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AMD's Personal Internet Communicator
mstefanus writes "SFGate.com has a story about AMD's 50x15 Personal Internet Communicator (PIC). It is basically a PC with an AMD Geode GX500 366MHz processor, 10GB hard drive and 128MB Memory; running some form of Windows CE. The device is intended as a cheap internet PC for the rest of the world population. AMDBoard has some pictures and specifications. The question is, will it run emm... FreeBSD?"
Kinda sad really.
When Argumentum ad Hominem falls short, try Argumentum ad Matrem
Seems like you could just hack an xbox to get better performance for cheaper. And already as NIC card and optical drive. Someone just needs to start selling hacked xbox to third world countries. The best part is the M$ subsidizes their cost, so it really would be charity. :)
If they want it even cheaper they should dump Windows in favor of Linux (or as the OP suggested, FreeBSD)...
It should be more reliable too.
It just appears to be that you can easily add an NIC card via its USB port, but not modem. Looks like this is an ingenius, well-thought-of design. I want one if it runs a strip down version of Fedora.
$249 is cheap here, but does it qualify as a "budget" machine in the target markets (India, Russia, China, Mexico and Brazil)? According to this site, the average income in Brazil's largest metropolitan areas is less than $300 a month!
At $185, even I as a student can afford to buy one of these just to play around with it. If AMD is smart, they will get a NIC for one of these and offer people the ability to run Linux on it. Think about that, Linux on one of these would make for a really good small business system. It's small, cheap and runs a free, but adequate OS. At $185 a unit, the thing could be replaced every 6 months by a business if need be.
But what AMD could really do to kick Microsoft's ass for not supporting the Athlon64 better would be to do three things with this. Offer for $200 a version of this that has: a NIC instead of a modem, a firewire port for an optical media drive and write a special distribution of linux that makes it easy for game designers to turn this into a console system. Imagine John Carmack being able to offer a boot CD with each new copy of Doom 3 that runs on one of these, without having to rewrite any code because the SDK for this box uses all the Linux tools he uses.
Click here or a puppy gets stomped!
if they wanted to reach a poorer population they should have a regular TV coax output along side the VGA.
I know this is most likely bait, but the issue isn't that it would cost the company less. That is easy to figure out. It is that it would cost the consumer more if they wanted to run windows if it wasn't preloaded.
PIC has been used. MANY times. In many fields, sometimes multiple times within one field. For instance: ... I'm always running into new Acroynms using PIC, I just never btoher to remember them. It's silly.
PIC = Programmable Integrated Circuit (ie. Microchip PIC).
PIC = Programmable Interrupt Controller.
PIC = Position Independant Code.
Larry Ellison's New Internet Computer. Complete failure. Need we say more?
Tech, life, family, faith: Give me a visit
Something neat, with some cool features but alas, relativly useless -- not to mention a bit dated.
I can't understand why, If there is a demand for this kind of stuff, they don't ship a standard container of old cast off P-II and 14" monitors over to the third world and have the cheap labor over there piece the pc's togeter?
I'm writing this on a $60 P-II w/ 128M, a free, cast-off 17" monitor, and a (loss-leader) $100 250 g hard drive, running Debian installed Knoppix.
I think I paid too much for the P-II
(plus a $70 a month DSL line)
There is free junk everywhere
It's aimed at 'developing' markets? What happened to the days when companies actually did some market research before releasing a product?
1. $249 is *not* cheap in the developing world - in fact it can easily be more than a months salary (in some countries several months - I knew a guy who worked in Bosnia for a time... he used his salary to pay 8 people to do his work for him and still had enough left over for a nice house).
2. Dialup? Most of these countries are hugely into mobile technology now, where the setup cost is low (no land lines to dig). Where connectivity does exist it is through local cyber-cafe's - the home PC just isn't as common, or required when you have better things to do, like keeping food on the table.
3. Guess what happens to the old PCs you think are 'slow'? A lot of them are happily chugging away running Win95 or Win3.1 (linux is also becoming more popular, but is still a minority) in developing countries, for a few dollars a pop or even free.
Twice the speed, 8 times the storage, more expandable and cheaper? What's the appeal of the AMD device?
Linux IT Consulting and Domino Development in Michigan
No, I can't build it as tiny with off-the-shelf parts. But that's hardly the point, since tiny but crippled just doesn't cut it. As to your thought of getting one to use as a firewall, well, lets just say you might give it a bit more thought. The damn thing has a 56k modem, but apparently no ethernet port. And a decent firewall needs (at least) two ethernet ports; but this thing has no expansion capability. Hope you don't plan on using USB to Ethernet kluges for the connections; they would not only be expensive, but since the spec's only mention USB I'm guessing this is USB 1.1 and not even USB2. So no good for a tiny dedicated device like a firewall, and doesn't compete well with larger computers you can build up from stock parts.
Sure, there are always a small number of dedicated applications that one can use a slow, low power computer for. But there are many other choices available for such projects. This thing wasn't intended to be that, and doesn't compete well in that market. So let's take it for what it claims to be and evaluate it based on that; a very low end PC replacement with a brain dead OS (that in the end the user pays for). It just doesn't stack up against what else is available.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
Which one will fit in your pocket or small bag, for use when you need a server or portable desktop on the go?
This is all well and good but.... It will never fly. Know why? For a decade America has been upgrading. That is, we have all traded in our 486 for a Pentium 65, for a Pentium 166, for a Pentium 2, 3 AMD, Cirix, and on and on. That original 486 running Win 3.1 with a 14.4 or 33.6 modem running Trumpet Winsock (rememebr that?) can get ont he Internet. And where did all that junk go? To the Third World by the dumptruck load!
A even more modest Pentium 300ish or a AMD K6-2 of about that speed on a socket 7 motherboard with 90-256mb memory a 2-6gb drive a 14" VGA.. load a bootleg 98SE and: you are in business! Cost? no 250 bucks, rather more like 20. Folks in Botswana would rather spend the $230 savings on FOOD! Poor folks do not buy new. Regardless of focus groups, break out sessions, and marketing strategies. I would strongly suggest to the good people who come up with these hair brained ideas to do their research somewhere that does not selll Late`. for example: Check the price at Goodwill.
- Minutus cantorum, minutus balorum, minutus carborata descendum pantorum.
Now, when the Botswana educational system and the Botswana community center want to provide a way to communicate wit the outside world and research why they crops keep failing or what to do about that nasty lump growing on Jr's neck or maybe let somebody know the next tribe over used their $250 to by a couple used AK-47's so they could take everybody else's food, they have a means. The reason why the Western world has advanced farther in the last 20 years than it did from the first 5,000 years of man is communication. Spoken words to written words to printed books to telegraphs to telephones to radio to tv to computers to the internet. Buy 100 lbs of rice your village eats for 6 months, sell "native talismans" on eBay for 6 months and buy the first Botswana McDonalds franchise.
Yes, but you don't even need Internet access to make this thing useful. What use would they have for a computer without Internet? We tend to be spoiled for space in our world of MP3's, video files, and multigigabyte games, but we cannot forget that a gigabyte is a LOT of data. A 20 gigabyte hard drive can hold as much text as an ENTIRE LIBRARY.
You have to look at these types of products in the context of how their going to be used. Nobody living in a shack in Botswana is going to be surfing EBay on this, and a Ghanian tribesman isn't going to give a flying rock about how it runs Half Life 2. What they're going to care about is the fact that they can add an entire library to their remote village for $249 thats compact enough to be easily moved when the river rises and they have to evacuate on foot every spring, thats integrated and durable enough so that they won't have to worry about shaking the PCI cards loose if they set it down too hard, and that will draw little enough power to run happily on their villages 20 watt in-stream hydro generator or 15 watt solar panel without frying itself.
The world is a lot bigger than the west people, and this type of hardware is badly needed in many parts of the world. Yes, you can probably piece one together using cheap Internet sourced parts for a lower cost, but will it have the durability, the low power consumption, and the ease of transport that this thing offers? Can you honestly tell me that Bahooba the tribal elder, who has probably never even held a phillips screwdriver in his entire life, would be better off building his own PC? These people need something braindead simple...plug in the wire, turn it on, and use it. When you live in an area where the nearest computer tech is 100 miles away on foot, you don't have the luxury of buying untested hardware configurations and calling for support when you run into a problem.
There is nothing so pathetic as seeing a beautiful young theory roughed up by a tough gang of facts.
The problem with tje Project For a New American Century is not that that they have nukes, CIA dirty trickters, torturers, chemical weapons and don't give a shit who they kill in order to preserve their privileged way of life (lots of other groups of deranged whackos have come together in similar ways over the last 500 years or so).
... I forgot, Francis Fukupayama (one of the signatories) already proclaimed the end of history so I guess there's no need - we are truly now in a "new reality".
The main problem with PANC is that ever last one of the signatories is INCREDIBLE FUCKING STUPID.
They quite simply don't understand the way the world works and don't pay attention to history or human nature.
Oops
Blech what utter idiots. Luckily they are mere dust in the winds of time - which I hope blows real hard in their direction.