The Endless Mini $79 desktop PC stores as much of the Internet as it can | Hacker News Reader

The Endless Mini $79 desktop PC stores as much of the Internet as it can

pcworld.com

49 pointsblacksqr55 comments

This sounds amazing. I have been working on a similar sidd project for almost 2 years now to make my pc similar. I briefly wrote about it [1] but have encountered my challenges along the way.

The PCs we have at home are so powerful yet they spend 99% of their life being idle. When your computer is on for the sake of being on, it's an opportunity to have it process information from the web.

I'll get my hand on one of those asap.

[1]: http://idiallo.com/blog/bringing-back-the-pc

> I'll get my hand on one of those asap.

Do a blog post on it? I'd love to see these extended, hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy style.

Here are the details of the software, it's based on Debian:

https://endlessm.com/developer/

I was hoping it would be available as an ISO, as it would make a great OS for my parents who aren't particularly tech savy.

They want to make money on it though... Maybe someone will get their hands on it and extract the ROM.

Just because you can do something, doesn't mean you should.

On their software page, they have this text at the bottom:

"We are targeting specific hardware and do not provide a general purpose installer at this time. If you’re interested, most of Our Software is available for download. In the future, we plan to make disk images available as well."

Are there more details about what user apps are included? I'm specifically interested in games and learn-to-program apps.

The video says its geared toward offline use but the screenshot on the developer page shows youtube, gmail, etc.

yes, totally want to try the os, but not that hardware...

Off and on I've made an attempt like this before, turning an external hard drive into an offline repository of things I find interesting.

I used to go through artists and download paintings, photos of international landmarks, books, games, classic shorts, tutorials, etc. with the idea that maybe it'd be useful someday, or a digital archaeologist might somehow run into it sometime. Some of it came straight from Project Gutenberg and Archive.org.

I wasn't very good at keeping up with it, though, but I still think that people rely on the omnipresence of broadband a little too often sometimes. I do still have the archive, though.

I'd love to have some sort of tap where I can just download a whole ton of this crap, possibly curated. Bit torrent is basically that, but its focus is on the new hotness and a hell of a lot less on the classics.

Even a blog that compiles a bunch of random open source stuff into a torrent and shares them with people would be nice. I can find this stuff individually, but that takes a lot of time and hunting.

This is great. In 2008 Patrick Collison had a buddy who was using the then undocumented iphone internal apis to make apps. They made a wikipedia dump[0] so they could have the hitchikers guide to the galaxy.

I was surprised that this was only 32gb as is noted below, but if you figure the entire WP dump is ~27gb unconpressed (from comment below) if that metric is all languages you could download a specific language and then modules i.e

Top 10,000 articles. Nature, mechanics, etc. then this thing likely has a global stylesheet so you are only downloading text. How much info do we really need?

Sure 32GB isnt a lit comparatively but even 24GB of text is a lot. 1gb is like 65k pages in a microsoft word doc

0 http://www.zdnet.com/article/encyclopedia-offline-wikipedia-...

To be clear, those sizes exclude pictures. Some articles are nearly useless without pictures.

Wikipedia currently is ~30-35TB total in size. If storage trends continue, you'll be able to store/run the entire corpus locally in 3-5 years.

But how large will the corpus be in 3-5 years?

Does that include page histories and talk pages?

?? I have offline copy of entire (en)wiki on my disk, its <100GB for images, 12GB articles compressed (~30GB with entire edit history). All other languages might double that, still nowhere close even one TB.

Not according to Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:FAQ/Technical#How_bi...

Wikipedia EN is 100GB[0] in an xml dump. You linked to the dump of the entire primary db which probably (and this is total spec.) is all users, editors, edits, languages, usage dtatistics and internal metrics.

I don't know if the wouted stat above includes pics, but i believe it is a text dump. You would have to read further to confirm. If they made their usage stats available you could pull 10% of that data (10gb) which corresponds to the most frequented articles

0. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Size_of_Wikipedia

Edit: maybe you meant what you said and are in fact correct. From a user standpoint, the article text, supplementary material and some edits are likely the most inportant metrics. However a massive dump of the entire site and infra would be about that large. H

Looking at the registration page[1], shows two computers with two configurations each:

                 RAM 24GB   32GB   500GB
  Endless Mini    1G  $79    $99*
  Endless         2G        $189*   $229*
    * Wi-Fi, Bluetooth

If this actually ships, I might buy one. This fits in with my desire to see a computer replace the long forgotten 8-bit price range[2]. Much like Apple PR's foolish Newton claims of handwriting recognition, I don't care for their "internet optional" advertising. A good reminder of just how much text in books and pictures you can put in gigabytes would be fine since I think people forget or never knew.

I would probably order quite a few for the local library.

1) https://endlessm.com/registration/

2) Sinclair for under $100 specifically

The 1982 £99 zx spectrum would cost £340 (almost $500) in today's money, when accounting for inflation[1] - well within the price range of "conventional" budget PCs.

[1] http://inflation.stephenmorley.org/

This comes every time, and $99 is still the price point people shot for smart phones. I know there still is a huge difference from a kid's perspective of the over / under $100.

I can assure you that in 1982, I would have a had better chance of getting my Dad to buy me a Sinclair than my nephew would have of getting his dad to buy him something costing 3.43 times as much.

[edit] Why when all the other prices have come down in computers do people insist everything's fine because of inflation with the removal of the sub-$200 category when Microsoft and Intel did the most damage to that category.

Maybe your dad was just a generous guy ;)

Given the different circumstances, I doubt that.

Information on the web is distributed in an even more skewed manner than Pareto's law would have you believe. I would bet 1% of the sites on the web provide 99% of the useful information. Thusly, this laptop may prove very useful for many things (excepting the wonders of web based interpersonal communication).

Sadly this leads to tragedy of the commons type of situation, best example being TVs version of what people want (ghost hunting shows on discovery "science", etc).

How big is the Wikipedia database?

Current revision only of just the text of the articles is 8.8GB compressed, 27GB uncompressed. All revisions, all pages (talk etc. included) of text is around 5 terabytes. [...] Neither of those include media. [0]

The biggest version of this device has 32GB of storage. The math is not hard to follow. This is the kind of transparently infeasible pipe dream I expect from Kickstarter projects.

[0] https://www.quora.com/How-many-gigabytes-or-terabytes-of-inf...

> made up of frequently accessed Wikipedia articles

Wikipedia has a very long tail, no need to load articles such as Jabal al Utayfah or Poul Reumert or Screaming Life/Fopp.

Huh. What percent of pages would estimate get less than say 100 organic views a month?

The data appears to be avaliable here:

http://dumps.wikimedia.org/other/pagecounts-raw/

Might be another way to answer that question, but I didn't find it here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Statistics#Page_view...

This is somewhat dangerous way of looking at things and will lead you to believe kittens are more important than math.

> just the text of the articles is 8.8GB compressed

Which seems to mean that storing only the version in the user's language should not pose a huge challenge, storage-wise. No?

I think that 8.8 GB is just EN wiki.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_Wikipedia

> There are 5,049,507 articles on the site (live count).[4] In October 2015, the combined text of the English Wikipedia's articles totalled 11.5 gigabytes when compressed.[5]

I upvoted you. The pitch doesn't reflect reality. The computer actually consists of an offline reader for popular Wikipedia articles and some parts of Khan Academy. It also has some open-source music and a couple of games. This is only storing "as much of the Internet as it can" insofar as 32GB means storing very, very little.

The perfect PC for disaster preppers who want wikipedia info after the world collapses.

I'd rather just download all of wikipedia onto an SSD and plug it into a raspberry pi or something.

SSDs are poor for long-term storage, as flash cells need occasional (=every few years) refreshing to not lose their data. Tapes or regular hard disks work better for that purpose.

News to me. what is your source?

http://www.anandtech.com/show/9248/the-truth-about-ssd-data-...

That's pretty interesting! I suppose tapes and hard disks are cheaper than SSDs anyway.

When I'm looting supermarkets for canned food in the post-apocalyptic gloom a list of all the Pokemon or fictional ducks is not one of my priorities.

When you're trying to survive and eventually thrive, knowing that post-apocalyptic canned food is a strictly limited commodity, you'll want all the information you can get. Possessing a list of all the Pokemon or fictional ducks in the process is a natural consequence of amassing every file you can.

"Pound pastrami, can kraut, six bagels--bring home for Emma" can spark the rebirth of civilization.

I mentioned the apocalypse smartphone concept to a guy on reddit once, and he immediately made sotheworldhasended.com and set up a wikimedia for it.

I figure the idea has SOME legs... How many people go on those survival weekend things?

this would be even better for them:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WikiReader

runs on AAA batteries, because, you know :p

Seems like we should make something that this that could last for a thousand years. And then house them throughout the world in case of disaster or make them so cheap that everyone could afford to buy one as a novelty.

It would be easier/cheaper to print out physical copies of the same resources and place them in archives around the world.

Perhaps not. Thinking about other comments referencing Wikipedia:

"This may be the first attempt to print Wikipedia to succeed in the sense that all of Wikipedia has been formatted as printable pdf files and made available for individual printing. The task has taken 3 years, and the upload process took 24 days, 3 hours and 18 minutes. It was completed 12 July 2015. PediaPress had attempted to raise money for a full Wikipedia print out on Indiegogo in 2014, but the project was pulled. Michael estimates that the printing costs of a full printout are around $500,000."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Print_Wikipedia

Assuming you can get this 1000-years-proof Wikipedia laptop down to $50 a piece, that's still 1 Wikipedia printout per 10 000 people buying the laptop. If people were buying that machine as much as they're buying smartphones, that would be equal to having a printed copy of Wikipedia in every city in the world.

Not exactly cheap, but designed to be durable and require only a decent microscope to read:

http://rosettaproject.org/disk/concept/

I can't help but think of https://youtu.be/Y5BZkaWZAAA

On a related note, if only for context & scale, Netflix fits in about 100TB - small enough they actually give away entire copies, server included, to ISPs. http://gizmodo.com/this-box-can-hold-an-entire-netflix-15925...

probably <20Tb once you standardize on fullhd h.265 and drop the rest. Afaik netflix keeps copies in wide range of resolutions and codecs for bw/platform scaling.

I love the idea of mini-pcs, but the specs are always dismal.

To me is teems like a single-purpose machine deisgned for web-surfing. People do more than surf and so I see less utility in this that I do in a ChromeBook.

Maybe with 4GB with root access and allowing me to change the distro and operate a lightweight server. Say SABnzbd, or plex media server(but not for transcoding, of course).

I bought a Zonbu when they appeared and ran mine until it died a few years back. It was handy for quick local network admin tasks and ran a few low priority cron jobs. Very cheap to operate, too.

You're probably not in the target market for this one.

> The computer revolution is one of the greatest revolutions in human history. And yet, 75% of the world still lives outside of its reach, struggling to fulfill the most basic of needs... This product has been designed in emerging markets, with our users. During our three years of research, we encountered thousands of ways in which technology today does not meet the needs of our users. And during those same three years of development, we have built the solutions that do.

https://endlessm.com/about-us/

Perhaps not, but I'm willing to help support their efforts, I just don't want any more dusty hardware on the shelf than I have. I think that adding a couple GB to the package or a second slot would boost demand and drive down unit cost.

I'm not looking for something powerful, just a small, low-power box to run daemons, but 2GB is limiting it's usefulness.

Even when they are distributed exactly to their demographic, that 2GB will be a wall they hit as they become adept at computer use. Then they'll have hardware that is not quite big enough.

I want it to succeed, but I can see it becoming obsolete in a couple of years.

This has great potential to take off

> The Endless Mini $79 desktop PC stores as much of the Internet as it can

which is barely anything...

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