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Census Bureau Wants 500,000 Handhelds in 2010
andori writes: "ComputerWorld is reporting that the Census Bureau is wanting to conduct the 2010 Census without the use of paper. They want to use 500,000 handhelds with GPS and wireless communications abilities. And they want to do it for $100 an unit. I sure hope the industry is able to that price point some day! I will personally take a few if they do."
They want to use 500,000 handhelds with GPS and wireless communications abilities. And they want to do it for $100 an unit.
Can't the Blackberry almost do this already? In 7 years, we'll have nothing to worry about. You vastly underestimate the pace at which technological innovation moves on this planet.
- A.P.
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
Right now, the functionality is just about there and the price isn't that far off either. Given another 6-7 years of tech, I have to say I'll be pretty disappointed if something like that costs anywhere near $100.
All movements for social change begin as missions, evolve into businesses, and end up as rackets.
By 2010, I don't see this as a problem. Hell, the local power company is already doing this.. not for that cheap, and they're not exactly palms.. but we have 8 years to go.
I don't see why this will be a problem.
I don't think it's too unreasonable that a combination GPS, PDA, and phone could be made available at $100/pop within the next 6 years.
"however it wouldn't work in alot of areas, such as mountian communities where thetre is wireless service"
1) we are talking 2010 here.. in 7 1/2 years a lot of things can change 2) gps uses satellites.. you don't need a cellular tower.
As the volume goes up, the price goes down. If retail stores take their typical 30+% markup on a $120 Palm device, then the Palm device makers are already in the range. I'm sure any one of the major handheld players would love to get that contract $50 million for 500,000 handhelds leaves LOTS of margin when those 500,000 handhelds are being churned out of fabs in Korea and Hong Kong.
http://tinyurl.com/4ny52
Otherwise we might see small rural areas with amazing population booms, their own congressional districts, and lots of federal $$$.
Hopefully they don't save the data in a proprietary format. Thus rendring the data useless by 2015. Like say domesday. :)
I know I'm going to hell, I'm just trying to get good seats.
Palm was selling Palm VII's for a hundred bucks for a while with large rebates. You would then need GPS units though. Still, with an order of 500k units they should be able to get a pretty deep discount so I think that $100 should be reasonable. Also, remember the next census is many years off, so prices should be lower in general (Hopefully!!).
The census people want Bejeweled, and they want it soon.
As a side note, they really need to ahve them by mid 2008ish. That's only 6 years off.
yet another completely absurd dependence on a machine in a system that works fine without them.
but hey -- its more profits for some company! and we all know thats good for everyone.
--
What would these half-million units be used for after the 2010 census? One thing is certain: The wireless protocols they end up using won't exist in 2020. Maybe they should donate them to schools?
Kevin Fox
Every day, our drivers use their DIAD (Delivery Information Acquisition Device) IIIs to track the millions of packages delivered and picked up. They're wireless, but in the event that they're out of RF range, the information is buffered and then re-transmitted by the DIAD Vehicle Adapter (DVA), which also provides trickle charge capabilities. If all else fails, the DIAD can transfer its batch at the end of the day when it's placed in its cradle at the center.
We don't currently have GPS in the DIAD III, but the prototype DIAD IVs (which run on PocketPC 2002...ugh) do. They'll not only give drivers who lose their way directions to the next delivery destination, they will also broadcast their location back to the center, which will allow center supervisors and managers to determine more efficient driving routes and coverage areas.
They that would sacrifice their
... the price will drop by 2009.
Samsung SPH-i330
plus people will commit unnatural acts to sell a half-million computers.
And what are those unnatural acts, I want to know. Maybe I am in the wrong career.
That's right, you had hanging Chads last year. Can't you just wait for the inevitable "hotsync reporting errors" and "field information loss" due to battery malfunction? Ahh the federal government. Constantly finding ways to add complexity to any situation.
Find out about my new childrens book: SS Death Camp Criminal Batallion Go To Monte Carlo For The Massacre
You would be crazy to think we won't be able to have this in 8 years. You can already get cell phones with GPS capability - couple that with a pocket PC and you're most of the way there technologically. Price-wise, well, I guess 8 years should be long enough to beat the price down.
He who defends everything, defends nothing. -- Fredrick The Great
My girlfriend once worked for the Census Bureau, and she used a laptop for her surveys (carrying 3 spare batteries at all times...)
Given the current state of affairs, this is certainly evolutionary, not revolutionary.
What we call folk wisdom is often no more than a kind of expedient stupidity.-Edward Abbey
The idiotic Kyoto Agreement needed so much work that only ONE industrialized country signed it (Romania).
The fact is that NOT A SINGLE COUNTRY in the EU has signed it, and they are usually even more enviro-radical than some of the moron greens here.
Get your facts straight.
El Karma: excelente(principalmente la suma de moderación hecha a los comentarios de los usuarios)
So what they're really saying is:
;-). The LCD, touchscreen and battery will cost $30-40 together, and the processor, mainboard, and all associated electronics will be another $10-20. The enclosure will be maybe $5. Cheap labor would be $1-5.
We want to give a $50,000,000 dollar contract to a company that can provide 500,000 rugged, easy to use, long lasting (14 hours of active use per charge minimum), PDAs with GPS and wireless communications.
That should be relatively simple, if they use a free OS. They don't need to be color, though it might help. They do need to be very easily visible. The display can be a larger 1/4 vga screen, which should be much less expensive to make than the current color PDA screens.
So, let's see... About twice as thick as an IPAQ, and about as wide and long as the old newtons. It wouldn't need to be a real computer, so you could go with only flash to hold the (optional) OS and program code with a compactflash slot for long term storage. The GPS unit will cost $10-15 in quantity, as will the GSM (or APRS, or 802.11b
Cost each unit:$56 - 80. The R&D (as well as breathing room for unexpected problems) would soak up the last $44-20.
This could be done in two years, including the development of software that is easily configurable to make census forms and input, enable the communications across the network, etc.
At the high end, it would leave $10,000,000 for the company doing the development, equivilant to 40 salaried employees for five years at $50,000/yr (yes, some would be more, a few would be less, but the dev time should be less than 3 years, and fewer than 40 employees are needed.) If the company doing the work generalizes the PDA enough(maybe adding local networking to the national networking, etc) then they could sell additional units to other customers. Hobbyists would pay a little for it, but it would mostly stay in the corporate sector.
That's my bid. I estimate about one year to get the company up and running, one year R&D, two years active development, one year for a limited test run, one year for a production run and distribution, and two years breathing room. The software will allow full remote updating, real time statistics collection, we'll engineer the systems needed to run the entire show, and contract the necessary infrastructure for the wireless data collection.
-Adam
I don't use much paper myself. I think I get ten times as much paper in the mail as I use myself.
However I sure would miss the paper the few times I use it. Printing out a configuration file for some software or hardware, printing out a chapter of a PDF file. I sometimes need to avoid the noise in my cubicle and noting beats going in to a meeting room, close the door and concentrate of the paper on the table.
Some times I just unplug my laptop or bring my palmtop, but for some reason it really helps me to see it on paper where I can underline, cross over or write on the paper. If I were to ditch the paper completly the palm or the laptop would need to mimic the paper better. One would need a "palmtop" with the size of a A4 and the resolution and contrast. Then I would need to be able do draw, write on it.
If you could take the acrobat reader and look and draw on the documents like a real paper it would be great maybe even better. Lets say you had a manual for a program or some hardware as a PDF document where you could "mess it up" by writing and drawing on top of the document. A great feature it would be. You could choose to see it as a clean document or with your own markings.
Then I might avoid the paper all together.
If anyone doubts that in several years we'll have handhelds that have capabilities current devices cannot dream of at prices that you wouldn't imagine, I would point them to an excellent source of information: recent history. (Well, as recent as thirty years ago.) Computers were the size of a building and costed millions of dollars. If someone had told people that in a few decades there would be computers that could fit on your desk and would be hundreds of times as powerful as all of the computers on the planet at the time and be affordable for most Americans to own at least one... you wouldn't have believed him.
What evidence do we have to suggest that the rate of advancement (which is exponential), will not do the same again? We reached the limit of vacuum tubes, and we discovered the integrated circuit. Why should it be impossible to discover another breakthrough of that same magnitude?
Lack of eloquence does not denote lack of intelligence, though they often coincide.
"it would leave $10,000,000 for the company doing the development, equivilant to 40 salaried employees for five years at $50,000/yr
...
That's my bid."
Well, get a project manager and an accountant and refine it, it might work. Here's one tip: double the salary cost to get the actual worker cost (once you factor in HR costs, payroll processing, matching social security, managerial/paperwork overhead, and hiring costs), i.e.a $50k employee costs the company $100k.
Which goes to show that operating a business isn't something that we comp sci folks are necessarily the best at. But (like you) we can do a good job specing out a project and then let someone modify our numbers!
(Running a business is always more expensive than it looks. Heck, just _filing_ an IPO is a half-million dollar cost!)
A.
There are many other costs associated with running a business - taking care of the employee might be one of the easiest. Also given that this is a government project, there is more red tape to deal with. The thing is, it's possible to do it now at this price, think how much more easily it'll be accomplished with off-the-shelf hardware 3 years from now. Only, they can't wait that long to start...
-Adam
In other news, a bunch of welfare recipients got together and voted that work should be done, then went back home to watch "Cribs."
Yes, I get your point.
Yes, I understand I'm being immature.
El Karma: excelente(principalmente la suma de moderación hecha a los comentarios de los usuarios)
The census has driven data processing technology before. In fact, it STARTED it.
As the population expanded, it was taking longer and longer to compute the results. By about 1890 it was taking almost ten years to complete, and the extrapolation was that the next one would take MORE than ten years.
So an employee of the Census began designing mechanical sorting and tabulating equipment. He came up with a cardboard card which could be punched with holes representing information, the placed in a "press" where the holes were read electromechanically.
The first sorting machines involved a human putting each card in the press by hand, causing the lid of the appropriate box to pop open, then throwing the card into the box and closing the lid. (After sorting the cards in each box would be counted.) But with time automatic machines were designed to feed, sort, and count the cards.
The census put out a contract to have cards made, and the bids that came in were very high. So the inventor went across the street to the Mint and obtained the retired cutting equipment for the previous generation of paper money - which became the dimension of the tabulation cards.
Eventually the inventor hired on with a business equipment company, designing sorting and tabulating equipment for the Census which found applications elsewhere. A multi-hole encoding for alphabetic information that cards be alphabetized in two passes through a simple machine.
The inventer was Herman Hollerith, and of course the code was named after him. The company was eventually named International Business Machines, later shortened to IBM. The card was the "tabulation" card, later shortened to "tab" card, but it was commonly known as a "Hollereth card" or "IBM card".
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way