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Steve Ballmer's $100 PC, Sans Windows
Posted by
timothy
on Sat Nov 27, 2004 03:21 PM
from the damn-bowlderized-damn-domain-name dept.
from the damn-bowlderized-damn-domain-name dept.
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.
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10Watts of slave power (Score:4, Funny)
I have visions of slaves in third world countries on generator bicycles, all outside pedaling away, while the local bigwig surfs porn
Re:10Watts of slave power (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:10Watts of slave power (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:10Watts of slave power (Score:4, Informative)
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Re:10Watts of slave power (Score:5, Funny)
Exactly how would this be more apealing than just fucking the slaves?
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Re:10Watts of slave power (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:10Watts of slave power (Score:5, Funny)
Where? On the porn site or pedaling the bicycle?
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Re:10Watts of slave power (Score:5, Informative)
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You're right. (Score:5, Funny)
What's the capitol of Africa again?
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Re:You're right. (Score:5, Funny)
Africa City, of course. Jeez, you don't get out much, do you?
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Re:10Watts of slave power (Score:5, Insightful)
It makes a major difference. If a person is riding a bike to power my computer he is working for me and me alone. This is not a fair or even economic model because I would need huge teams of people on bikes to power my house. To keep a single person in luxury a large number of people would be needed. Because of this imbalance, only a small number of privileged people would have electricity even though a large number of people worked for that electricity.
Consider the local incinerator. They provide power for this entire region. The number of people who can power their entire homes far exceeds the number of people actually required to create that power. This is a far better model because large numbers of people get electricity including those who produced it.
Now, I suppose the next step in your little philosophy is to argue that I could be personally down there shoveling trash into the burner. And I certainly could. But where would I get my food? I don't have the time or stamina for a full time job at the power plant and a full time job on the farm. In addition I'd also need to start working at the Water Works, the oil company, and the waste water treatment plant, and at some point I'd need to learn carpentry so I could build a house.
In addition to those necessities, I'd probably want to get part-time jobs at the Phone Company, The Cable company, The Local Newspaper, the local Dr Pepper bottling plant, etc
I like our current system better than both the slave system where people hire large numbers of people for their own personal use, or your system where everyone does everything themselves. Namely, individual services are provided by a relatively small number of people and offered to a large number of people. This allows everyone to enjoy the benefit of services that they could not personally provide. With the introduction of currency we can keep the whole system at least roughly fair.
Now don't get me wrong, I'll be the first to admit that our current Capitalist system is not perfect and it has many problems, but it is a major step up from rich people hiring large sets of slaves and everyone else being screwed.
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For leaders of a new Information Era... (Score:5, Funny)
-fren
Re:For leaders of a new Information Era... (Score:3, Interesting)
That is not the website you're looking for... (Score:3, Informative)
Re:That is not the website you're looking for... (Score:5, Interesting)
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solid-state? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:solid-state? (Score:5, Insightful)
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?"
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Re:solid-state? (Score:4, Funny)
"You don't need another pair of shoes. What's wrong with the ones you're wearing right now?"
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Re:solid-state? (Score:5, Informative)
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).
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Post is wrong by 2 orders of magnitude. (Score:5, Informative)
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.
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Re:Post is wrong by 2 orders of magnitude. (Score:4, Interesting)
(This assumes that you can read from the flash chips as much as you want, without wearing them out... hopefully that is the case)
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that's cool (Score:4, Informative)
Re:that's cool (Score:5, Funny)
-fren
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Re:that's cool (Score:3, Funny)
No power supply... (Score:5, Interesting)
Still, a nice deal assuming it has decent specs.
Re:No power supply... (Score:3, Informative)
Alot more aff
From the SolarLite page (Score:4, Funny)
WTF, stylish? It looks like a metal project box from radio shack.
Check it out [solarlite.org].
a metal project box from radio shack (Score:5, Funny)
How is that not stylish?
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a new Information Era is coming (Score:5, Funny)
Re:a new Information Era is coming (Score:5, Funny)
(o) Press here for more information
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Hmmm (Score:5, Funny)
What it really looks like (Score:5, Informative)
Assuming decent performance and expansion (Score:5, Interesting)
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 :)
Garbage. (Score:5, Insightful)
$100 is a lot of money... (Score:3, Insightful)
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."
Re:$100 is a lot of money... (Score:5, Insightful)
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Here are more specs on these computers.... (Score:5, Informative)
Might make a good Skype box. (Score:4, Insightful)
Combining SkypeOut and SkypeIn means that Skype may finally be viable for completely replacing a traditional phoneline (In eastern Canada we have "naked DSL" with no extra costs, and cable internet doesn't require it either).
I envision taking one of these 100$ 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.
Re:Minimum 100,000? (Score:5, Informative)
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100,000 will barely be enough for Slashdot alone! (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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Re:Minimum 100,000? (Score:4, Informative)
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Re:Miniaturizing is required. (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:am I just behind on the times? (Score:5, Insightful)
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?
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Re:am I just behind on the times? (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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Re:Chinese (ugh) VIA is NOT Environmentally Friend (Score:3, Insightful)
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 th
Re:Chinese (ugh) VIA is NOT Environmentally Friend (Score:4, Insightful)
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 ?
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Re:Minimum order, 100,000? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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Re:Minimum order, 100,000? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:AWESOME!!!!!!!! (Score:4, Funny)
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Re:Imagine... (Score:5, Informative)
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