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"World's Cheapest Laptop" Available in Bulk Only
BobB writes to tell us that what one company is calling the "world's cheapest laptop" is now available at the price of $130. Unfortunately if you want to buy one you will also need to convince 99 of your closest friends to go in on an order with you since you cannot buy in less than units of 100. We have covered several "cheap laptops" in the past and many have turned out to be fraudulent, so especially with a large up-front cost, buyer beware. "The Impulse NPX-9000 laptop has a 7-inch screen and comes with the Linux OS. It has a 400MHz processor, 128M bytes of RAM, 1G byte of flash storage and an optional wireless networking dongle. It includes office productivity software, a Web browser and multimedia software."
Posting this with my 600MHz laptop running KDE 3 1/2 (Kubuntu 8.04) and have never had any complaints about speed. 128MB, though ...
I just got a P3 laptop for free at a rummage sale cuz the hard drive was broken (but I had a spare one). This model goes for far under $100 on ebay so let's compare. 400MHz processor vs 850 MHz processor. 128 vs 128 of ram. 1GB of storage compared to 20GB. 7 inch screen vs 14. And a who knows but probably less AH batter vs a 2.2AH battery (you can order a 4-6+ AH one on ebay for it though). Oh and mine came with ME on it so I reinstalled that and it boots from off in about 15 seconds and shuts down in just under 5 seconds. Yep, mine's faster. This trend of ultra cheap but slower than hell laptops is a joke. If you want some cheap, slow piece of crap that can surf the web and type documents, just buy a used laptop on ebay for even cheaper.
Google's Super Secret Search Algorithm: SELECT @search_results FROM internet WHERE @search_results = 'good'
I tested the 7 inch screen Eee PC when it first came out and a screen that size is pretty much useless when it comes to internet use of serious document preparation.
The Mac Classic my wife used to get through law school, several years of law, and then half of medical school only had a 512x384 9" monochrome CRT...
Now, I agree that one wouldn't want to do much in the way of desktop publishing on a 7" screen - and programming could get ugly, but it is more than capable of checking email and making slideshows... if your slide can't be seen on a 7" screen then it can't be seen across a room, either. You can also type text into it and format it later. Even web surfing can be acceptable if you just hit up news sites and the like.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
Even closer in spirit, I think, would be www.eswarm.com. I've met one of the founders, and they've been in development for a long time, it seems. From what I understand, the whole point of e-swarming is to post something you'd like a discount on (like these cheap laptops, or even regular consumer items--blenders, ipods, car insurance, etc--and see if you can find the requisite number of people to affect a bulk buy discount.
When I first met the guy, and heard his idea, I thought it a brilliant use of the internet, and I'm surprised it hasn't caught on before.
If my wife could buy a class set of 30 (maybe a few extras), she'd be more than happy to have these for her 6th grade students. A couple of candy bar sales would do it. All they need them for is simple research on the web and basic word processing. Anything else (audio, able to show video, etc) is great, but not needed. And at $130, when one is lost (and technology in student hands always dies or gets stolen), she won't have to call in the national guard.
Crappy machines? Yes! Almost a plus in this case. So they fit a need. My guess is she's no the only with the need.
The world is made by those who show up for the job.
I know it's a little more expensive, but I'm holding out for one of these.
One thing to note, 400MHz today isn't 400MHz 10 years ago. Depending on which processor this thing uses, it could be much much more powerful than the 10 year old laptop, or it could be much much less powerful than the 10 year old laptop. We certainly have new technologies today which could allow a very quick 400MHz machine. Imagine, most of the newest Core 2 Duos only sit at 2GHz.
It's been a long time.
You should look at the chart more carefully. That MIPS chip is situated between 2 Athlon Thunderbirds, which are 32-bit machines on an integer-based benchmark. I'd like to see an FPU-based benchmark. Plus those Athlon cpus were a lot less expensive than the MIPS 16000 cpus used by SGI.
I doubt it. It depends on the Flash animation you want to view, of course, but YouTube videos don't even play anything close to smoothly on my 500MHz iBook.
"And there be unix which have made themselves unix for the kingdom of heaven's sake." - Matt. 19:12
Eswarm isn't live yet, however, the Point is. It allows you to start a "campaign" that people can pledge to, set a cut of date, and if the goal is fulfilled by the cutoff date, then everyone is obligated to meet abide by their pledge. In the case of monetary campaigns, your credit card is required as part of your pledge. You are never charged if the campaign goal isn't met.
That's hilarious!
The MIPS R16k cpu (originally released some 7-8 years ago) consumes ~20 watts all by itself. That isn't going to work for a laptop.
A modern Centrino chipset is ~25 watts *total* (cpu, I/O, etc).
A small laptop with a half-bright screen and idle but spinning drive tends to idle at 20-25 watts (Mac G4 Powerbook was the last one I tested) including substantial losses in the iGo inverter (it was hot) running in 12V input mode.
But seriously, there are fundamental architectural reasons why RISC will never again beat CISC for general purpose applications. The most signifigant is the round-trip time required to fetch anything from RAM. RISC is incredibly sensitive to any latency, whereas CISC is less so.
Well, MIPS might beat PowerPC, but regardless...
It's MIPS. It very likely won't run a modern Flash. Best you'll get is Flash 6, according to another poster.
However, put Gnash on there, and if Gnash can actually play video, it'll be much faster. I've tested -- windowed Flash uses over 50% of a 2.4 ghz AMD X2. (That's 50% of one core, so not as bad as it sounds -- still, 1.2 ghz.) Fullscreen doesn't play smoothly at all, now that it's actually supported.
Download the same video, play it in mplayer or VLC, and CPU usage doesn't rise above 1% -- maybe 2% fullscreen, if that.
Try the same experiment with a modern codec -- 720p h.264 from Vimeo. Sucks in Flash, even if you deliberately force it not to do any scaling. Smooth as butter in mplayer.
So in this case, I'd blame Adobe -- and YouTube/Google for supporting them -- and not the CPU in question.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
I developed for SGI machines quite a few years ago, and the FPU performance of the Mips processors is where they really shone (They were after all used primarily for 3D work in an era pre-GPU). A 200Mhz mips chip would still outperform an 800Mhz Athalon (my PC at the time) when it came to raw FPU power. That of course required quite a lot of work to get that kind of performance. The big speed killer was always memory access, but if you got that right, they were astonishingly quick at FPU computation
:( The benchmarks on that page seem pretty low to me - The FPU performance of the 800/900 Mhz chips i used to use were closer to that of a 3Ghz P4....
The R16000's were awesome - i miss the old SGI Fuels