
The Endless Mini $79 desktop PC stores as much of the Internet as it can - blacksqr
http://www.pcworld.com/article/3017993/linux/the-endless-mini-79-desktop-pc-stores-as-much-of-the-internet-as-it-can.html#tk.rss_all
======
jetskindo
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](http://idiallo.com/blog/bringing-back-the-pc)

~~~
toomuchtodo
> 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.

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

[https://endlessm.com/developer/](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.

~~~
xd1936
They want to make money on it though... Maybe someone will get their hands on
it and extract the ROM.

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

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cableshaft
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.

------
vonklaus
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-...](http://www.zdnet.com/article/encyclopedia-offline-wikipedia-
viewer-for-iphone/)

~~~
toomuchtodo
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.

~~~
rasz_pl
?? 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.

~~~
toomuchtodo
Not according to Wikipedia:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:FAQ/Technical#How_bi...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:FAQ/Technical#How_big_is_the_database.3F)

~~~
vonklaus
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](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

------
protomyth
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/](https://endlessm.com/registration/)

2) Sinclair for under $100 specifically

~~~
ido
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/](http://inflation.stephenmorley.org/)

~~~
protomyth
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.

~~~
mattbessey
Maybe your dad was just a generous guy ;)

~~~
protomyth
Given the different circumstances, I doubt that.

------
jrlocke
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).

~~~
rasz_pl
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).

------
jarcane
_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...](https://www.quora.com/How-many-gigabytes-or-terabytes-of-information-
is-Wikipedia)

~~~
placeybordeaux
> 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.

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

~~~
placeybordeaux
The data appears to be avaliable here:

[http://dumps.wikimedia.org/other/pagecounts-
raw/](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...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Statistics#Page_views)

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

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

~~~
creshal
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.

~~~
boznz
News to me. what is your source?

~~~
cellularmitosis
[http://www.anandtech.com/show/9248/the-truth-about-ssd-
data-...](http://www.anandtech.com/show/9248/the-truth-about-ssd-data-
retention)

------
theklub
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.

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

~~~
NSAID
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](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Print_Wikipedia)

~~~
TeMPOraL
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.

------
Eleopteryx
I can't help but think of
[https://youtu.be/Y5BZkaWZAAA](https://youtu.be/Y5BZkaWZAAA)

------
ctdonath
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...](http://gizmodo.com/this-box-can-hold-an-entire-
netflix-1592590450)

~~~
rasz_pl
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.

------
tired_man
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.

~~~
mintplant
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/](https://endlessm.com/about-us/)

~~~
tired_man
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.

------
bezaorj
This has great potential to take off

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

which is barely anything...

