated areas in Europe, not to mention Korea or Japan.
Furthermore, Canada and a few European countries (such as Finland) also have pretty large swathes of land with little population scattered around villages, yet they somehow manage to get broadband there as well.
Try again.