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$250 Freescale-Based "Green" "Cloud" Computer
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"green" vs "no upgrades" (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:"green" vs "no upgrades" (Score:5, Insightful)
so buying a throw-away brick is now considered green?
Yeah, because the parts you replace when upgrading are notoriously biodegradable!
Re:"green" vs "no upgrades" (Score:5, Insightful)
That analogy means the opposite what you think it does. You really might as well throw away the whole puzzle if you already are missing a piece.
Re:"green" vs "no upgrades" (Score:5, Funny)
No, i want the entire pie and will picket your house until you produce the missing piece.
I can wait all day folks....
Re:"green" vs "no upgrades" (Score:4, Funny)
Oblig.
Imagine a beowulf cluster of these -- as the bricks of your house!
Re:"green" vs "no upgrades" (Score:4, Informative)
Re:"green" vs "no upgrades" (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:"green" vs "no upgrades" (Score:5, Funny)
And why exactly would you throw it away?
Its just a matter of time until the release the CherryPal2...
Re:"green" vs "no upgrades" (Score:5, Informative)
Re:"green" vs "no upgrades" (Score:4, Informative)
And $5 a month plus $250 every year or two to support the "latest software" that "You're already paying for" is even more.
The company claims that their system will last ten years, and I was going on the (probably generous) assumption that that's an honest claim. It is at least plausible, since the system is designed to be little more than a thin client for server-side applications, which (depending on the app) offloads a lot of the computation work onto the server. Hell, if all you're running is Firefox and all you have to do is make sure AJAX applications are relatively snappy, you don't need particularly hefty hardware.
In this case, the business model will probably be based on cheap and durable hardware (as promised) but a costly subscription model. But IANABusinessAnalyst.
Re:"green" vs "no upgrades" (Score:5, Funny)
And why exactly would you throw it away?
Its just a matter of time until the release the CherryPal2...
I'm really, really hoping the next version is the Cherry 2000 [wikipedia.org] instead. I'd buy one of those.
Re:"green" vs "no upgrades" (Score:5, Funny)
You don't know me very well. I didn't.
Re:"green" vs "no upgrades" (Score:5, Insightful)
I've never thrown a PC away. I've been upgrading my trusty Radio Shack TRS-80 CoCo2 all this time. . . component by component. I've even kept the circuit boards.
Seriously, the ecologically worst parts of the computer are the circuit boards and the LCDs if I recall correctly. I don't see how swapping a big-ass motherboard in and out of your relatively benign metal case is that green.
This, on the other hand, is small and does consume very little power. I bet its footprint isn't much bigger than the average video card. If you want to be green it probably means not buying a computer, or making due with old / slow shit.
Reduce, reuse, recycle. IN THAT ORDER! How many geeks here follow the first and most ecologically beneficial part of that triad?
Re:"green" vs "no upgrades" (Score:5, Interesting)
I didn't go quite that far back... well, maybe I did. My third computer was an IBM XT I bought used in 1987. It was the last whole computer I bought. At one time my "IBM XT" sported a forty meg hard drive, 386 processor, joystick, mouse, and SVGA graphics. Alas, the next upgrade replaced the last remaining origional parts, the case and power supply, as the new motherboard wouldn't fit in the XT case.
I put back together with its original parts, but its monochrome hercules card had died. I left it in the house the bank foreclosed on in 2005, along with a bunch of other computers, all built with spare parts.
I met a rich man once, who told the that the secret to wealth was to never throw anything away! When the great depression hit he'd bought a Model T Ford from a friend as a favor to the friend, who needed fifteen bucks to buy mules and a wagon to move to California. He had no use for it and stored it in his barn.
In 1951 a collector spied it and bought it from the old guy for $100,000. He invested the $100k and will never want for anything again.
I met this gentleman long before the bank took the house, but I had been overcome by insanity; I'd not gotten over my divorce, they were taking my house away, the doctor took me off Paxil and the only thing that kept me from killing myself was knowing what it would do to my children.
As lomg as you never throw its parts away, all computers are green; at least, as green as they ever were. So maybe this "green" computer isn't so green after all; at least, not in the hands of a nerd like me.
Re:"green" vs "no upgrades" (Score:5, Informative)
Obviously he didn't invest that $100k in Enron
This was some time in the early 1980s, Enron didn't exixt. However, if you had bought Enron early and fled before it crumbled you would have made a killing. That's the way of riches; you have to have it to get it. The insiders got rich while California had brownouts and small investors and employees lost everything.
If you want to be scared shitless, read Only Yesterday: An Informal History of the 1920s [virginia.edu] by Frederick Lewis Allen [wikipedia.org]. It was required reading in a required undergrad history class I took in the late 1970s, the University of Virginia has placed the entire text online (darn, back in the old days we had to BUY books!)
The 1920s had many eerie similarities to now, especially finance. Their ultra-rich were as sociopathis as today's. We mey be heading for another depression.
Re:"green" vs "no upgrades" (Score:5, Informative)
No, using less power is considered green. If this machine really uses 2 watts (yeah, I'm skeptical too), then it's saving about 100 watts. Assume that the computer is turned on about 40 hours a week, then it uses 4 kilowatt hours a week.
A little random googling and I came up with it taking a ton of coal to produce 2,460 kilowatt hours of electricity. So if 615 people using a 4-watt computer instead of a 100+ watt computer save a ton of coal a week. Not exactly a major impact, but not trivial either.
(Cue the green-bashing snipers with their "stupid environmentalist cliches". Sorry, not interested.)
Anyway, how does lack of upgradability make a computer a "throwaway brick"? If a computer does what you need it to, why do you need to upgrade it? Most users, especially business users, never install a PCI card. If you buy a computer that already has enough RAM (most are sold undersupplied, to keep the list price down) and a big enough disk (except this thing doesn't need a disk), you probably won't upgrade. Unless you need a fancy video adapter to play Halo. And if you do, you won't buy this kind of computer in the first place.
Has to be said... (Score:5, Funny)
Sorry, couldn't help it.
Re:Has to be said... (Score:5, Funny)
So who is going to be the first to pop that cherry?
Not me, I live in north america, you insensitive clod. I'll have to wait for the CherryNTSC to get a taste.
iTunes under Linux? (Score:3, Insightful)
Free-based computing (Score:3, Funny)
Sounds cool.
Re:Free-based computing (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Cloud computer? (Score:5, Interesting)
The point of this is that it connects to their cloud. Think of this as an X terminal that connects to a mainframe via the internet. The point isn't to build a cloud out of these things.
Re:Cloud computer? (Score:5, Funny)
Well, until the meme changes from "beowulf cluster" to "cloud," then I think we're safe.
Central Controled Computer (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Cloud computer? (Score:4, Funny)
While I grant that it is somewhat difficult to nail down the definition of "cloud computing", what does this have to do with it?
If you want to define "cloud computing" in this context you need to consider the Web 2.0 paradigm this product leverages for its innovation. This is a "green" product that maximizes its use of the grid for next-generation social shaping, so from a Slashdot commenter's perspective you'll get web services, tagging, and real user participation if you buy this product. I think their idea is to have it be a dynamic framework for proactive immersion, which is basically win-win.
More better circuitry (Score:5, Funny)
Green Cloud? Can we have a Brown Hornet computer? How about a Black Canary monitor?
The Black Canary can tell us whether we can safely breathe in the Green Cloud.
Re:More better circuitry (Score:5, Funny)
From the submission:
It uses a Freescale processor that runs Linux and has no moving parts
The processor has NO MOVING PARTS!!! You bet your sweet bippie that this is more better circuitry. Finally - a solid-state microprocessor!
Digital Cameras? (Score:3, Insightful)
If this works with digital cameras and has even basic photo support I may have found a computer for mom. Every time I come home there's a camera that hasn't been offloaded since last time I was home.
But it's not that much cheaper ... (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem with this device is that it isn't that much cheaper than a full budget PC that will whack this into the ground.
$250 for what is essentially a DTV receiver (my ex had a £25 Sagem Freeview receiver that had an integrated 250MHz PowerPC) with 4GB flash... sure it comes with 50GB of online storage, but they haven't reduced the affordability.
Re:But it's not that much cheaper ... (Score:5, Interesting)
I agree that it has a nice size.
However, for $50 more at Wal-Mart, I can pick up an el cheapo Compaq sporting basic sound, 512MB of RAM, and a hard disk good enough to put a modern distro of Linux on it and have it work as a decent box. No, it won't boot in 5 seconds, but it will do a lot more for not that much more outlay.
If Cherry Pal could kick the price down to $100 or so, that would be an alternative, but right now, unless one wants a highly portable cheap computer (which for $50-$100 more, an EeePC can do the job with a monitor), this computer has a hard market to crack into.
Re:But it's not that much cheaper ... (Score:4, Informative)
You should try to compare apples to apples instead of to Cherries. Where can you get a low power x86 for $250-300? Show me a 2W x86 that lets you browse the net, write documents, view porn, etc. The closest thing I can think of is a VIA Artigo and those are more like $500. (after you buy the RAM and HDD/Flash for them)
What's missing: (Score:5, Interesting)
Strange what small things they left off:
* no microphone jack, so no voip
* no extra usb jack, so no uploading pictures, printing, scanning, using a thumb drive, or loading your ipod
Those things would have hardly added to the size or cost and would greatly increase the usability of this thing.
Oh yeah, it'll be a pain to replace the "all firefox" interface with a more familiar linux desktop as you'll have to do the installation over the wire.
But I think the small size and pared down power are not so bad. It could be cool
Re:What's missing: (Score:4, Informative)
Or you could spend the extra couple of dollars and buy a decent USB keyboard with a couple of ports built in and use those ports. USB is chainable.
Actually USB is not "chainable" in the sense of daisy-chaining (a la SCSI). Those USB keyboard with additional ports are just bus-powered USB hubs with USB keyboards permanently attached to one of the hub inputs.
You're still right, of course, this is one way around the problem of only two USB ports, if not particularly desirable. Bus-powered hubs can't support the same power needs as the original hub for obvious reasons. The point is that for a "cloud" (ugh) device, a second USB host to provide two more ports would make this thing great for webcam/microphone use - a cheap connectivity device for Skype, MSN, etc.
Re:2 watts? (Score:5, Funny)
That's a maximum rating on the power supply (Score:5, Informative)
From their (weird) web site [72.51.37.17]: 9vDC 2.5mm 10 watt AC-DC adapter power supply So the box is not eating 2 watts, but 10, unless you can pump in it 9VDC in a more efficient way.
The 10 Watt rating is the maximum output of the the power supply - that means the computer itself has to draw less than 10W. It was probably cheaper to buy an off-the-shelf 10W power supply than have a custom 2W PSU built. It does not mean that the computer itself draws 10W.