| [News] U.S. Senate's High Tech Task Force Visit ODW Assembly | ANN.lu |
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| U.S. Senate's High Tech Task Force Visit ODW Assembly : Comment 22 of 27 | ANN.lu |
| Posted by Joe "Floid" Kanowitz on 28-Aug-2004 05:20 GMT | In reply to Comment 21 (corpse):
The Chinese produce a MIPS based desktop-capable linux machine in a tiny orange cube and what do America/Europe have to offer? Ah argh I know let's stick an underpowered, expensive design in a flashy case and give it a bunch of stupid tag names.
That's the "Nipponese" (NEC) trying to market to the Chinese, and... hey, it's a shame that thing *is* going to be remembered here as 'that weird orange thing that runs TRON,' especially when AMD has a reference platform that could be put to similar use, and so on. (Of course, I'm not sure what to think, since on the one hand you could incorporate one into a desktop LCD at barely any cost... and on the other hand, all the ridiculous complexity already in such things is part of what's keeping prices high. Hmm, you're right, I did just accidentally reinvent Microsoft's 'Mira' in a much more corporately-useful fashion.)
Meanwhile, there's not really anything horribly wrong here, to the extent that the power consumption of a whole Pegasos (or, of course, the competing Via hardware) probably isn't *all* that different from the NEC cube per_metric_of_performance, and entities have been throwing entire 'PCs' (even ones with -- *gasp* -- moving parts, and have you ever touched a 300MHz P-II?) at the same problems for quite some time. Netbooting straight from Genesi HQ might not be the most intelligent thing for everyone (as far as I can tell, that's just an example, if I'm even reading it right), and it seems a bit silly to couch the tech on this Avalanche site (well, it seems a bit silly to make a para-proprietary solution), but if Genesi want to be a 'solutions' company this week, that's how everyone from HP to Tarantella try to make their money (and SourceForge projects probably don't impress the Republicans)...
The only ironies are that, of course, it'd be just as easy to do with OpenBSD as anything else (maybe 'easier,' if that development would've caught and squashed any lingering bugs), and unless you're Motorola, it probably *is* still cheaper to do it with commodity PCs. But drag the Pegasos to parity with the average C3 solution or overpriced big-brand pizza box (as far as I can tell, it's getting there, if only because there's no way to sell them otherwise), give it some decently functional software (okay, I'm ragging, but is any silliness with Marvell's gigabit driver really over and done?), and at least you've got something with PCI slots if you ever need to repurpose one in the field.
(Contrast Sun Rays, iMacs, the occasional Wyse Winterm or whatever the market for this junk is presently using -- An all-Pegasos deployment might actually have some vague advantages versus a hundred 'thin' clients and a small nation's GNP of Cisco in the closet to support them... and the same holds equally for AmigaOne, if anything ever straightens out on that end.) |
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