SKIRMISHER

The $100 PC by Rufino Mananghaya of the University of the Philippines Los Banos has raised my usually-raised eyebrows a notch higher.

But first, the specs:

Mananghaya’s budget PC uses a Taiwanese mini-motherboard with 256 megabytes of memory and integrated with a Via C3 800 megahertz processor. This is barely enough to compete with most computers today but it has fewer applications to run anyway.

Instead of having a hard disk, this budget PC has been enhanced with a memory card adapter that allows it to use a Compact Flash card, which is usually used for digital cameras and MP3 players. Mananghaya used a 128 MB Compact Flash card and it’s already an operational computer. Mananghaya’s PC is not encased in solid metal; it is fixed in a 50-peso transparent plastic briefcase that can be bought in school supply shops.

Mananghaya’s PC feels more blather than any real achievement. You can get any Pentium-class PC for half that price at any second-hand shop; last year, for instance, I bought a complete desktop PC package for a measly $50 (P3 800 MHz, 128 MB RAM, 20 GB HDD, monitor, etc) to use as a test machine. Mananghaya’s “concoction” has some sort of allusion to Negroponte’s $100 notebook PC, but Negroponte’s PC uses new technologies and groundbreaking power source (the hand crank), among many other things, and is supposedly assembled for under $100.

The whole thing behooves me to rhetorically ask Mananghaya the completely relevant question:

What would happen if I’d pop that balloon?

via PINOY TECH BLOG

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