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An $89 remanufactured Ubuntu workstation

symplepc.com

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Re: An $89 remanufactured Ubuntu workstation

#71

Post by smeyer »

john61 wrote: post #63
cwyers wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cost to build likely includes the cost of power, no? In other words, if building an ARM SoC costs $10, the electricity cost in the ARM SoC is under $10, so if you save $10 in electricity by running the ARM SoC, then you've offset the cost of the energy used in manufacturing.

Energy is dirt cheap in comparison to labor. Therefore cost of industrial goods is correlated to labor not to energy / power costs. (with few exceptions in heavy industries.)

That is not the point of the comment to which you're replying. They didn't claim that the purchase price provides a good estimate of the energy cost, but that it provides a strict upper bound. If the manufacturer is not selling at a loss, then they can't sell for less than their energy costs, let alone labor costs.

Re: An $89 remanufactured Ubuntu workstation

#72

Post by sliverstorm »

On the subject of power-efficiency... if you do not need high performance, the power-per-performance improvements in modern chips are not important, and you are missing out only on power-per-time thanks to huge leaps in idle power.

So, what if you put a classroom full of students on dumb terminals all connected to one or two of these? In other words, isn't it true that the more maximally utilized these old boxes are, the less their idle power deficiencies matter?

Re: An $89 remanufactured Ubuntu workstation

#73

Post by melling »

pmontra wrote: post #14
jkot wrote: post #6

And people pay $80 for this? ARM device from China will be cheaper, smaller,more power efficient and will run Ubuntu just as fine. > 2.8Ghz P4 or better CPU (pentium 4 is very very green) > 80GB SATA HD (spin it yeah, Ubuntu comfortably fits to 5GB) > VGA port ???

Plenty of TVs and monitors still have a VGA port, so that's not a surprise. Furthermore this is basically a PC from 10 years ago and not a top notch one (I'm looking to HD, CPU and network card - I had a laptop with 10/100/1000). It's interesting that you can still run a 2014 OS on that hardware. There is probably some value in using an Intel chip instead of an ARM one even if I bet that most Linux software runs on A…

People never stop making excuses. VGA is dead.

http://www.raspberrypi.org/help/faqs/#videoVGA

Re: An $89 remanufactured Ubuntu workstation

#74

Post by VLM »

zerohm wrote: post #20
proveanegative wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Amazing price point. Is it really? It seems in line with eBay/Craigslist prices for similar hardware, expect for the "remanufactured" part.

Try getting all those old parts to a facility, test them, assemble a consistent product, and get it out the door. Their efficiency in doing that is their value proposition.

With free labor that sounds pretty trivial.

We're talking about a use case where spending $500 to ten-tuple a users peak computational ability is too much of a capital investment and/or labor is too cheap to bother, so just hire more bodies and work slower.

Re: An $89 remanufactured Ubuntu workstation

#75

Post by dankohn1 »

I have started switching our customer service staff to Chromeboxes (specifically, the Asus model below). However, we've found that 2 GB does not provide acceptable performance once you open more than half a dozen tabs. We've been upgrading all machines to 4 GB and have found that performance is significantly snappier than the low end Windows boxes we were using.

And, of course, we love not having to worry about upgrades, anti-virus, backups. etc. Even the Symple would require us to manually upgrade the Ubuntu OS eventually.

http://www.amazon.com/Asus-CHROMEBOX-M004U-ASUS-Desktop/dp/B...

Re: An $89 remanufactured Ubuntu workstation

#76

Post by mediumdave »

stcredzero wrote: post #61

You can also pick up a Thinkpad T400 laptop on ebay for about that amount. (Has absolutely crap video hardware, but plenty good for web development and educational purposes.)

I have a couple T61s from Ebay that I got for my kids. I've been using one of them for some development work, and I've been surprised at how well they work for that purpose --- as in, I could easily use one for my day to day work. Put an old SSD in one, install Linux, and you have a very nice machine.

Re: An $89 remanufactured Ubuntu workstation

#77

Post by stcredzero »

mediumdave wrote: post #76
stcredzero wrote: post #61

You can also pick up a Thinkpad T400 laptop on ebay for about that amount. (Has absolutely crap video hardware, but plenty good for web development and educational purposes.)

I have a couple T61s from Ebay that I got for my kids. I've been using one of them for some development work, and I've been surprised at how well they work for that purpose --- as in, I could easily use one for my day to day work. Put an old SSD in one, install Linux, and you have a very nice machine.

I bought a Thinkpad x220 tablet off ebay as a "poor man's Cintiq" and put an old SSD in it. The thing is like a developer Swiss Army Knife. I can use the very nice keyboard for real programming work. I can use the Wacom stylus for pixel art and graphics. Makes me think that Apple is aiming at dominating the common-person's "workstation" form factor, while Lenovo is aiming more squarely at guys like us.

Re: An $89 remanufactured Ubuntu workstation

#78

Post by switchbak »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #53
egd wrote: post #24

They're cheap enough that my first thought was to pick up a couple and figure out what I'd do with them later, but the disadvantage here is that they're older boxes, which means they're going to be energy hogs (for the performance point, at least). That's what makes the eco pitch interesting - they're reducing e-waste, which is good, but energy efficiency on newer boxes (especially if you just need minimal performanc…

This has been one of the most amazingly non-intuitive things for me over the years. That operating a computer that is older can be so much more inefficient than operating one that is newer, that it isn't worth it. Literally the best thing you can do is crush the chips and mine the result for gold, silver, and the few rare earths that are left over. That at least puts a finite limit on the energy consumed over it, and…

If we had halfway-usable power management back in the day, it would have a lot more sense (for occasional use) as it would be idle/sleeping most of the day.

But we most certainly didn't, especially in Linux - and most people ended up having to leave them on. Heck, even the super pimped-out Linux machine I made in 2012 still has occasional issues with suspend/resume (I could probably go on a week long patch fest to try to fix it, but no thanks - I bought a macbook instead :)

Re: An $89 remanufactured Ubuntu workstation

#79

Post by kolev »

ashark wrote: post #66
kolev wrote: post #54

If had no fan, I'd buy one for my kids.

I recently bought a Raspberry Pi 2, a nicer case than I really needed, a 64GB sdhc card, and a good power supply for not more than one of these cost. Going with a smaller SD card and a less-nice case you'd easily save enough to cover a breakout breadboard for the GPIO and maybe a couple of sensors. Judging from its performance I suspect the original Pi would have disappointed me and been nearly useless for anything I…

That's what I did, too. I want to create a Pi 2 blade server and use it for local docker PaaS (for builds, running tests, etc.), but can't find a good case for that. The dog bone one takes too much space and is too generic.

Re: An $89 remanufactured Ubuntu workstation

#80

Post by Animats »

There's an outfit in Oakland which does this.[1] They're a computer recycling center which assembles working systems from the recycled ones. They currently offer minimum specs of at least 2GB of RAM, 80GB HDD, DVD-ROM and 17” monitor. They install Linux XUBUNTU 14.0.1. The machines are free to schools, non-profits, and low-income people.

There was a similar organization in Berkeley which installed Windows. They had a deal with Microsoft which allowed them to do this. But I think that ended with Windows XP.

[1] http://www.ewastecollective.org

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