31–40 of 112 posts
Finally, a cheap ATX-compatible ARM board. Give me PCIe and DIMM slots and I'll be salivating. Equip it with something like a dual-core Cortex chip and I'll be throwing wads of cash in all directions.
Windows is an awful choice since it requires a huge pricey box with fans, since it shows its dialog messages over the interface, catches viruses and yet they stick to it. It makes me sad thinking about how much money do they waste on it and how MS is able by get their cut while making everyone lives and products worse by using their BS power.
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I'd rather pay more for a high-end Cortex A15-based ChromeBox. Browsing will be very slow on an ARM11 chip, especially if you use it in "desktop mode", which will make it feel even slower compared to using it in a mobile phone. Also, it better have a good GPU, otherwise it won't even support resolutions higher than 800x480 (this one might). But I do think ChromeOS devices should be somewhere in the $200 price range (…
In 1989 I ran a Unix system with 1000 users on hardware less powerful than this, why this kind of horse power cannot run something as simple as a web browser says more about the inefficiencies inherent in current operating systems and programming methods than they do about the hardware.
But, iRobot, why should we care about efficiencies? Energy grows on trees.
I predict we are going to see many, many more ARM devices. And Apple is going to lead the way.
This is going to bother some people who like to write bloated, inefficient code. Their focus is on multi-core and concurrency. But to do simple things (retrieving text, images, audio, or video via http, sending/receiving email, etc), one does not need that much power.
The rise of ARM will create opportunity for a different set of programmers who are more efficiency-conscious.
Related, my boss just ordered one of these for me to play with: http://www.asiapads.com/product_info.php?products_id=2246 I'm looking forward to it. Internally, it's called "chrisk's Crapper Computer" (my name is Chris last name starts with K)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'd rather pay more for a high-end Cortex A15-based ChromeBox. Browsing will be very slow on an ARM11 chip, especially if you use it in "desktop mode", which will make it feel even slower compared to using it in a mobile phone. Also, it better have a good GPU, otherwise it won't even support resolutions higher than 800x480 (this one might). But I do think ChromeOS devices should be somewhere in the $200 price range (…
In 1989 I ran a Unix system with 1000 users on hardware less powerful than this, why this kind of horse power cannot run something as simple as a web browser says more about the inefficiencies inherent in current operating systems and programming methods than they do about the hardware.
The whole multimedia thing, you know.
Also, this Android box costs and weighs a fraction of that wonderful machine you used to serve 1000 of users.
So I'd still call it a progress worth 25 years of technology evolution.
Why does it have a VGA port instead of a DVI port?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'd rather pay more for a high-end Cortex A15-based ChromeBox. Browsing will be very slow on an ARM11 chip, especially if you use it in "desktop mode", which will make it feel even slower compared to using it in a mobile phone. Also, it better have a good GPU, otherwise it won't even support resolutions higher than 800x480 (this one might). But I do think ChromeOS devices should be somewhere in the $200 price range (…
In 1989 I ran a Unix system with 1000 users on hardware less powerful than this, why this kind of horse power cannot run something as simple as a web browser says more about the inefficiencies inherent in current operating systems and programming methods than they do about the hardware.
No. This is simply not true, at least at the extreme you are suggesting.
What I have open on my quad-core 8GB RAM desktop right now: two Eclipse sessions; One emacs server, with about 20 client windows; Firefox, with 30+ tabs; 20 or so console sessions; five PDFs of documentation; an IRC client; an image viewer and a Jabber client. All of this is spread over two big monitors, with antialiased fonts, fast scrolling, lots of undo history and all sorts of good things.
The truth is that expectations have changed. Say all you want about having 1000 users on a single core, but users today are getting a much richer environment, and capabilities that we only could have dreamed of twenty years ago. This isn't waste or inefficiency, it's using what we have.
Web browsers are also far from simple. High resolution graphics, interactive sites, multiple format support, dynamic content loading, antialiased fonts and all these other things do add up. Compare that to what a user was doing on a tiny slice of a machine 20 years ago. I'd call it progress.
It has a nice photo of Allen and Gates.
Now, what I'm wondering is how easy it is to replace Android with your own OS. I want to know about the bootloader.
First I bought a SheevaPlug (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SheevaPlug) but that fried itself before long.
Next I bought an Efika MX Smarttop (https://www.genesi-usa.com/store/details/11), which works ok, but doesn't always boot reliably (I boot it headless most of the time, so can never get to the bottom of why).
I wish I could jailbreak my Apple TV 3, because it's cheap and the form factor is perfect for this. But it's looking like it will be more difficult to jailbreak than previous generations.
I just want something I can run Debian or Ubuntu on and know that when I restart it it's going to come back up. Any suggestions?
4 watts when idle no power management? my standard voltage laptop with a spinning disk, screen and low backlighting idles at 6-7. And can you really get away with no HS/F at 13 watts under load?