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Linux Business Software Hardware Linux

Steve Ballmer's $100 PC, Sans Windows 409

Posted by timothy 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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Steve Ballmer's $100 PC, Sans Windows More

Steve Ballmer's $100 PC, Sans Windows

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  • 10Watts of slave power (Score:4, Funny)

    by Hanzie ( 16075 ) on Saturday November 27, 2004 @04:22PM (#10932666)
    ... or human powered (with a bicycle-based generator)


    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)

      by FLAGGR ( 800770 ) on Saturday November 27, 2004 @04:25PM (#10932690)
      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 (Score:5, Funny)

      by Gherald ( 682277 ) on Saturday November 27, 2004 @04:25PM (#10932694) Journal
      > 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?
    • No slaves needed with the new Wanking-based generator.

      Damn, that is a seriously viable idea. I CALL PATENT!

  • Minimum 100,000? (Score:2, Interesting)

    by TiMac ( 621390 )
    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 [solarlite.org]. :P

    -fren

  • solid-state? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by caino59 ( 313096 ) on Saturday November 27, 2004 @04:26PM (#10932695) Homepage
    using flash drives....whats the lifespan on these given ther write limits on the drives...

    • Re:solid-state? (Score:2, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      100.000 writes per sector usually. Sandisk has some with 1 million writes too. But I guess (or hope, at least) these drives are mounted read-only, with some other kind of memory for saving documents etc.

      • Re:solid-state? (Score:3, Interesting)

        by starm_ ( 573321 )
        I think it would be interesting for it to have no HD only a big USB hub for memsticks (and periferal) and cd rom. You could either boot from the CD or a mem stick and have your /HOME on another stick or something. When the sticks are getting old just replace them.

    • Re:solid-state? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by bcrowell ( 177657 ) on Saturday November 27, 2004 @04:53PM (#10932912) Homepage
      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? (Score:3, Informative)

      by richcoder ( 539438 )
      using flash drives....whats the lifespan on these given ther write limits on the drives...

      The press release states that it uses a compact flash drive. I'd assume it is a micro drive and not solid state, so the number of writes are the same as your desktop PC.

      -rich

    • 'frugal install' of DSL (Score:2, Informative)

      by timothy ( 36799 ) *
      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

    • Re:solid-state? (Score:5, Informative)

      by grozzie2 ( 698656 ) on Saturday November 27, 2004 @05:09PM (#10933008)
      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).

      • Post is wrong by 2 orders of magnitude. (Score:5, Informative)

        by haggar ( 72771 ) on Saturday November 27, 2004 @07:45PM (#10933895) Homepage Journal
        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.

        • Re:Post is wrong by 2 orders of magnitude. (Score:4, Interesting)

          by Jeremi ( 14640 ) on Saturday November 27, 2004 @09:00PM (#10934270) Homepage
          Even if you only can get 10,000 writes out of a flash chip, it still isn't necessarily a problem -- just split your drives into mostly-read-only drives (that hold your OS and your apps, and get written too only rarely) and personal-data-storage drives (which get written to often, but which you replace every few years anyway). Design your computer with two or three flash slots, and just leave the "OS/app flash" in all the time.


          (This assumes that you can read from the flash chips as much as you want, without wearing them out... hopefully that is the case)

        • 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.

          Googling for flash mtbf turns up this site [transcend.com.tw], which claims 1e6 program/erase cycles and 1e6 hours MTBF, and this site [m-sys.com], which claims 5e6 program/erase cycles and 1.8e6 hour MTBF for their 1 GB flash disc, 1.0e6 hour MTBF for their 6 GB flash disc. Others claim MTBF figures such as 5e5 and 8e5 hours.

  • that's cool (Score:4, Informative)

    by MeatBlast ( 834728 ) on Saturday November 27, 2004 @04:26PM (#10932697)
    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.

  • specs? (Score:2, Interesting)

    by BMojo ( 315620 )
    Can I get even one piece of useful information pertaining to the actual performance of this thing?
  • 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?
    • Well, he wants a 100$ computer... If he's looking for it to be running Windows, he'd better bump that up a bit! :)
    • The summary is referring to something Ballmer said earlier this year about there being a need for $100 PCs...

    • Re:am I just behind on the times? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by peragrin ( 659227 ) on Saturday November 27, 2004 @04:32PM (#10932764)
      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?

      • >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.

        Not really. I mean, how much money has been dropped by MS just to get into markets? IE development, all the embrace/extend/extinguish stuff, etc.

        In other words, if it may be profitable in the future then today it means giving it away for free or nearly free.

        So lets look at China. There's an up and coming info market. Ballmer could very well subsidize Windows for next to nothing to p

      • Re:am I just behind on the times? (Score:5, Interesting)

        by grozzie2 ( 698656 ) on Saturday November 27, 2004 @06:16PM (#10933372)
        Hardware guys are already running at 1-3% profit per machine,

        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.

        • I agree with your assesment.

          I guess it's lucky that Linux is begining to boom while the win32 api is about to be written out of exsitance by MSFT. Lognhorn is supposed to kill off the iwn32 api and replace it. My guess is that is why they bought Virtual PC, so that they could run windows inside of longhorn.

          Also hardware manufactors have been replacing hardware tasks with software ones inside windows for years. I think that is part of the reason for such buggy drivers, as they are trying to do to much i
        • 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
      • 400% profit? Can you elaborate please?

        400% of what? The purchase price?
    • Nevermind. Article makes no mention of Ballmer - title was just a reference to a past blathering by said Crazy Microsoft Guy(tm). Apologies.
  • 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.
    • Cool idea, but why the large minimum order requirements

      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?


      • If they can take orders at 100,000 units, then they can manufacture them. You're probably right that they're probably only sitting on prototypes right now, but we know they can do it. Either way, they're demoing them at Linux Expo in February.

  • No power supply... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by toddestan ( 632714 ) on Saturday November 27, 2004 @04:28PM (#10932724)
    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.
    • i can see such a pc replacing my current p150 router . i just hope it has a usb2/firewall plug for an external hd and it'd be heaven :)
    • Actually that's easy. A 15 watt solar panel runs your about $100 these days. There is also the fact that nearly all automotive and RV type systems as well as the bulk of your small off the grid power supplies are all 12vdc. Developing a small portable and inexpensive power supply can be done quite easily for a relatively small amount of money. A few thousand dollars to out fit a school with the computers and a few more thousands for the power supply affordable by even 3rd world standards.

      Alot more aff

    • Re:No power supply... (Score:3, Interesting)

      by jxs2151 ( 554138 )
      So unless you already have your own 12V DC source handy...

      Gel cell battery and a solar panel. Every self-respecting amateur radio operator under 60 (all ten of us) has these items. Seriously, I had a blast doing remote ops with a gel cell and flexible solar panel. Perhaps I could use them with a new computer.

    • 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.

  • From the SolarLite page (Score:4, Funny)

    by mr.henry ( 618818 ) * on Saturday November 27, 2004 @04:29PM (#10932732) Journal
    Small, Silent, Sensible and Stylish

    WTF, stylish? It looks like a metal project box from radio shack.

    Check it out [solarlite.org].

  • a new Information Era is coming (Score:5, Funny)

    by frovingslosh ( 582462 ) on Saturday November 27, 2004 @04:30PM (#10932743)
    Damn, at first I read this as ""a new Information Bra is coming". I kind of like my way better.

  • Hmmm (Score:5, Funny)

    by ICECommander ( 811191 ) on Saturday November 27, 2004 @04:33PM (#10932767)
    It's the solution to America's obesity problem: Stop buying computers with power supplies, just make your kids pedal away.

  • What it really looks like (Score:5, Informative)

    by Animats ( 122034 ) on Saturday November 27, 2004 @04:41PM (#10932827) Homepage
    After some enhancement in Photoshop, here's what it really looks like. [overbot.com] It resembles a very basic mini-ITX box. No connectors are visible.
  • Yeah, a new information age is coming...as long as the schools can afford the $10 million for the minimum order.

    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.

  • Assuming decent performance and expansion (Score:5, Interesting)

    by drinkypoo ( 153816 ) <drink@hyperlogos.org> on Saturday November 27, 2004 @04:46PM (#10932859) Homepage Journal

    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)

    by Saeed al-Sahaf ( 665390 ) on Saturday November 27, 2004 @04:46PM (#10932860) Homepage
    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.

  • $100 is a lot of money... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by writermike ( 57327 ) on Saturday November 27, 2004 @04:49PM (#10932878)
    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."

  • Here are more specs on these computers.... (Score:5, Informative)

    by xxdinkxx ( 560434 ) on Saturday November 27, 2004 @04:51PM (#10932892) Homepage
    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?
  • 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, an
  • Think Geek should sell these to bypass the minimum order barrier and make the $100 PC available to us :

    I'd actually pay $150 (about £100) for one of these, if Think Geek needs a profit...

  • "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...

  • 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.
  • ...our new $100 underlords. ;-)

    It will be a delicious irony if Ballmer's sweaty Wal-Mart-style browbeating on pricing leads to an exodus from Windows.

  • Might make a good Skype box. (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Guspaz ( 556486 ) on Saturday November 27, 2004 @05:19PM (#10933078)
    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.

  • I hope they're selling at SCALE (Score:3, Interesting)

    by MsGeek ( 162936 ) on Saturday November 27, 2004 @05:31PM (#10933146) Homepage Journal
    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.

  • Solar PC website (Score:3, Informative)

    by jangobongo ( 812593 ) on Saturday November 27, 2004 @05:40PM (#10933197)
    From what I can see, this $100 PC won't include anything beyond the computer [205.147.44.194] itself. You'll need to provide your own monitor and power source (or purchase one from them).

    The SolarPC website also lists their specs for their other computers [solarpc.com] 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 [205.147.44.194].

  • $200...NOT $100 (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Danathar ( 267989 ) on Saturday November 27, 2004 @09:07PM (#10934305) Journal
    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 [http]

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