What has happened to the CRT?

TV

of

Hmm.. yes. I'm not that comfortable with the organic 'O' in OLED either. Organic things always seem to me to have a tendency to rot. But then again, back in the days I used to think the crystal 'C' in LCDs were fragile. They still are, with dead pixels etc. but robust enough for daily abuse.

Hello Real_McCoy,

It's worse: Such radios were indeed produced for the US market a while ago. But then they disappeared. This can only mean the industry has determined that it ain't worth it.

Regards, Joerg

vapourware.

Unveiled fully working at UN Net summit. News article complete of pic of Kofi Annan using one:

Official website where they explain to you why you can't get one:

Not in production yet. But they have a (big?) working prototype. And it appears that they have decided on the form factor. I hate the green though. They also haven't decided on what OS it will be running.

I presume the demo units were running a custom demo app to display those happy faces without any real OS.

The specs are quite nice, about the same price but more powerful than my webserver (Linksys NSLU2).

What they have done is solve the hardware cost problem. The complete hardware really do cost less than $100. Negroponte said he hopes Taiwanese companies will steal the design and make it even cheaper.

Has anyone seen one. Heard this s*it before. Strikes me as being like vapourware.

Graham

burning trees doesn't cause a net increase in CO2, the carbon in the tree came from the atmosphere in the first place,

old growth forests are carbon neutral too, dead treea are rotting and releasing CO2 at about the same rate that live trees are capturing it.

here too, Christchurch New Zealand. There's an atmospheric inversion layer (no unlike LAs) but the population is much smaller.

Bye. Jasen

less than 1000 years in most cases. if a tree rots it's all released again so it might as well benefit someone instead.

Bye. Jasen

some

...

Such a radio would have to be made for a limited US market - AM stereo does not exist elsewhere.

McC

I bought a 38" RCA (Thomson) widescreen CRT set several years ago. At the time it was a good bit cheaper than other options for that size and came with built-in HDTV and Dirctv receivers. I think they stopped making it shortly after I bought, though.

I compared picture quality in the stores at the time and this one looked better than others in the size, unless I went up to about 3x in cost. I did discover there is a slight compression in horizontal images toward the edges, but it is very mild and hardly ever noticable in regular viewing.

You are correct about size and weight. This thing is about 22 inches deep and weighs over 200 lb IIRC.

I have heard thst the $100 price point is based on some subsidies. So they don't want the subsidized units being diverted to wealthy countries where pople can just slug it out for a $400 model at WalMart.

I have heard that they were considering Linux. But that is a preliminary design spec, probably intended to get Bill Gates to counter with an offer of free Windows s/w.

If they were smart, they'd just ask a company to quote a ruggedized unit built to a flexible enough spec so the manufacturer could anticipate some volume. Then, whatever the price is, just kick in the subsidy tio bring it down to $100.

If you can get out with one alive.

You could say the same about coal and oil, carbon neutral, over a few million yeras maybe, but the short term release of CO2 of stuff that was captured over a millions yeras is not a good thing

martin

Looks like the usual fluff show. Nothing works, but for the cameras let's just pretend that it does.

'Only through government programs ...' That is a perfect recipe for huge cost overruns. If it ain't going to be mass produced it ain't going to be under $100. After subsidies maybe, courtesy of the taxpayer.

Academians do not necessarily appreciate or know the fact that the road between some lab prototype and full-blown mass production is brutal.

Well, I'd like to see a breakdown of that. Including labor, overhead, amortization for molds and so on.

If a cheap laptop is the goal maybe a trip to Walmart after Thanksgiving would be educational. They advertised an HP laptop for $378.

Regards, Joerg

Hello Paul,

If it is based on subsidies then the true cost is not $100.

Linux would be fine. However, the things won't do any good if people could not use most of the popular software.

The problem will be that such subsidies will have to be paid by someone. I doubt that the amount of aid to developing countries will miraculously increase overnight so this would mean the money has to be siphoned off from other projects.

That's for sure. My wife and I have never participated in that Friday morning craze or any other crazes, and never will.

What I don't understand is why those MIT folks didn't just sit down with the Dell folks and hash out a 'real' concept. For example, the Inspiron 1200 could often be had at around $500 when on sale. Heck, we even got free shipping with one. That price must still include a healthy profit margin for Dell. It's a nice laptop. If you'd take out lots of stuff that isn't truly essential it could certainly cost even less. Basically you don't need a CDRW, the processor doesn't have to be a GHz+ version, the fan could go, one USB port would be enough, the screen could be smaller etc.

Even RAM is dispensable to an extent. I am writing this on an old PC that is my newsgroup interface. 64MB is all it's got and I still use it for compiler work, CAD and other stuff because sometimes I want to sit in front of a real monitor with a CRT (to get back to the thread topic ...).

Regards, Joerg

vapourware.

No. It shows kofi Annan waving his hands around *as if he was using one*.

There's no way I believe the $100 price tag. $150-200 is likely nearer.

The other point is that this won't help third world education one jot.

Spending the money on more teachers and classrooms would help though ( and be more effective since it'll put the cash into the local economy ). You *can* probably build a new classrom for a thousand dollars ( or less maybe ) in the third world and it'll still be useful 50 yrs later.

Graham

That happened to us Thursday. After turkey we sat down to watch a movie my son brought up. About midway through the powere went out for a second or two. When it came back the DVDR had to check it's disk (Free-BSD or something in there). Of course, the cable company's DVR was hosed too and needed a power cycle to recover.

Too late. They're here.

I don't have to do that because the company buys the cartridges for me, but the printer was $30.00 on ebay, and the cartridges are about $29.95. =:-O

(and finding another printer on ebay doesn't sound like much fun.)

Cheers! Rich

Now that you mention it, I saw an item on TV yesterday or so, where they reviewed about a dozen flat TVs. One of the things they did was compare the color pallette with the CRT. They used a scene with a gradation of blue sky, and the CRT was smooth, like only analog can be, but the flat ones had kinda like color bands.

Cheers! Rich

Hello Keith,

When stuff needs a power cycle to recover that is IMHO always a sign of poor engineering. Will the kids ever learn how to use the watchdog feature efficiently? Do they read a uCs family spec before coding?

Oh no, not in our house.

But regular CRT TVs aren't that great anymore either. After vowing never to touch one again for repairs when they became so flimsy 25 years ago I did repair one yesterday. For someone who is visually impaired that large TV was the only way to watch the ball games so how could I refuse?

Anyway, the F-connector jack had fallen out (!). Unbelievable. After removing the flimsy plastic back shell I saw that they had simply press-fitted the jack into the thin sheet metal of the tuner. A tuner which, of course, was not bolted onto the circuit board but held by half a dozen thin solder leads. Yuck. There was barely 1/10" of metal on either side for strength. Oh man. Luckily I could solder it back in place with the iron cranked up to high temp. It's probably more stable now than it ever was.

Regards, Joerg

Hello Graham,

more

probably build a

it'll

Fully agree. It would also be better to first teach the kids the more mundane technological stuff. Knowledge that they and their families can use instantly. Like how electrical things of daily use work, how a gasoline engine works, how a well pump works, what to do when it doesn't work etc. A laptop without a reliable web connection isn't going to do any good for that. You can't simulate potable water back into the pipes.

Keep it simple. That's how we learned. Most of us were lucky if we had a slide rule calculator yet many of us became successful engineers. At least on one occasion those basic skills have helped me, when I switched to the log domain because DSP in the old days just didn't have any horse power. Back then a LUT RAM was cheaper than another DSP chip. If we hadn't been forced to use log tables in school maybe I would not have figured that out.

Regards, Joerg

Hello Frank,

Sure they do. What I do not understand is why they didn't use a PCB mount F-connector and flip the tuner layout so that it sits at the bottom where the tuner mounts to the main board. This would reduce mechanical stress a lot and be cost neutral or even a penny cheaper. Crimp-in connectors usually cost more and a PCB mount would reduce the hand solder joints by one.

I probably would have gone a step further and integrate the tuner on the main circuit board. Dielectric losses would be a bit higher (cheaper carrier material) but I bet nobody would notice if the noise figure is a dB higher.

Regards, Joerg