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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.
...they sure do have a ghetto website. :P
-fren
"Where are we going, and why am I in this handbasket?"
using flash drives....whats the lifespan on these given ther write limits on the drives...
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.
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.
WTF, stylish? It looks like a metal project box from radio shack.
Check it out.
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.
Subnnotrenbiooklds are fgreast!@ Teh keybboardas sizzzxe dsolen't boethre me at allk!
It would be cool if it didn't suck.
No It's a really bad joke on Ballmer.
A few weeks ago Ballmer made the annoucement he wanted $100 PC's for the 3rd world countries. He of course wanted them to run windows.
the joke is that the reason you can't have a $100 pc running windows, is because you need to spend $50 on just Windows. Hardware guys are already running at 1-3% profit per machine, Unlike say MSFT windows and office which are running at somewhere around 400% profit per license sold.
What Ballmer fails to realize is that people will balance that equation out. Both sides should be no higher than 30% Guess who will suffer more?
i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.
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.
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
After some enhancement in Photoshop, here's what it really looks like. It resembles a very basic mini-ITX box. No connectors are visible.
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
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!
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.
The village doesn't have to afford it. If a first-world charity or aid agency has $1000 to spend on computers (which is quite plausible), they can buy ten of these instead of two standard $500 desktops.
It's hard to be religious when certain people are never incinerated by bolts of lightning.
WTF, stylish? It looks like a metal project box from radio shack.
How is that not stylish?
I am a viral sig. Please help me spread.
Perhaps becuase it is vapourware?
Could it be that the product does not exist yet, but the "supplier" figured out that it could be manufactured cost-effectively if there were a guaranteed build quantity of 100k units?
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
But it does nothing so efficiently!
I know it was a troll, but their website does actually cover that eventuality... http://solarpc.com/beowulf.html
Yeah - they have to turn off stylesheets when it gets too cloudy.
We already have SkypeOut, and SkypeIn is coming soon, and Siemens has those Skype compatible phones (Alternatively there are USB devices for using any phone with Skype)
Combining SkypeOut and SkypeIn means that Skype may finally be viable for completely replacing a traditional phoneline (In eastern Canada we have "naked DSL" with no extra costs, and cable internet doesn't require it either).
I envision taking one of these 100$ 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.
How silly of me.
What's the capitol of Africa again?
+++ATH0
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.
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.
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.
Well, since you mention it, here you go.