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.

Comments

Re:Minimum 100,000?

[deft]

Thi is the level that many retailers buy at. You're looking at Walmart, Target, Circuit City, Best Buy, etc., numbers.

that's cool

[MeatBlast]

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.

Re:10Watts of slave power

[pyrros]

Africa is not a country, it is a continent.

What it really looks like

[Animats]

After some enhancement in Photoshop, here's what it really looks like. It resembles a very basic mini-ITX box. No connectors are visible.

Here are more specs on these computers....

[xxdinkxx]

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.

Re:Imagine...

[Sinus0idal]

I know it was a troll, but their website does actually cover that eventuality... http://solarpc.com/beowulf.html

Re:solid-state?

[grozzie2]

Typical flash today is good for a million writes per cell. If you use a file system that's not doing wear levelling, and write on average once a minute, you will see the cells start breaking down in 2 years. But, include wear levelling into the flash (most off the shelf flash drives today actually include it at the hardware level), you can increase that lifetime by a factor of 100, so useful life heads up to around 200 years. if you assume it's turned off for even 8 hours a day, it goes up to on the order of 300 years (based on rewriting the same data once a minute for all the time it's turned on).

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).

Post is wrong by 2 orders of magnitude.

[haggar]

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.

Re:10Watts of slave power

[mikey13]

I envision fewer Gentoo users.