[Beowulf] who is buying those $200 PCs from wal-mart?

[Peter St. John]

There was some discussion of this at Slashdot. I surmise that a)
Walmart didn't do the quantity for initial release that that might do
for Brittany Spears Tableware or somesuch. b) a lot of bithead geeks
are buying them for their innumerate kin (but that's the kind of
anecdotal evidence you'd expect at Slashdot).
The countervailing idea is that pure economics...a machine that's
cheaper than the OS (if it were M$)... drives a groundswell of new
adopters from the tighter-budget demographic. I certainly hope that's
at least part of it. It makes a lovely ballance with One Laptop Per
Child.
Peter

On Nov 15, 2007 12:39 AM, Mark Hahn <hahn at mcmaster.ca> wrote:
> http://www.eetimes.com/news/latest/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=203100228&printable=true
> http://www.walmart.com/catalog/product.do?product_id=7754614#Specifications
>
> I'm a little surprised by this - personally, I think there's a large,
> under-developed market for minimal-function PCs.  haven't we all met
> people who think that the web browser _is_ not only the internet,
> but also the computer?  but I wonder whether there aren't some of you
> out there buying up these boxes to make clusters.
>
> yes, I know: Via C7-D 1.5 GHz is hardly competitive with a quad-core penryn.
> but maybe something disk-intensive and embarassingly parallel?
>
> I'd love to hear stories.  heck, I'd get a huge kick out of it
> if the integrated nic can do PXE ;)
> _______________________________________________
> Beowulf mailing list, Beowulf at beowulf.org
> To change your subscription (digest mode or unsubscribe) visit http://www.beowulf.org/mailman/listinfo/beowulf
>