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Is 25 years good enough?

Is 25 years good enough?

Posted May 24, 2008 0:14 UTC (Sat) by man_ls (guest, #15091)
In reply to: OLPC was designed to last YEARS not DAYS by khim
Parent article: OLPC 2.0: towards the US$75 laptop (apc)

Firefox is actually the biggest memory hog on my 128 MB system. It does not seem like the best browser for a low memory machine -- although under XFCE it eats up quite less memory than under GNOME. But on my laptop Linux runs routinely under 80 MB RAM with firefox running and GMail loaded, using a bit of swap. I don't know what the swap was used for, it didn't thrash very much.

I will not throw away my NSLU2, just the USB memory (which BTW is about 5 years old and is still in working order). And then for 6 € I will buy another 2 GB high speed USB memory that should work for some 25 years more. Talk about the price of consumables!

Why have swap? Because Firefox refuses to run in 64 MB RAM! No other reason: with a low footprint browser you might as well disable swap. It is a classical engineering dilemma, and one where OLPC was not creative enough -- if that is the real price increase, which I doubt because my $300 Eee comes with 512 MB of RAM.


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Not quite 25 years.

Posted May 29, 2008 12:13 UTC (Thu) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link] (1 responses)

The links you've supplied starts with the following assumption: Wear-leveling is effective to some degree. If you are using flash for JFSS or YASS or you have some special firmware - it IS effective. With swap and no special hardware it's not. USB sticks typically have this special hardware so if you are are using not built-in flash for swap but USB stick it's somewhat different story.

It is a classical engineering dilemma, and one where OLPC was not creative enough -- if that is the real price increase.

It is a real price increase. We are talking about something like $2-$3 here, it's not much, but when we are talking about $100 prices $2-$3 here, then $3-$4 there and suddenly the end result is $188 laptop, not $155 laptop... And $155 is real price which "$100 laptop" meant: when the whole story started we had 1EUR == $1 USD, today 1EUR == 1.55USD...

Not quite 25 years.

Posted May 29, 2008 21:25 UTC (Thu) by man_ls (guest, #15091) [Link]

If you are using flash for JFSS or YASS or you have some special firmware - it IS effective.
Isn't this the kind of engineering problems the OLPC set out to solve?
With swap and no special hardware it's not. USB sticks typically have this special hardware so if you are are using not built-in flash for swap but USB stick it's somewhat different story. [...] It is a real price increase. We are talking about something like $2-$3 here
This "special hardware" cannot be that expensive, when for 6€ you get a nice shiny 2 GB USB stick nowadays. Or just do it in software as you suggested above. Just spend $0.10 for every laptop and with the current unit volume you get $60,000 to pay an engineer that could develop JFSS further.
And $155 is real price which "$100 laptop" meant: when the whole story started we had 1EUR == $1 USD, today 1EUR == 1.55USD...
Why should the target be in € (EUR)? If so, why didn't Negroponte announce the "100 € laptop"? Most stuff sold and bought in the US have not suffered a 55% increase in price; that is why we Europeans travel there to buy a lot of stuff. And it doesn't show in inflation.


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