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:10Watts of slave power

[FLAGGR]

I have visions of linux geeks loosing lots of weight, because they overclocked their SolarPC and it needs more juice.

Re:10Watts of slave power

[Gherald]

> I have visions of slaves in third world countries on generator bicycles, all outside pedaling away, while the local bigwig surfs porn

Exactly how would this be more apealing than just fucking the slaves?

solid-state?

[caino59]

using flash drives....whats the lifespan on these given ther write limits on the drives...

Re:solid-state?

[bcrowell]

Yeah, it's not so incredibly surprising that they can sell a PC for $100 if they leave out the power supply and the hard drive, and if $100 is the wholesale price in quantities of 100,000.

I've been buying Great Quality brand PCs from Fry's, and have been very happy with them. The retail price normally runs from $180 to $220, and it includes a hard drive and a power supply. Yesterday, as a day-after-Thanksgiving promo, they were selling them for $99. I almost went down there to get in line before dawn and snap one up, but my wife said lots of unreasonable things like, "You don't need another computer," and "What's wrong with the computer you have now?"

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).

Re:that's cool

[frenetic3]

whoo dont's have much money a chance to have a computer and learn

And not a moment too soon. :)

-fren

Re:am I just behind on the times?

[peragrin]

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?

Hmmm

[ICECommander]

It's the solution to America's obesity problem: Stop buying computers with power supplies, just make your kids pedal away.

Re:10Watts of slave power

[pyrros]

Africa is not a country, it is a continent.

Re:10Watts of slave power

[drinkypoo]

Depending on how appealing they are, you might need one before the other.

Re:Minimum order, 100,000?

[Junior J. Junior III]

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.

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:10Watts of slave power

[0racle]

I envision less Gentoo users.

Re:That is not the website you're looking for...

[HalliS]

And it seems that they've already imagined a beowolf cluster of their products: solarpc.com/beowulf.html

Re:10Watts of slave power

[samekt]

Not to mention there could be a farm animal.

Where? On the porn site or pedaling the bicycle?

Re:You're right.

[corbettw]

What's the capitol of Africa again?

Africa City, of course. Jeez, you don't get out much, do you?