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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.
using flash drives....whats the lifespan on these given ther write limits on the drives...
Assuming this is like their other PCs, a power supply is not included. So unless you already have your own 12V DC source handy, you're going to be spending more than $100.
Still, a nice deal assuming it has decent specs.
This could be the ultimate Automotive PC. You need some USB, and some firewire would be ideal but is not required. A GPS hung off the USB bus would be excellent, and you could connect a camera to the system the same way. I realize that linux navigation is not yet here but when it is I want to be ready.
If that screen is available in a touch version for less than three hundred dollars, and the system has enough processing power to, say, play a fullscreen MPEG4 video, then I'll buy at least one, and probably two. (If I can buy the screen and the overlay for three hundred bucks, same thing.) I can't imagine them omitting USB which means I can get wireless ethernet at suitable rates for my purposes.
One of the largest problems in automotive computing is handling the power in the vehicle. With a computer that runs on twelve volts DC, all you need is a simple regulated power supply with some filtering in order to protect the machine and provide it with adequate power. You can of course buy the stuff off the shelf for not too much money. It's also a serious benefit that it's so small, as it will fit well up under the dash where it will be difficult to steal :)
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
And it seems that they've already imagined a beowolf cluster of their products: solarpc.com/beowulf.html
My other UID is 1337
This is what happens in a free market, with enough competitors properly funded to actually work in the market. The production quantities over it's lifetime on a pc chipset are HUGE, typical orders running in the 100K units range, and those orders will repeat. Early in thier run, new chips demand a premium, companies can quickly amortize the development costs off against the early run on a given chip. Once that's done, they can supply into the market with very slim margins, and still be profitable because the numbers get staggeringly huge. Since there are multiple vendors of a 'motherboard chipset', a large volume motherboard producer can, and will, have a bidding war between them to determine which chipset is used on a given motherboard design. You can bet your last dollar, Via, Intel, Nvidia and the rest will all get out the pencil sharpener when Asus comes looking for a quote. A design win with Asus will justify the entire chipset line.
Back in the 80's, there was only one supplier of x86 processors into the pc marketplace. Processors were EXPENSIVE by today's standards. The mac with it's 68K processor was threatening to become a serious player, then the clones in x86 space started to show up. pricing in the x86 market started to reflect cost of production rather than 'what the market will bear'. The rest is history, and now we have single chip integrated systems, because they are ultimately cheaper to produce in quantity, even tho the engineering costs up front are staggering.
On the software side of the equation, this type of competition has not happened, mostly because parts are not interchangeable. You can swap an ati video out of a machine and toss in an Nvidia. You cannot swap a windows program out, and swap in it's linux equivalent. Competetive pricing on software, based on 'cost of manufacture' rather than 'what the market will bear' will only happen when the predominant components can be interchanged. In the hardware world this is done by using common signalling on standard bus. In software, it's only going to happen if there is common and interchangeable api systems, and the common api ends up with the lions share of the market. From a software vendor point of view today, the only common api to work with is the Win32 api.
It's in the hardware vendors best interest to undermine the cost of software. they have known this for years, but they are currently hostage to the Win32 api to sell hardware. Software vendors are in the same boat. The real solution to a free market, is to have an alternative vendor from which to purchase the Win32 api for deployment on new machines, or for both hardware and software vendors to settle on an alternative api. Neither of these are going to happen in the short term. If the Win32 api remains single vendor, single source, it's inevitable the market will migrate to an alternative, but, it may take 2 more generations (people generations, not those 18 month hardware generations). Any time you do a product in the design phase, a major consideration is the risk attached to single source components. In today's market, the risk/reward equations favour the single vendor Win32 solution. Eventually, the market will abandon the single source solution, but, that wont happen till the risk/reward equations come up in favour of the alternative.
And as the production lines just keep running, every first-world sale at $150 could subsidize a $50 half-price unit for countries that could otherwise hardly afford one even at $100.