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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. :)
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!
if they wanted to reach a poorer population they should have a regular TV coax output along side the VGA.
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.
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.