Delivering some hardware, I'll concede as not that tricky. Delivering a fairly advanced piece of kit at a very low price is another matter. Doing it on the relatively limited scale we are talking here (Kickstarter's statisics would suggest not too many over 800 kits going out: http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/ouya/ouya-a-new-kind-of-video-game-console?ref=live - add up the numbers for the $699 and above pledges) is particularly tricky.

I can't find any off the shelf Tegra 3 boards; the nearest option is the KTT30 ( http://emea.kontron.com/products/boards+and+mezzanines/embedded+motherboards/miniitx+motherboards/ktt30mitx.html ) which is unpriced and "Coming Soon!", despite a number of articles expecting it to come out in Q4 2012. The devkit board retails for 529 Euros ( http://shop.seco.com/carma-devkit.html?___store=eu_en&___from_store=eu_en ) by itself, for comparison.

It's worth saying that the Nexus 7 hadn't been announced when I said this, and even if it had you have to wonder whether removing the touchscreen is enough to save 50% of the price, especially with Google's ability to use economies of scale to mitigate R&D costs. I would point out that the Nexus 7 is predicted to be selling around a million a month ( http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/google/9645052/Google-Nexus-7-tablet-sales-approaching-1m-a-month.html ), or over 20 times the pre-orders for the Ouya. Even then the Nexus 7 is generally presumed not to be making a profit on hardware (which the Ouya will have to do).

Well, I said it couldn't be done, I was wrong. Very well done to them!

> There is NO benefit for customers from this at all that I can see.

Okay, lets assume it costs (all in, with all your overheads, taxes, etc.) $x to fly a plane from A to B, and it will carry y passengers. So if the airline can sell y seats at $x/y each, it breaks even. If it doesn't believe that's possible, it won't run the flight, no-one gets to fly from A to B.

So how about instead they sell a small number of seats at a vastly inflated price (we'll call it "Business class" shall we), in return for benefits that don't cost nearly as much as the price difference. Suddenly the rest of the seats can be sold more cheaply and the flight goes ahead still.

We can continue that, to differentiate people who kinda fancy going from A to B (ie for a holiday), from those who have to (ie for work). If you can persuade those who have to, to pay more, they can drop the prices for those who do not have to fly, again making it more likely the whole thing will go ahead.

If you ever actually have to price things, you very rapidly discover that many things are only cost effective with differential pricing depending on willingness to pay.

People make these things so complicated.

They'll pick the lock on your door, replace your whole motherboard, and leave. Flying bugs would be an incredible overcomplication.

> If you believe the NSA is watching you, then try taking your meds and refer to the moderately paranoid measures.

In the unlikely event that the NSA or other similar organisation is watching you; if you have to ask /. for security tips, you've gone terribly, terribly wrong somewhere.

Erm, I'm fairly certain they were being sarcastic...

GoG.com 's been having a great sale, and is all DRM free, in case anyone's missed it so far...

We have wifi infrastructure in place anyway, and many of the students have mobile devices. It's therefore not a lot of developer work to have our university mobile app be able to say "Yeah, I'm on the right network" on a daily basis, or on request when students are meant to be in lecture, or something. In comparison to fingerprint checks we don't have to equip every lecture theatre with fingerprint scanners (probably two, so we have a backup in case of problems) and computers (again, two) and then maintain that extra infrastructure.

The in depth checks are a right pain, but we legally have to do them, so nothing's going to change there either way.

Sorry, realised this is obvious to me, but requires explanation.

There are fixed things we absolutely have to check, such as checking visa & passport at the start of the academic year (might be each semester, not sure off hand), but there's a more flexible set of requirements in checking the student is generally attending the university.

What that means is we can tell students they need to be attending tutorials regularly and/or taking out books regularly or can be expected to be called in for an ID check if we haven't got any other proof they're actually attending the university. We don't want to spend time pulling students halfway across town so we can glance at their passport and tick a checkbox any more than they want to have to do so, so anything we can do to minimise the number we do that for is a good thing.

Customers, technically, but anyway...

We do not have a general policy of failing students for not attending most lectures. There are exceptions; if you're doing Chemistry and completely fail to attend a safety briefing (I believe they're all either routinely repeated or can be repeated if there's a good reason why a student was absent), for example, that can basically be degree ending right there (you cannot be allowed into the lab, so cannot do coursework). There are similar examples in most sciences and Medicine.

What we're talking about is fulfilling a legal requirement in one case, and helping us manage resources in another (by providing additional assistance to students most likely to benefit from it).

> This has the advantage of not hassling students who feel that their time is better spent in the library instead of at lecture.

Which makes me think, why aren't we using book lending as an activity...

From my point of view (as a non-academic who works on improving university administration), it matters for a few key reasons:

1. Students who don't turn up to lectures are more likely to drop out of university. This particularly goes for students whose attendance was good and tails off, so we want to spot them early on and ask if they need any help (academic or personal).

2. If a student turns up mid-way through semester with problems, we're inclined to be a lot more sympathetic (and devote more staff time to helping) if you've attended class. If you didn't attend class and then don't know the material, it could be argued that's rather your own fault.

That's fair, but I did want people to think about this.

My suggestion was that we do wifi-pinging from student mobiles to cover most cases (as in you download an app and it checks you're in-range of our wifi), and use attendance at tutorials and 2-3 annual full checks (as in turn up with your passport so we can double check everything) to cover the requirement for more in-depth checks. Having tried ID card based lecture attendance, we've found mostly it's a huge pain; even when it works correctly it creates long queues at the start of lectures, and it's more hardware we have to manage. I don't imagine Newcastle will be doing fingerprint checks for long, personally...

You would have to take that up with the government, it's their requirement: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-19425718

I'd have to check the specifics of what the requirements are (they're actually not terribly harsh, just more admin work we didn't need), but they are something that are imposed on universities.

If you're at the university on a visa, there's an expectation you're attending the university. Don't laugh, it happens.

If the UKBA feels the university isn't doing enough, this happens: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-19425718