Seeing as you can get a Pentium III processor for about $10, 256MB RAM for $25 (both on Pricewatch)... throw in a motherboard ($25) with onboard video, sound, etc. and a hard drive ($30 for a 40gb EIDE) and you have a similar product for cheaper, and we didn't even have to resort to OEM/bulk pricing.

The unique feature is a 64 bit RISC chip and S-video out for a TV interface. No need for a computer monitor.

Basically, how much is $150 to the average chinese citizen?

About 1200 yuan. [yahoo.com]

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-920346214 8706105599&q=Municator&pl=true [google.com]

here's a demo of the product.

People at linuxdevice [linuxdevices.com] have a good article [linuxdevices.com] on it and even a link to a interview with a chinesse seller in video [google.com] made by a french reporter! I post this a some time ago, but people here don't like my syntax.

In another lost in translation marketing descision an Chinese firm decides to put "Yellow and River" together in their name. I'd call that a piss poor decision?

No, it is simply your total lack of education. Google on "Yellow River China" and you'll find it is one of the most important rivers in the world and along with the Tigris/Euphrates and Nile is where one of the earliest civilizations developed, sometime around 4000 B.C.

It is named after the color of the silt in the water, just like the Red River which is also in China.

Just randomly picking from a google search finds this PDF [sagarpa.gob.mx] which says the average household income for a rural household is 2262 Yuan which is about $327 USD [yahoo.com]. So a $150 computer would be about 6 months work for a rural family.

The graph on this page [iiasa.ac.at] confirms the ~2200 Yuan for rural households and shows urban households at just more than double that of rural.

So, from 3 to 6 months net income for an average household.

I have an SGI Octane with dual MIPS R12k 300 mhz and it outperforms a P4 2ghz on floating point ops all the time. Integer performance isn't as good, but that's the way the things are built. Some of the reason it's faster at floating point than a much newer P4 is because each chip has 2MB cache, and MIPS chips have way more registers than intel+friends, but still...it's a ten year old machine.

Even if the MIPS implementation these guys are using is dated and has a teensy cache, 400-600 mhz MIPS would be roughly in the ballpark of a P3... and 64-bit to boot. And have a lot more registers, which makes it easier to write fast code because you dont have to swap things out of your primary (what, four? =P) registers to do anything, like on Intel + friends.

No need for a computer monitor.

Have you ever tried using a TV as a monitor using S-Video? If you're not using software specifically designed for it (MythTV/Media Center) then it's all but useless. The signal from S-Video is in some respects like a low resolution VGA signal, but it's very sloppy in comparison, smearing the pixels across a comparitively wide area. It's fine for graphics and very large print on things like buttons, but it just isnt' accurate enough to make legible text unless that text is pretty big.

Or you could just buy the LinspirePC from TigerDirect which includes a 2.4GHz Celeron, 256Meg, 40 Gig HD, CD-RW, network, integrated graphics and audio for $199.

(Please restrain yourselves from flaming about Linspire, TigerDirect, Celeron, etc.... this IS a CHEAP machine. It does, however, show what can be done at the low end of the market.)

Is it so difficult for the article submitter, to provide a link to the actual product [yellowsheepriver.org] ?

Why is this a problem?

First, applications ARE available on "alternate" (from your point of view) platforms. Lots of applications. Photo editing, CAD, Office applications. Instant messaging, email and web browsing applications. Gaming, video conferencing, diagraming and project management applications. Financial, programming, and database applications.

Second, there will be a "flash rendering" component available. Start with "gnash".

Third, QEMU will be able to run Intel binaries, where it is otherwise impossible. Indeed, I have used QEMU to run Wine.

The biggest risk item is running nVidia (and other) binary drivers. If the basic i/o with the box is sufficient, then this isn't a concern (for the target audience) either.

The reason that *I* won't be using one of these is that it provides no value proposition for me. But I may rework applications to run on this platform. A potential audience of millions or tens of millions, or, potentially a billion simply cannot be ignored.

Again, this is not a "Wintel" platform; from that perspective it fails. But that is not the target.

Ratboy

S-video out for a TV interface. No need for a computer monitor.

That's IN ADDITION to normal VGA. I live in Hong Kong, you can get used 14 or 15" CRT monitors free, people are throwing them out all over to get LCD screens. You can buy them in a PC junk shop for US$3. Bigger monitors ar absurdly cheap too if you have the deskspace.

The full specs of the PC are here. [yellowsheepriver.org] The video specs:
ATI Radeon 7000-M
33MHz 32-bit PCI
Internalized with 16MB DDR RAM buffers
Support VGA port & S-Video output

It's really small; weighs 650g, half the Mac Mini.

Twitter, why do you continue to lie? Whitebox PC's do not make up 75% of the PC market, they make up more like 30%. See here for more information: http://www.technewsworld.com/story/33596.html [technewsworld.com].

Of course the majority of computers that show up to be repaired major brand PC's - they are the majority of the market!

You future of "everything is free" isn't going to happen. Its not sustainable and no one who matters wants it. This isn't new, there have been many low cost PC's available that run Linux. No one is switching.