What's the rush?

So, in a recent meeting of the College ICT Committee, the 1:1 plans were discussed, and critically, the budget for said plans has started to take shape.

The budget will be the biggest I've been responsible for putting together.  Although the idea is that we'd be asking parents to contribute to the cost of the program, it still represents a considerable dent in the College's cash-flow.  But I guess that's the price we need to pay to ge the program started.

Timeframes have also been discussed.  There was some talk of looking at kicking it off at the beginning of 2013.  I can't see how that's even possible.  There's only 1 term left in 2012 and for a normal sized rollout I'd already want to be looking at some candidate machines.  Then there's the question of our staff laptops, which are due to be replaced at the start of 2013.  I think a 2013 start is going to be pushing our luck.

Dell Roadshow

I've recently travelled to Slowbart to see what Dell have in store with their Windows 8 based machines.  I can't say I really feel any more enlightened though.

The Dell sales guys brought some pretty standard laptops and ultrabooks, and an old Windows 7 tablet, but not much else.  They had Powerpoint slides of the Dell XPS-12, which is certainly an interesting machine (although I wonder about the durablity of the hinge mecahnism), and a plastic mock-up of their Windows 8 slate (the Latitude 10, I think).

Anyway, it ws nice to be able to talk to the Dell people, and I certainly got some good information about availability.  That is, that it looks like we wont see anything until after the Windows 8 launch. I also learned that there will be a lot of Intel Atom based equipment coming out, due largely to Intels very aggressive pricing of this platform.  I'm told this is an improvement on the old Atom chips.  It would need to be.