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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?"
I wonder if for $349, a hundred dollars more, they could produce a similar package for here in the US with a nic instead of a modem along with some sort of optical drive. I think they would sell like crazy. It would come with some newbie-friendly flavor of Linux and the user could always change that if they want, but why add a lot of cost upfront for an operating system. There are a lot of people in the US that will not be able to buy a computer unless they can get the price down to something like $350 or so. If this $249 machine can be profitable, then I think this $349 machine could be profitable as well and we'd be helping people here, as well as abroad. Or, am I just completely missing something?
http://www.busyweather.com/
This is a perfect killer-application for Gmail. Now Google should concentrate on persistent documents (a la Office) productivity suit, and no one will ever need a desktop PC with a hard drive. Is this how the future will look like?
Sincerely,
Pan Tarhei Hosé, PhD.
"Homo sum et cogito ergo odi profanum vulgus et libido."
Not in my opinion.
I think that is still too expensive of a computer to get into the hands of those that don't have one. A second hand 1GHz computer would probably be a lot cheaper and more suitable for running modern browsers. At least this is pretty power efficient, but even Via probably has more powerful CPUs that are sufficiently low power.
just what i was looking for. i need something for http/ftp/print/etc server. and also something for a freebsd firewall, a full computer would be too much.
good job AMD (if it runs FreeBSD)!
Marge, get me your address book, 4 beers, and my conversation hat.
If it's got a 10GB HD, why's it using WinCE? performance on a slow CPU? How have the WinCE apps done security-wise vs. Win32 apps for "regular" Windows?
500GB of disk, 5TB of transfer, $5.95/mo
I wonder if they could strip it down and get rid of the hard drive and use a bootable Ethernet card. If you are on a lan with a NFS server running dhcpd, rarpd and tftpd, you can have the computer boot as a diskless workstation. Convince your ISP to run these services and privide users with a home directory. That would be a sweet way to provide a zero maintenance PC to anyone. Diskless FreeBSD is discussed at http://www.onlamp.com/pub/a/bsd/2004/09/09/diskles s_server.html
Think global, act loco
For $249 it's not partiularly inexpensive, fast or useful. Although it might be had to find parts like a hard drive of only 10 gig any more (at least for any manufacturing project where you want to make a number of the product over a year or more of time and have a viable supply of identical parts for the run), I certainly can put together a more capable PC for $249 with off the shelf parts. I expect third world users who look to spend a month or more of income on a PC are more likely to want to buy as much computer as they can for their money rather than care much that it comes in a small plastic box (and runs slow, has limited storage, and includes an OS that the user paid something for but will have to ditch).
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
Having the system loaded with a version of Windows CE may actually be a good thing. Not better than having a version of embedded linux, but better then XP. So far the only worm/virus/trojan I know of is a proof of concept trojan that was emailed to an AntiVirus vendor for Pocket PC, and it didn't actually do anything.
With the amount of spyware and other nasties out there preying on naive internet users it would be in everyone's best interest to keep these machines on an embedded platform. First a trojan/virus/worm would need to be created to take advantage of this platform which is new territory to the evil doers. Second, the user base is small and the machines are not very powerful so the advantage to writing a nasty for this platform are small. And third, even if the PC were to be infected it could be cleaned by a simple hard reset. If I ever were to totally hose my Pocket PC (and I'm not sure how I could do that) I could always hard reset the device and copy my data back from CF backup. Sure, you could do the same with linux setup with partition that contains an image that would overwrite the OS upon each boot but this is still a step in the right direction.
I'm not saying I would want one of these things, unless they scaled them down and sold them cheaper in which case they could make nice low cost cam/file/web/router/vpn/etc/servers, but I think I'll stick with VIA on that for now.
This would be great for my grandparents, especially if you could remotely administer them.
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Im dreaming ofa big bndwdth, That can resist the
Yes exactly. Back in 98/99, the big hype in embedded computing circles was things called "set-top boxes" (read things like WebTV boxes). Everybody absolutely *had* to get into doing set-top boxes, despite the astoundingly dismal sales volumes. That trend has come and gone thank goodness.
So, while this thing is technically better (it uses a computer screen, not a TV), it is definitely more expensive (the usually accepted price point for set-top boxes is $100), and it is proven the public doesn't give a flying fuck about them. So the question is, what is it those guys are hoping to achieve here?
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
I suspect this may be a case of not knowing your mrkets. In less industrialized markets, copper phone lines are rare. Cellular phones, WiFi, and other new technologies will be the source of connectivity.
You are in a maze of twisted little posts, all alike.