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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.
I have visions of slaves in third world countries on generator bicycles, all outside pedaling away, while the local bigwig surfs porn
********* sig: If you don't like the law, get filthy stinking rich, and buy a better one.
I assume that's for reseller or distributor ordering...I don't know of many places that ever order computers 100,000 at a time....
...they sure do have a ghetto website. :P
-fren
"Where are we going, and why am I in this handbasket?"
would'nt "server per classroom" be a better solution?
using flash drives....whats the lifespan on these given ther write limits on the drives...
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.
VIA may have produced a lead-free motherboard, but VIA abuses its workers and integrates lead into other products.
Ballmer should wake up and license his new PC to American and Japanese companies, particularly those on the SVTC's list of recommended companies.
Can I get even one piece of useful information pertaining to the actual performance of this thing?
-BMojo
Steve Ballmer endorsing something running linux?
Last I remember, he was the crazy guy at Microsoft (er, one of them). Did he leave Microsoft and I didn't hear about it?
http://www.babysmasher.com
http://www.openingbands.com
can it run Half-Life 2?
----
Ph-nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn
Cool idea, but why the large minimum order requirements. I'm sure the community in the first world would love to have these little toys to play with. The 12 volt power supply would make this thing a shoe in for remote/mobile aps.
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.
so what are the stats? Would a piss-poor college student like me want to buy one, or is this *strictly* a third world thing?
WTF, stylish? It looks like a metal project box from radio shack.
Check it out.
A largescale redistributor would have no problem moving that amount of computers if it catches on.
That's probably for sellers (such as best buy).
Damn, at first I read this as ""a new Information Bra is coming". I kind of like my way better.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
a beowulf cluster of these!
R.I.P.
Subnnotrenbiooklds are fgreast!@ Teh keybboardas sizzzxe dsolen't boethre me at allk!
It would be cool if it didn't suck.
It's the solution to America's obesity problem: Stop buying computers with power supplies, just make your kids pedal away.
All your Sybase are belong to us.
Interesting, look at how small those systems are, they have to have huge extentions just to fit into a normal rack. I'd be willing to bet that you could probably fit a good two or three systems into the space that one rack would normally contain. This would be interesting for companies that use highly-parallelizable applications, like the motion-picture industry or the sciences, especially considering the low prices...
VIA may have produced a lead-free motherboard, but VIA abuses its workers and integrates lead into other products.
So, rather than purchase products which would actually satisfy you when they are available, you will instead continue to shun the company and do without.
If I were the company, and I made an effort to make you happy and then, you, rather than take the opportunity to show me that you are willing to support me when I offer what you want, rather continue to tell me I'm horrible, well, I'd take the impression of:
(a) You're jerks.
(b) There's no pleasing you.
(c) May as well continue what we were doing because we won't be selling to anyone that cares about our increased "green" efforts, anyways.
(d) Let's never try this waste of money again.
If you could be told what you can see or read, then it follows that you could be told what to say or think - BoC
...using assembly lines full of 8 year old Bangladeshi girls.
After some enhancement in Photoshop, here's what it really looks like. It resembles a very basic mini-ITX box. No connectors are visible.
Although I wonder what the margin is on this and if someone could buy an initial block of them and resell them at a SLIGHTLY higher price in smaller numbers. That might help some places that aren't able to afford it out.
Buy Steampunk Clothing Online!
If I won the lotto, I would purchase 100k of these babies, and sell them for $125 plus shipping. bingo bango bongo!
Elliott Smith Tribute CD available now on Double D Records! Visit www.doubledrecords.com to order.
You need at least 5 to actually have the power to boot. 15 to play pong. :)
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.'"
The company that "makes" these is nothing more than a Navada sales company. There is nothing "revolutionary" about this product, it's a miniITX. BFD. This is not a computer company, and as usual, Slashdot got sucked into a free Slavertisment.
"Who are in control, they are not in control of anything - they don't even control themselves!" - Glen Beck
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.
My point was, if it's $100, minimum order 100,000, then obviously $100 is not going to be the retail price of this machine. Once it goes through distribution and goes to retail outlets, it'll probably double in price.
I also just see a box on their website's illustrations. I don't think $100 includes the cost of the monitor or the keyboard/mouse. So by the time you're done buying those "optional" items and can actually USE the computer, you're looking at maybe $400. Which is the cost of a low end Dell shitbox, which almost certainly has better specs. So I don't see that we've actually gained anything.
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
Sure, maybe not to lower-middle-income residents of wealthy nations, but where these things might be needed and better suited, a VILLAGE might not be able to afford $100.00.
I very much appreciate the exercise, that of making the cheapest possible PC, but we really need next-to-nothing PCs if they're supposed to liberate as we expect. Otherwise, it's just more throwaway stuff for what the poorest nations would call the "well-to-do."
If Nalgene water bottles are outlawed, only outlaws will have Nalgene water bottles.
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.
anyone want to get together and split an order?
Are you suggesting you are willing to pay USD 100 for a device that does nothing?
I want one, this is cheap enough and uses little enough power to do exactly what I want. Right now i have a Celeron 400 as my server/router. Now i can get rid of that :) I'm not ordering 1 million dollars worth of these things though.. Hopefully someday i can buy just one.
They have an XP based one on their web site for about $270. It's a Celeron 2.4 Ghz with 128 megs of ram and a 40 gig hard drive, but no monitor. The $200 one they used to have ran Lindows (whatever they are calling now). If you take $270, subtract $60 for XP Home OEM, subtract $20 for a 20 gig drive, and $40 for a power supply, that gets the price down to $150. I'm not sure how much Lindows costs, but if it was $20, then the price is $130 and starting to get really close to the $100 cost of this one, and you can just buy 1. To me, a $100 computer sounds like a perfect Citrix or Web client.
I'd actually pay $150 (about £100) for one of these, if Think Geek needs a profit...
Prosperity is only an instrument to be used, not a deity to be worshipped. Calvin Coolidge
Why would the reseller need to double the price? If they buy 100,000 units for 10,000,000 dollars, and sell each for 120$, than thats 2 million in profit. And I think the point of this is not to make money for the reseller, but to be used in schools/third world countries, where they can't afford "normal" pc's.
WTF, stylish? It looks like a metal project box from radio shack.
How is that not stylish?
I am a viral sig. Please help me spread.
The day after thanksgiving in the USA, is a source of great deals. Yesterday at my local bestbuy, there were 200 dollar emachine computers with monitors (after rebates). That ship with Windows XP Home Edition and have 2.66 GHZ Celeron D processors, and 512 mb ddr sdram, with an 80 gig hard drive and a 17 inch monitor. This deal is too hard to topple, seeing that Windows XP alone cost 200 dollars, last time I checked.
Damn this sounds cool. I gotta get one of these.
I suppose on those cloudy days I could get on the stationary cycle. Just of of interest, how much does it cost with the tredmill, bicycle and stationary rower?
I think us IT professionals have a bad rap when it comes to gym work, this cannot be true otherwise the idea of a bicycle powered computer would never have survided off the drawing board.
Why UNIX?
But it does nothing so efficiently!
"green" lead free
Folks- "green" is hardly how one would describe most of the OTHER heavy metals in motherboards...like in the capacitors alone. Nevermind the chemicals used in making all the various components...
Please help metamoderate.
My local frys electronics is now advertising a $100 machine. Though granted it is reduced from $200 because of after-thanksgiving sales and it probably has no monitor like most people expect. It does comes with linspire. The price may go back up, but chances are such that it may drop back down to $100 again. The way I see it, $100 PC has already been for some time.
It will be a delicious irony if Ballmer's sweaty Wal-Mart-style browbeating on pricing leads to an exodus from Windows.
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
It says it uses solid-state CF.. so how much memory does it have?
I dont see it in the article, nor on their main site. They DO mention having lots of apps installed, so I presume its not zero..
GPL'd web-based tradewars themed space game
They did. Go to http://solarpc.com/ and scroll down.
What's a Nehemiah? Is this something like a modern version of AMD's Elan?
Not since Marie-Antoinette played milkmaid has looking simple and honest been so fake and complicated.
So they are going with a no moving parts design.
sounds good to me, give every user a 64 or 32 meg usb drive for $10 apeice...
This of course precludes the far cheaper use of cdrw as a storage medium at under a $1 apiece with far larger storage capacity..
and no HD??? they are using a CF card? well, more power to them, but those things tend to have finite w/rw cycles. (like 100,000- still you might not want it for a memory swap use...) What are we talking about 256Mb CF card? I dont picture them going bigger then a 512mb cf card, becouse of the price point....
I hope in the US market version, we will be able to open a slot and swap in our 4gb cf hard drive...
and of course it needs its own computer memory- 64mb? 128?
They show it with a small lcd in the homepage of the .org site. Doesnt even look like a 15 incher.. Does this imply a 640*480 maximum resolution???
It does seem like it would be a good platform for commercial/POS use. Cheap, small, runs an lcd. hopefully it supports the lcd as a touchscreen.
Probably its a unitized mobo, with hardwired cpu attached. as for the memory...??? and of course integral video, and audio.
a 640*480 video display suggests a max of 2mb of video memory, probably allocated out of the general computer memory. not very impressive.
Conclusion- This also seems like it would be a nice car pc. Still I want it to play a dvd, onto a nice size 15 or 17 inch screen. hopefully that level of hardware will be available in a slightly up rated version.
I dont do meaning of life questions.
Yeah - they have to turn off stylesheets when it gets too cloudy.
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
We already have SkypeOut, and SkypeIn is coming soon, and Siemens has those Skype compatible phones (Alternatively there are USB devices for using any phone with Skype)
Combining SkypeOut and SkypeIn means that Skype may finally be viable for completely replacing a traditional phoneline (In eastern Canada we have "naked DSL" with no extra costs, and cable internet doesn't require it either).
I envision taking one of these 100$ PCs and using it as a Skype gateway; SkypeIn and SkypeOut provide incoming and outgoing POTS service, the 100$ PC runs skype, and the phones (Which are wireless, so the base stations can be where the PC is) provide the final link.
Now, the only problem is that SkypeOut charges for local calls, which are normally free (for a monthly fee) here. If you make a lot of local calls, even at the very affordable SkypeOut rates it might become expensive.
The markup on Personal Computers is more like 5%.
No. They wouldnt, the manufacturing process means they make them in batches, batches of say, 100,000, if they make them one at a time, the manufacturing costs skyrocket, if they make 100,000 without a confirmed order, they stand to lose a LOT of money.
This would be a truly bitchen little file server/print server. If the system boots from a read-only CF, but uses an external USB2 drive as the shareable space and home for the print queue, it would be splendid.
You really don't need that much horsepower to serve files/print queues. Hell, a 486 can do that without breaking a sweat.
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power multiplied.
I don't know about as a home computer, but since it already runs on 12 volts, this could make an excellent car MP3 player. Someone said something about it being more than 100.00 dollars with a monitor, but 100.00 bucks and little LCD monitor to browse your MP3 list...and I'll buy one for each vehicle I own. :) I went to the web page but there wasn't much information. How much storage space do these things have again?
Usurper_ii
Ron Paul
How silly of me.
What's the capitol of Africa again?
+++ATH0
Just a word Hamsters lots of them, the best and one of the cheapest power sources available, just imagine a couple of hamsters in their exercise wheels powering your new 100$ computer.
And I have prayed unto You, O Lord U**X in the time of the Will of Linux.
To the opener.
It shouldn't be long before someone hacks this and installs whatever OS they choose on it.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
Well, they're not for everyone. People with handicaps such as grotesquely large hands will have to use specialised solutions, as always.
Switch back to Slashdot's D1 system.
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
Also you can often by hardware even below the 100,000 unit price as typically there is an even lower price for 1 Million or more units purchased.
The thing is that Microsoft has already created the $149.00 PC and it will run linux without any modification, they just need to drop the price again and he'll be set.
Hey look no pointless curley braces or semicolons... just like Python
If you really want environmentally friendly computers, why can't more be done to improve reuseability. From experience working in locations where it isn't easy to get laptops and PC's repaired, the following would be useful:
1. Laptops in which the screens have a video-in socket. This would allow the screen of a functioning laptop to allow the use of a laptop with a broken backlight/display.
2. Having LCD backlights which could be replaced without having to take apart the entire display.
(I personally had this experience with a laptop repair shop - the PC was completely dead because the invertor had fried; the technician told me nothing could be done. Unplugging the invertor and using an external monitor allowed the PC to start up normally).
3. Have the motherboard of a PC in it's own slot - replacing a motherboard wouldn't require dissassembling the entire system. Many users seem happy to throw out a perfectly usable power-supply, cooling fans, chassis and frame, network, audio and video cards just because the motherboard has fried.
4. With new video cards coming out every six months, and the availabilty of chipsets in the MXM form factor for laptops, would it be possible to design desktop video cards so that the memory chips, and GPU could be inserted/removed individually, rather than having to buy a completely new chip but with exactly the same circuit board.
Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
You guys seem to be assuming that the cost to the distributor is $100. I see no indication of that at all. Maybe $100 is the intended retail price.
You see this on Walmart.com.
By the time you price a "complete" system, in-store pick-up, no free home delivery, whatever advantage Linux has disappears, and the Windows system will have brand name recognition (HP, eMachines.)
The idea here is that they can cut the price down on 100.000 units in manufacturing and shipping. Imagine for a second that they need to make one. The cost to make it would be 70$. This is so high because they need to fire up ye olde machines to press the cases, print the boards, the people that do the manual stuff, etc. Now, shipping one unit to one person costs 40$.
However, if they make 100.000. The cost to make it drops to 20$. All those machines are already running, the staff is already there. The shipping is in bulk container, so it probably costs 10.000$ to ship the lot.
Oh yes, they could make 100.000 units and sell them seperatly as orders come in, but they run the risk of having 90.000 units in stock they can't get rid of, which makes it a very unlucrative business.
So, yes, you're going to have to sell these in bulk as a manufacturer if you want to have some profit. And that's what motivates everyone who's doing business.
By the time you price a "complete" system, in-store pick-up, no free home delivery, whatever advantage Linux has disappears
How do the features that Linux offers 'disappear' just because some American company chooses to sell PCs with Windows pre-installed? Noone says you can't reformat the harddisk and install the OS of your choice[1]. Admittedly, the installation is the weak point on some Linux distributions.
[1] Not yet anyway.
I'll probably be modded down for this...
we can get someone to put the lead back in (do any boards use lead anymore?) and take out all that phoney baloney eco-crap we could have a $50 computer that runs on a battery.
Looks like this will be a good christmas after all.
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
And while we're at it, I'm going to ask Santa Clause install Ralph Nader as president of my country and replace all the coal power plants by zero-impact fusion power plants and make the world all better.
To think that you can provide 10 watts of solar power (okay, I read the article, and despite solar being in the name, solar cells not included), a power supply unit to provide backup power should you go out of the sun for a few minutes, and the actual unit itself, no less do it for quite a bit under $100 since a good chunk will go to the retailer. And to do it with untested technology no less. If only NASA could send bleeding edge tech to space for even twice this much cost.
Maybe next year I'll ask jolly old St. Nicholas for a flying pig.
Sarcasm aside, I would try to provide cheap desktops before providing a cheap laptop. Anything laptop is 2-3x the cost of a comparable desktop, and repairs and theft are much bigger issues. All three of these will be concerns for units targetted for poor people.
VIA abuses its workers?
... until you consider that if that factory closed down, she might work 4 hours a day as a child prostitute instead.
Let me ask you something. How badly are they abused? Are their fingers being cut off? Are they having firey bamboo chutes shoved into exit-only orifaces? Are they "made" to work long hours? what constitutes worker abuse, exactly?
Look at this way. Presumably, these people work an abusive VIA factory because for them, currently, _that is the best thing going_.
Yeah, its upsetting that a 10 year old girl might work 14 hrs a day in a factory somewhere.
I think its better for the child to keep on working for nike as opposed to polishing 30 year old men. How about you ?
My opinions are my own, and do not necessarily represent those of my employer.
I've been looking into building systems like these myself. I am currently using a VIA EPIA VE5000, and I like it a lot. Silent, low power consumption, and fast enough for me.
I'm not going to beat SolarPC in price, though. The board alone cost me 84 euros, and I would need to add a case, power supply and flash drive to that. Perhaps I should import rather than build them...
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
Without a harddrive and such a limited applicability, can this really be the $100 PC? I guess it really depends on your idea of PC.
It's an interesting contraption, but I wouldn't consider it a mainstream usable PC.
"Simple words such as 'better' or 'faster' are best used by simpletons. Life [...] is more complicated." - TMC
DSL! DSL is an awesome distro :) I run it here on older desktops and laptops that don't have the memory or disk space to run Mandrake. It's very small and easily customizable. Perfect! I'm glad DSL is finally getting the attention it deserves :)
-- Ed Carp, N7EKG erc@pobox.com PGP KeyID: 0x0BD32C9B What I'm up to: http://intuitives.mine.nu
That is exactly what I think
Even XBOX is more expensive than this, and XBOX is sld at a loss (last time it was $40 on every unit)
Go grab those torrents.
``$400. Which is the cost of a low end Dell shitbox, which almost certainly has better specs. So I don't see that we've actually gained anything.''
Well, the SolarPC is small and silent and has low power requirements and probably a good life expectancy (no moving parts). Which one is the best pick depends completely on your priorities.
For myself, I would go with the SolarPC any day.
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
Yes, but we dont have the credit card that Skype would accept. Skype sux.
Go grab those torrents.
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!
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.
If the 10 year old girl's parents were being paid a decent wage she wouldn't have to be a line worker or a prostitute.
Is that with one gig or capable of holding one gig?
Surely it's $100 or less in 100k quantities.
It has a user interface and wireless and uses power efficiently.
ARM9 and ARM7 should be plenty of power for education and FUN too.
Now I'm the grandest Tiger in the Jungle!
"Where there is much light there is also much shadow. -- Goethe"
... sort of appropriate as solarpc displays (according to the site, see touchscreen section) emit no radiation! Even black holes can't do that!!
The above was the quote I got for this story
Slashdot has been quick to dismiss Windows XP Starter Edition as a competitor, localized and with a lot of help for first time users. Screenshots of SE suggest a very clean and attractive GUI.
Microsoft is well known and accepted at street level in the third world, something an eastern buyer has to consider when commiting to a million-dollar purchase. I am not convinced that Linux is the right marketing decision for the SolarPC, however big the PR win in the western Linux press, where nothing is at risk.
does it run Windows?
*Ducks*
*Picks up grenade and throws back*
*Runs for cover*
I remember back in the 80's a quote by a former Commodore computer exec.. "Computers for the masses, not the classes".
The price point that seemed to be "special" for the consumer (at least back then) was $200 bucks. We have to remember though that at that time when you bought a C64/Vic20 it did not come with ANY storage (sounds a lot like the unit above!) and hardly any apps (a couple of cartridges I think). And for display you hooked it up to a TV.
Why can't that model work now? Are we SO used to having SVGA (or better) and Hard disks that an embedded computer (which is what the C64 and Vic20 was) can't make it?
Over 25 MILLION C64's were produced. The person that can tap that same market again (el cheapo PC) can make $$$$
http://http//en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodore_64
everyone knows that this has always been 'damn small linux' except that article uses the linking text of "www.dslos.com" though it really goes to "www.damnsmalllinux.org". dslos.com is a working url, which is the same as the normal site except it says 'demi sized linux' in the title bar and elsewhere instead of 'damn small linux'.
i thought maybe this 'demi sized' version of the name has been the clean version for a while, but a google search brings up nothing.
i guess its not that bad but does this suggest that MS wanted the os to present itself in a 'cleaner' fashion, without the word "damn"?
also why does the article point to the damn small version rather the the demi sized. maybe they just recently set up the domain or something and the dns hadnt fully moved over at time of publishing? although a whois on dslos.com shows it was registered on nov 4.
(although note on that the whois.sc info on the site it shows 'desktop sized linux' as the title bar... i guess they arnt even sure what they want the clean version to be. wierd.)
I wonder which cpu and how much memory these things are going to have. Their other mini-itx boxes start at $189 and have no memory, no HD, no flash, and use the cheapest ITX MB that via makes (the EPIA 5000):
. 147.44.194/catalog/index.php?cPath=21
http://www.solarpc.com/compare.html
http://205
So I wonder what they are going to do to cut their prices by $89 and still add RAM and flash memory? I wonder what their costs in producing PCs are currently? Maybe they are going to just make a marginal profit just to get their name out (and surely a lab full of solarlite's would go well with a nice $10K solarpc server).
I'm getting sick and tired of hearing this stupid crap over and over again.
No matter how many computers you have, you aren't going to magically get any smarter. Your education system isn't going to suck any less. etc.
Fact is, the more money you are spending on computers, the more likely it is you are taking money away from the programs that actually educate students.
Just look at TVs and VCRs in every classroom. They also held the promise of revolutionizing the education system, but they really just gather dust year-round, and only get pulled-out when the teacher feels like wasting time with a movie, rather than teaching.
Now, this isn't a rant against new technology. Frankly, if TVs were better used, they would make a vast improvement in the education system. Why the hell is it that everyone is still forced to spend weeks reading plays from Shakespeare, rather than watching them in a couple days?
But I digress. Computers, like TVs before them, are getting used 99% of the time for entertainment purposes, and for practically nothing educational. Meanwhile, the idea that you must have computers to have educated students is sucking money from the places it can have real positive benefits.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
My old PC300 PL which has a value of 100-200 bucks today can run W2K SP4 perfectly well. It has 288MB RAM a 40GB drive and a P2-450. Stock audio/video and for laughs I've replaced the free onboard NIC with a RealTek NIC that cost $0 after rebate.
My even older PC750 with an AMD K62-400, 112MB RAM and 4GB and a 6GB drive, an AWE64 soundcard from the trash, stock video and another net zero cost NIC do a serviceable job for low end use.
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.
If it has at least one serial port I'll probably buy one. I only know PPC assembly, so I'd love to see a hundred dollar small factor PPC system, but whatever, I'll either learn x86 or just do it in C if I could build stuff for 100$+periferals. You can get a 16x4 alpha/numeric LCD for $25, and the interface is pretty easy. I'd probably want an FPGA just to simplify the interface, so that's an extra 15$. But total, that's less than 150 to build whatever coo thing you could want and have it be car mountable. This could be awesome for robotics as well.
I think this is what you were looking for. ;)
Why bother.
My first computer was a Radio Shack CoCo II. I believe it ran about $149 in 1983 when I got it. I was a Computer Engineering student at the time and did my last 3 years worth of undergrad work using that computer. Without enhancement, it was only able to drive a 32x16 character screen, but with a little assembly language and a couple extra memory chips, I was able to build a more reasonable screen mode using the "high res" graphics mode.
It's likely that you could make the same computer today for less than $20. And the challenge of dealing with something that low end would be a lot more educational than this $100 dream machine. It is the high expectations that we create that keep many out of the computer age. If they entered it where we entered, they'd find the going far easier.
My personal opinion is that the device will not have widespread use until specific applications are developed (and are mature). For example, it definitely has a niche in the automobile industry (think portable mp3 player, dvd player, navigation, browser, etc.), in watercrafts (sailing navigation, fish finding, luxury boating etc.), in the medical industry (bedside browser, communication device, all-in-one), but for it to be a good seller in these markets, developers have to have a crack at it to make the software better than what one can find in the regular PC market. Because they're so inexpensive, it wouldn't hurt for the manufacturer to give the device to key developers in each niche market. That way, it'll get the snowball rolling -- more apps mean more users that in turn mean more consumers to buy the products.
Linux at home
I've been to a few places in the Third World and they are often hindered by government tariffs on electronics, (helpful hint: use your old laptop to help pay for your next trip to Ecuador by selling it in Ecuador) bad roads, and that unique third world IT marketing teqnique that can be best described as "get old hardware, fill it up with pirated software".
But the roads and tarriffs will likely add alot of cost to these computers before the mystery of how they actually purchase old Compaq's can be cracked.
On a positive note; at least the power consumption is low. Many big cities in third world contries have 8 + hour blackouts daily and this means computers must be run on diesel generators. Internet cafe's in Port Au Prince are really odd that you have to type e-mails by candlelight.
I hope the plan succeeds.
You can use battery backed up sdram for home and do a backup onto your flash device to reduce the number of writes.
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
in car mp3 player here we come.
I think the 10what vesion should be good enough to play mp3s.
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
Sure 100 bucks is cheap.....but these days you can go online and buy a complete used system for 100 bucks...thats with at least 64 mb ram...10 gig hdd and fairly decent video card and more.
If you want to save the enviroment the best way is to recycle used computers.
Look at this place for example...most everything they sell is used.. computer geeks
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.
to run an XboX.
Powering the thing is a _serious_ issue in the third world, where electricity is either unavailable or relatively expensive, and $1 is a day's income - IF you have a job which pays money, which most do not.
I can't imagine what the people in the farming villages would do with a computer anyway, without an Internet connection, which is out of the question. Outside of a city, land lines are nonexistant. A satellite link is about the only connection, and co$t$ $80/month, which would be a significant fraction of the income of a village. Someone else mentioned that it would take an entire village to come up with $100, and that's not an exaggeration. What these villages could _really_ use might be: 1. Power Line Modems (for the ones which _have_ power) and 2. Wireless ethernet, with directional antennas capable of links of several miles. OH - and, solar power, definately.
Maybe in town, where DSL is available and jobs are more common, a DSL connection might be affordable if shared between a dozen households. Maybe. The rich kids paying $.60/hr in parlors to play multiplayer FPS won't be interested in this box.
School kids might use these (in town & out, without Internet), but they won't touch 'em without WinBloze, especially when their teachers issue and expect Word documents. Forget the co$t of M$, they pay $3 for a bootleg, and the Emperor is fine with that. Ballmer wants a $100 _PC_ to insure Imperial penetration into these markets, (especially the schools,) before that horrible GPL software, on some cheaper platform, can get a foothold.
The BIG question is not "Will it run Linux?", but "Will it run LoseXP?"
Exceeding the recommended torque is not recommended.
If you think paying $100 for a "Lead-Free" PC is a good idea, then you might be unfamiliar with the "Tin Whiskers Alert" issued by the University of Maryland.
For what it's worth, an Independence Day weekend article posted "here" provides a preview of what can be expected due to the proliferation of such hardware.
Bottom line, THERE IS NO FREE LUNCH!!!
...dancemat keyboard?
Hmmm.. !
It sounds to me as the perfect computer to build in my car.
From the article:
- Book sized (9" x 7" x 1.75") machine that weighs approximately three pounds.
- It features a rugged no-moving-parts design that includes a Compact Flash drive.
- Operates on 12 volt DC power and can be run from a car battery.
- The article states its quiet.
The SolarLite uses 10 watts of energy, does that compromise my car battery performance - or is it insignificant?
Hivemind harvest in progress..
Synapse 'sinaps: 1. Noun. The junction between two neurons (axon-to-dendrite) or between a neuron and a muscle. Using a noun as a verb? Grammatical faux-pas.
It's made of SOY BEANS! How can you beat that?
"Who are in control, they are not in control of anything - they don't even control themselves!" - Glen Beck
I'm not sure one failed attempt at something = impossibility. Things that might be different about this PC:
1.- Linux has gotten better by leaps and bounds.
2.- Flash memory is cheaper, and this machine probably has more.
3.- Dude, it can run off solar. Or a car battery. Or your bicycle. Which makes it perfect for people on farms, people camping, and, well, people.
4.- It costs 100 dollars.
5.- The market is different.
6.- The marketer is different.
I can go on, but I won't. It's a different situation.
Please stop stalking me, bro.