101–110 of 144 posts
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.)
"Data control by large corporations and government agencies is a tangible concern. Our Symple PC represents another, environmentally intelligent and privacy-aware path. It is one of the most planet-friendly PCs in the world. The case is made from recycled ABS plastic, the parts are recycled..." Hold on, hold on. They are directly marketing this solution to call centers, non-profits, etc., claiming it's "privacy-consc…
I am concerned with energy consumption of this device. Pentium 4 class computer consumes 40 watts while idle. ARM cpu would work just as fine (Ubuntu). I think this devices should not be called green, unless they disclose power efficiency rating.
In a model using solely exchange values, it is practical to cast fungible money directly into energy and thus treat the price of a physical good as roughly equivalent to its embodied energy. [it's a plausibly reasonable first approximation].
Again to a first approximation and absent detailed figures we're unlikely to obtain easily, we could say that the $300 ARM desktop carries $210 of additional embodied energy compared with the $90 recycled machine. That's about four years of a Pentium 4 idling 24/7. This assumes that an ARM consumes zero power at idle and that no energy is consumed in the disposal of a P4.
IMO the cutoff needs to be Core 2 Duo tech (even Celeron versions) or any AMD64 chip. Pentium 4 Prescotts, which their spec implies could be used, are awful and inefficient chips. (Heck, I told people not to buy them when they were new !)
I'm sure there are many of those CPUs involved in some of these PCs; why not offer a CD+ (or even 'no P4') guarantee for +$10 or so?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
He is talking about power not cost to build it.
This guy is (pretty much) right. Firstly it's energy not power (power is more like the rate of flow of energy).. The embodied energy of a PC (ie, energy required to make it) is huge. >life cycle energy use of a computer is dominated by production (83%) as opposed to operation (17%). The yearly life cycle cost of owning a computer is about 3,000 MJ/year, half again that of a refrigerator, a much larger appliance that…
I am concerned with energy consumption of this device. Pentium 4 class computer consumes 40 watts while idle. ARM cpu would work just as fine (Ubuntu). I think this devices should not be called green, unless they disclose power efficiency rating.
There might as well be a book called "Fifty Shades of Green". The embodied energy of a product includes the amortization of the industrial infrastructure to produce it, to sustain the workers involved in its production, and that consumed by the logistics entailed in its acquisition. In a model using solely exchange values, it is practical to cast fungible money directly into energy and thus treat the price of a physi…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
They did, with the B+ in mid 2014, and the current Pi 2 with the same power design. The B+ and newer boards don't suffer the odd power supply issues that the older boards (even the B rev2) suffered. And I'm not just rehashing what someone else said; I've had one each of the original B, a rev 2 B, a B+, and now a Pi 2. I've used the same power supply on all four, and on the B+ and Pi 2 I don't have any issues with hot…
This reflects my experience as well. Not only did the B+ add a switching power supply, but there is proper USB power protection and soft-start as well. Unless GP is referring to the flash problem of the RPi 2.0, which is readily solved by using a case, piece of tape, or an epoxy blob (which I imagine is what will be added to the manufacturing line eventually)
At what point is it more planet-friendly to manufacture a new energy-efficient underpowered low-end PC, rather than repurpose an old power-hungry low-end PC?
1. http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/Xplore/login.jsp?url=http%3A%2F%2...
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.)
For value in a used linux laptop nothing beats an Acer C710(~$60+)/C720(~$100); they'd beat the T400 or a 2.8ghz P4 (by a mile in total system performance), with an SSD and HDMI output, all while giving you >6hrs battery life and USB3 in the case of the 720. IIRC the iGPU's in the T400 era don't do webGL.
They are indeed close to the worst integrated GPUs ever made.
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…
There's an organization in Minneapolis which does a similar thing. It's called Free Geek Twin Cities, and they recycle old PCs and put Ubuntu on them. It's about $40 for a computer, or one can earn one by volunteering for 24 hours. I used to volunteer there when I was less busy.
It worked.