Yeah. I think it was even mentioned somewhere. Or maybe not. What will be ācoreā is actually still being debated. Not just whatās in it, but also how we arrive at it. Lantern will probably have a manageable portion of it to boot. Wikipedia for Schools may just be small enough to fit.
Lantern is poorly described in the website. This should simply be fixed.
Not knowing the exact specs of the device is a poor excuse for the
lack of clarity on this.
As of Nov 30, 2014, the highest capacity SD card I can easily find on the web
is 256GB. It costs $97, quantity 1.
look up PNY-Elite-Performance-256GB on amazon.
If we stick with spending $100 for hard drives,
3Tbytes costs $100
Look up hard drives at Microcenter.
If we are designing for a year from now (Nov 2015) , we expect prices to fall, and weāll be ordering in
quantity. On the other hand, you want reliability so the absolute max capacity
isnāt the best. But letās estimate weāll be able to get double those
capacities for $100, so thatās 512Gbytes sd (maybe use 2 cards!) or
6Tbytes of magnetic hard disk, (SSD disk costs about the same as
SD memory).
Wikipedia English XML compressed is only 10GBytes.
We can uncompress on the fly.
SD is more expensive per byte but has many advantages:
lower power so less solar panel expense to support it
more reliable as no moving parts
much faster so can serve more people quicker with a given processor.
generates less heat so keeps other parts cooler and thus more reliable,
and necessitating less fan so again less expense and area for solar panels.
and Wikipedia takes up only 2% of it, so letās go with the SD memory.
Note that when a Lantern is shipped, it can be pre-loaded with Wikipedia, etc.
so the satellite to Lantern data transmission only needs to be the updates.
For any large, relatively persistent body of knowledge, updates per month
will be a tiny fraction of the total knowledge size, probably less than 1% per month.
The entire cost of the lanterns is about $99 as I understand it, with a normal sale price of $149. So there certainly wonāt be budget available for $100 SD cards.
Branded 8Gig SD cards are available for about $5, probably less in bulk.
You also have to take into account product R&D and the actual service cost for the lifetime of the device. Realistically, the physical cost (the ābag of partsā) needs to come under $30.
Personally (as a Lantern backer), Iām not very concerned about the amount of pre-installed storage. I am more concerned about having the ability to upgrade the pre-installed storage - hopefully by just swapping a Mini SD card - instead of manually connecting an external hard drive or something like that.
Thatās what Iād have thought, or $50ish. Once you factor in distribution, CE conformity etc etc. But it looks like the bag of bitās will be $80 ish
[quote=āDarkStar, post:27, topic:981ā]
Iām not very concerned about the amount of pre-installed storage [/quote]
On a personal level Iām not either. I have a bunch of micro SD cards I could chuck in it.
However If I live in a dictatorial regime where SD cards are three hours drive, and a days wages away Iād probably prefer the 8Gig and a copy of Wikipedia.
USB storage will be an alternative alongside micro SD for storage will it not? I think itās convenient to have more than one option to store the library. Of course I know this is already in the FAQ and product description.
I know as far as transmission of data, isnāt a company by the name of GoTenna using a mobile service that has a 50 mile radius for texting? Well, up to fifty miles give or take at line of sight.
Wouldnāt Outernet be able to utilize a similar technology for a possible āupstreamā form of communication? Just a thought about possible technologies that are being used. Not so regulated.
Funding/feature creep is definitely an issue. But letās just say that we had infinite funding. Even in that case, we would not want to include bi-directional communications over VHF into the basic Lantern because then the device turns into an intentional radiator (transmitter). Sure, it already is with itās wifi module, but wifi is universally unlicensed. Communications over VHF is not unlicensed everywhere, so that means that could not be exported into certain places.
All of that being said, VHF communications will very likely become an add-on feature some day that takes shape in the form of an attachable module.