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Steve Ballmer's $100 PC, Sans Windows
Martin_Flory writes "SolarPC has announced the $100 personal computer. Steve Ballmer's idea for reducing piracy was great after all, since this computer runs on Linux (DSL Distro). 'The design and construction of the SolarLite is consistent with the goal of an environmentally friendly computer. It uses a lightweight, recyclable, aluminum case that has a 20-year warranty. Its VIA chipset based "long-life" motherboard is a "green" lead free product. Like all SolarPC computers, the SolarLite operates on 12 volt DC power and can be run from a solar panel, car battery, or human powered (with a bicycle-based generator). The cool and quiet SolarLite uses approximately 10 watts of energy, just a fraction of what a standard PC consumes.' Sounds amazing right? This could change education all around the globe... a new Information Era is coming, and everyone is invited." The site claims they'll be available next month (minimum order 100,000 units), and promises a demo at SCALE 2005.
Thi is the level that many retailers buy at. You're looking at Walmart, Target, Circuit City, Best Buy, etc., numbers.
There's nothing Intelligent about Intelligent Design.
this will give kids whoo dont's have much money a chance to have a computer and learn. It also allows schools to buy computer cheaply w/ software already installed. I think SolarPC is doing a great thing here and should continue on with more ideas like this.
100.000 writes per sector usually. Sandisk has some with 1 million writes too. But I guess (or hope, at least) these drives are mounted read-only, with some other kind of memory for saving documents etc.
Africa is not a country, it is a continent.
After some enhancement in Photoshop, here's what it really looks like. It resembles a very basic mini-ITX box. No connectors are visible.
Alot more affordable than the power hungry machines that are available these days at your local Best Buy.
In the 1st world I can see alot of public computing applications being put to use with these machines. Especially for basic info services or free public web surfing.
Not that it's much fancier, but their main website is at SolarPC.com.
There are two kinds of people: 1) those who start arrays with one and 1) those who start them with zero.
I am really surprised that so far no one has used google yet to get any more information. A quick 1 minute search revealed. http://www.solarpc.com/about.html http://www.solarpc.com/ there did not appear to be any google cache available for this site. What we are talking about here is 500-600 mhz for the 10 watts model and ~20 watts models are around 1 ghz. They readily admit that they are not the fastest in the market... but they are quiet and the 10 watts model has no fan at all. They are also using the C3 processor. there is also a faq on the site as well. happy slashdotting.
using flash drives....whats the lifespan on these given ther write limits on the drives...
The press release states that it uses a compact flash drive. I'd assume it is a micro drive and not solid state, so the number of writes are the same as your desktop PC.
-rich
Damn Small Linux has a special "Frugal" mode which is intended to minimize the problem you point out with write limits. I don't know much about it, but my impression is that it does things like spool writes for as long as practical in order to reduce their total number. That, and continuing improvements to flash memory, should help quite a bit.
:)
DSL is not nearly as full featured as bells-n-whistles live distros like Knoppix / Mepis, but dang it's pretty neat for 50MB
timothy
jrnl: http://tinyurl.com/c2l8yr / foes: http://tinyurl.com/ckjno5
I know it was a troll, but their website does actually cover that eventuality... http://solarpc.com/beowulf.html
Using flash drives is only a problem if you build it without enough ram, and do something stupid like put swap on the flash drive. If you build a system that's not thrashing the swap, and use modern wear levelled flash, the unit will likely outlive the owner (even a typical /. first year college kid) before the flash starts to die from wear.
While it's true, flash does have write limits, they are vastly overrated today. if you are going to compare flash to spinning media, then factor things like bearings into the equation, and write frequency, and possibly even power consumption. Flash with wear levelling, after you factor in bearing failures on traditional spinning media, is actually more reliable than a hard drive. If you are truely paranoid, use a reed-solomon based write methodology so you can recover data after a cell failure from writes, and you are looking at a system with _at least_ an order of magnitude higher reliability ratings (mtbf) than one with spinning media, and that's even before you factor in some 'harsh environment' details, like 'ooops, it got dropped' etc. It doesn't matter what kind of error handling/correction you apply to the spinning media, bearings and motors will give it a useful lifetime that's not in any way tied to read/write cycles, but rather to calendar time and physical handling.
note, i'm comparing reliability here, not cost per bit of storage. Spinning media is still a couple orders of magnitude cheaper for large storage quantities, but that's changing rather rapidly these days too.
I've got a unit on my desk here, with a 266 mhz processor, and 1 gig of flash. After bringing up X, i've still got on the order of 600 meg of free flash on it, with a basic set of gui apps isntalled and running. This box is all solid state, no fans, runs on a 19v laptop supply. It's actually quite amazing what can be done with this box if you aren't concerned about stupid games, and just want a basic productivity platform (email, word processing, etc).
Haha I always loved that...
Grammar doesn't matter because the absolute majority of americans cannot put 2 sentences together...
Africa is now a country, because most americans think it is a country
No wonder "the majority of americans" keep bitching and complaining about how hard it is to get a job... go get yourself an education and it will be a lot easier...
The SolarPC website also lists their specs for their other computers along with the price so maybe you can deduce from there what the $100 model might contain.
This quote from the home page is interesting, too:
- "A no cost license to manufacture SolarPC designs is available for educational and charitable groups participating in the Global Education Link project. Please contact SolarPC for additional information."
FWIW, a review was posted touting their computer as a great war driving machine.Sig cancelled due to lack of interest
No power supply, but you can use a standard $10-$35 power supply, I'm sure, depending on what the requirements are.
However, this looks like an excellent opportunity to use Spheral Solar's latest products, which
!!! Are out now, and for sale !!!
www.spheralsolar.com
I'm hyped about it.
Correct Horse Battery Staple: 72 bits of entropy. Enter "Correct H" into google. When it generates the phrase, that's
Typical flash today is good for a million writes per cell.
You wish. It's more like 10.000. 1.000.000 is the figure for EEPROM, but there the access time is quite a bit longer.
The second problem with Flash: the access is not on the "cell" level (I guess you meant each bit or addressable word), but by sector in the best case scenario. Sectored Flash RAM is a bit more expensive, and sectors tend to be large: 64 KBytes for an 8 Mbit (! MByte) Flash RAM, for example.
Sigged!
Well, since you mention it, here you go.
It's a real distro, it came with my Linux Format magazine/DVD. Not bad, it's based on Knoppix and meant to be small enough to boot from a business card CD, I would say it would be more usefull on a jump drive. It has XMMS, some simple text programs, a couple of video games, some terminals and the Links web browser. It's good enough for basic work without ever having to write to the host system hard drive.
The preceding post was not a Slashvertisement.
I envision fewer Gentoo users.
but I guess it doesn't really contribute much to your statement anyway....
Back in the 80's, there was only one supplier of x86 processors into the pc marketplace.
That's just plain wrong.
The neatest of several 8086 chips was the NEC V20/30, which not only was a drop-in replacement for the 8088/86, but had a switch in its flags which, when set, would make it act like an 8085 (or maybe it was a Z80, I forget which). With a little software (called UniDOS) which provided a special CP/M BIOS, this could run practically ALL the legacy CP/M software (which was abundant in 1983) without modifications, on a PC. NEC built a PC clone with a 16-bit data bus which could have used the 8086, but with their V30 this not only ran DoS at about twice the speed of an IBM-PC, it would also blaze through CP/M software at seemingly demonic speed. Jerry Pournelle usta rave about this rig, because it allowed him to keep his favorite CP/M text editor while upgraging to the new PC technology.
I digress. AMD had a technology exchange agreement with Intel (in the late 70's, supposed to last 25 years) to share x86 IP. (Among other exchanges,) AMD got the 8086/88 and Intel got the small masks for the 2732A (that's a 32 Kbit UVEPROM, organized as 4KBytes at 350 & 250 nS) which were half the size of theirs. AMD consistently dieshrank, outyielded, outperformed, and outpriced Intel on the 8085, 8086/88, 80186/88, 80286, and 80386. (I used to have price lists to prove this stuff, before the SO made me reduce the size of my "legacy hardware library".) I remember buying cheap 12MHz 80286 motherboards (at $179 when most were over $200) that came equipped with 10MHz Intel 80286 CPUs and crashed when these overheated. I replaced the CPUs with AMD 80286LP-12s which co$t le$$ than the 10MHz Intel 80286s and ran frosty cool, but at $40 they killed the low price of the deal. AMD sold 40MHz 80386 chips while Intel abandoned it at 32MHz and introduced the 80486, early versions of which (at 25MHz) could not keep up with the 40MHz AMD 80386 (and, of course, co$t much more). Several other pretty recognizable guys like Cyrix, IBM, and TI also built the 80386 & 80486. I remember buying a Cyrix 80387 that was half the price of Intel's and outperformed it, partly because it worked beside an AMD 80386-40.
Intel determined (unilaterally) that the 8086-family technology exchange agreement did not extend to the 80486, and refused to give the masks to AMD, AMD sued and won. With the "Pentium", Intel abandoned the 8086 series part numbers (critical to the court decision) so they did not have to give it to AMD, and it took AMD many moons to reverse engineer it. 120MHz AMD 80486s (Intel never made them past 100MHz) outperformed the original 50MHz Pentuims, but the 100MHz Pentium, coupled with the new WinBloze 95(tm)(r)(C) "Operating System" did away with the 486. When Intel introduced the MMX extensions, they refused to completely document them, and this gave AMD additional RE headaches. Coupled with billion$ in mass media advertizing, Intel became the name-brand CPU, even though AMD's have generally been as good or better, and always cheaper.
Processors were EXPENSIVE by today's standards.
You coulda fooled me. As I mentioned above, I bought AMD 80286-12s for $44, when Intel's sold for about $60 (top speed of the day was 20 MHz at $100). What does a P4 co$t? A motherboard with CPU and without RAM co$t about $200, is that really much more than we're paying now? Enough RAM to run it co$t $50, to really load it up co$t $100-$200, that hasn't changed, though of course the size and speed have done dramatic things. It's the iron that was expen$ive. Hard di$k$ used to co$t $250! Now they're more like $125.
To be sure, AMD does exert considerable price pressure on Intel. Without them, you would see expensive CPUs.
Your statement makes more sense in the context of complete systems.
For a year or two, IBM enjoyed a monopoly on the PC. They got $1
Exceeding the recommended torque is not recommended.
Anone remember the thinknic? it was cheap, low power, ran linux..
It was a few years ago, and it booted off the CD-ROM, and had like 4m of flash for bookmarks/emails etc. pretty basic machine, but essentially the same idea of these things. The ThinkNICs didn't last very long before the company went out of biz, why would this one do any better?
Get on an excercise bike serious enough to have an electronic load and a power readout, and see how trivial 50 watts really really is.
A bicycle racer makes about 3/4 horsepower (to go 28 MPH).
One horsepower is IMU something like 785 Watts. Translation of this to SI units is left as an excercise for the reader.
I found 300 Watts to be a semi-sustainable pace, four years after buying a car and parking my bikes. It would have been quite easy when I was riding 10-15 miles a day (at around 20 MPH).
The above discussion about massive banks of slaves on generator bikes was ridiculous. Two decently-nourished slaves could easily power a w1K3d game system.
Exceeding the recommended torque is not recommended.
I think the 10what vesion should be good enough to play mp3s.
It is! I've used to play mp3s (with mpg123) on an old Pentium 200 MHz running FreeBSD (with X and all), and the load average didn't even exceed 0.20 or so. Even while running 'make buildworld' did mpg123 perform very well! Considering that my Soekris net4801 runs at 266 MHz and uses approx. 5 Watts, I'm pretty sure that the 10 Watt version will do just fine.
cpghost at Cordula's Web.