Re: If you could design a $300 homecomputer today, what would you choose?

[Beyonder <beyonder@vrx.net>]

You people are insane.
for $300 you can get a high end pentium 3 system, loaded.
for $100 more you can get a high end 1.4gig system, loaded.
and these are retail prices! that doesn't include monitor, but who
cares?

get with the times.

B
On Fri, 13 Jul 2001 12:49:42 -0700, Matthew Montchalin
<mmontcha@OregonVOS.net> wrote:

>On Fri, 13 Jul 2001, Matthew Montchalin wrote:
>|On Thu, 12 Jul 2001, T.J.T van Kooten wrote:
>|
>||For the sake of argument let's suppose you could design a next
>||generation $300 homecomputer.
>
>Well, I'd like to have the stripped down version priced at $150.
>
>||The goal is to make a userfriendly machine for general use and 
>||for hobbyists. How would such a system look?
>|
>|A box with a whole bunch of ports that all looked like 'phone jacks'
>|and was intelligent enough to tell the user (with a speech synthesizer)
>|what was available at each port.   If you needed to pass through more
>|data than usual, just use more phone jacks.  Yep, phone jacks all
>|over the place.  Just about *anybody* can figure out how to plug
>|jacks in.  But it is very human to plug the wrong things in to the
>|wrong sockets, so use the speech synthesis to tell him what's wrong.
>
>And what's right.  You see, that's part of the initialization
>procedure.  For instance, if the Box ends up saying "Waiting for
>Port 1 Jack" the user knows that something is up right there.
>
>|Oh, and the audio ins and outs would be through phone jacks, too.
>
>Yep, phone jacks all over the place.
>
>|And when it powers up properly, and is sufficiently initialized,
>|says something like "Computer Okay."
>
>As for speech recognition, or maybe just whistle recognition, that's
>a whole 'nother ball o' wax.  The manufacturer would be shooting
>himself in the foot if he requires the user to input data (er, ah,
>select games or applications) by whistling.