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 performance) is worlds better than what these are offering. On the one hand, the recycling is great, but on the other hand, it's like putting a 1953 Chevy back on the road - sure, we didn't have to manufacture another one, but it still might not be the best thing for the environment.
Given the right uses, like an elementary school computer lab for learning Scratch, Logo, etc; they would be fine.
The problem is they are right on the cusp of the next cycle of Moore's Law, Raspberry Pi is now quad core and 1GB, it puts it in the same class as this machine. The cost of "good enough" compute hardware is going to zero (shipping, financial trans cost will dominate).
The main power draws of these systems will probably be the monitor they are attached to, the older PSU inside, and the hard disk. Keep in mind that for a RPi based solution, you still need to provide all of these. The tiny PSU needed for a RPi will probably be quite efficient, so maybe count that one out.
Also, as great as the RPi 2 is, I still don't think it is the same class as these machines, which have a 3x clock cycle advantage, plus much wider CPUs. For web browsing, this is going to matter way more than 4 cores.
P4s have a horrible stall happy pipeline, the RaspPi has a decent GPU, I'd call it even. For a school environment and a good minimal window manager, the new RaspPi would be excellent for web browsing.
> I haven’t tried any normal desktop applications (other than Chromium), but I’d say the Pi 2 is finally worth considering as an full-fledged educational computer (i.e., beyond the introductory toy stage).
With a newer monitor and the current generation raspberrypi, it should powered directly from the USB hub in the monitor. With a bolt through VESA mount, a wifi dongle and netbooting off an NFS, a rapidly deployable Raspberry Pi school lab should be easily doable.
Finding the perfect monitor (internal powered usb hub) for the right price point is difficult, the device that needs to get built is a VESA case for the raspberry pi that has a NEMA 5-15R input and AC pass through, a USB powersupply for the RaspPi and a power switch that turns both the rasp and the monitor off.
DC in is nice, could run the lab off batteries or direct solar for off grid installations.
The problem is the software configuration for the NFS bootserver and making the netboot images.
Someone should make a VM image that can netboot a cluster of Raspberry Pis with a choice of roles (scratch, web browsing, quake 3, etc). With remote mounted home directories (served from ZFS, for snapshots).
One modification I'd like to see for the raspberry pi is better sleep support. I don't know if the SoC could do it, but if it could go into extra low power mode, possibly powered by a supercap, it could wakeup on external events (like an RTC) and not take any power from the USB.
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 hotplugging flash drives and wifi adapters whereas I did on the original and rev 2 models.
I've had my B+ running 24/7 since August as a webcam server to watch my dog in the back yard, and I've only had to reboot it once for an update. It's running a Microsoft USB-powered 720p webcam and an Edimax wifi adapter directly off of the built in USB, and it hasn't once had a power issue. I've had my Pi 2 running 24/7 since I got it a couple of weeks ago, as a "light" GNU/Linux workstation I can switch to and use when my main workstation is otherwise occupied. Again, no power issues on that board.
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)
Many DC devices have capacitors on their power rails. When they are plugged in, they generate a huge current spike as the capacitors charge up (limited only by the resistance and inductance of the capacitors/wires). This is enough to overwhelm the power supply and cause a reset.
The solution is a current limiter of some sort. Sometimes this is as simple as initially powering the USB port through a resistor, watching until the USB voltage gets high enough, then switching over to a direct connection.
First I've heard of this; it does need a decent USB power supply, but that's a consequence of not shipping one and expecting the user to supply one of suitable quality.
I found the first model would sometimes brownout when trying to maximally utilize the ethernet. Which was not a big deal for a hobby device, but it did eliminate a number of possibilities.
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 the value returned from it.
Not sending it to places like the e-waste dump in Agbogbloshie, Accra, Ghana is a benefit. I'm not sure how to weight each thing - the increased CO2 emmissions are bad; not poisoning poor people who do things like burn the PVC insulation off cables to get the copper is a good thing.
Certainly agree with that sentiment! We are getting to the point where it makes sense to have 'disassembly' robots, this paper (http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0967066108...) looked at that (it wasn't the focus per se but an example). I can clearly see that 'anti-factories' where raw materials are recovered and unrecoverable materials made inert will be a thing.
Still, the market isn't going to solve this on it's own. Other peoples children are going to be cheaper than robots for the foreseeable future. In fact, poisoning the local population could be considered a minor issue compared to contaminating the water tables. Sick people die, but a contaminated water table keeps killing people for generations.
I think strong local regulations, as well as an emphasis of recycling locally is the best short-term solution. It does expose the actual cost of recycling (safely) -- but also cuts energy to shipping, and can be used as a stimuli for a more re-cycle friendly value chain (eg: make sellers of electronics take the bill for recycling, and demand local, safe recycling) -- which in turn puts pressure on suppliers to deliver items that are cheaper to recycle safely.
We may have sufficient regulations that the market can push it over the top. After all if you can create a facility that converts ewaste into resalable raw materials you can both sell the service to municipalities who are required by law to dispose of their ewaste safely, and the raw materials to manufacturers as a recycled product. That combination might get you into an internal rate of return to make it worth while.
The real challenge is the globalization (and accompanying fragmentation of regulation) of electronics production. One might recycle heavy metals locally, but you'd have to get it back into the production pipe-line -- which generally means shipping it to China. And being able to compete on price with heavy metals from various more-or less horribly run mines around the world. One obvious alternative is to produce electronic components locally (again). But realistically, doing that cheaply enough (and well enough) is going to be a challenge.
In this sense I think Tesla is a very interesting company (even if I don't think much of the cars themselves, from an eco-perspective -- cars is a horrible means of transportation, even electric ones).
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 :)
Though it clearly isn't a server farm, there would appear to be reasonable use cases in the consumer and small business markets.
Lowest first cost is a significant form of capital efficiency [as opposed to energy]. There are tradeoffs either way, and for a single moderate use computer reaching the break-even point via reduced energy footprint could easily be several years. The raw cost of running the most power hungry P4 [115w] is $151 per 24/7 year @ full load @ $0.15/kwH.
In addition, having the machine pre-loaded with Linux also offers time efficiency versus re-provisioning a new Windows machine with Ubuntu or shopping for components, etc.
None of which to say it's a good deal per FLOP or MIP or anything else. But it's not necessarily bad either.
Heh, where they might make sense is in old apartments in northern Europe. My ancient building in Dublin uses resistive electric heat (about the worst kind of heating you can have unless you have abundant renewable energy). Really, I suppose I might as well be very slowly mining bitcoins or running servers instead of just getting no work at all for the heat I'm making.
Core 2 Duos and Pentium Dual Cores under 3ghz are fairly energy efficient chips (~65w) and they use Speedstep, etc to keep power consumption low at idle.
Of course newer dual cores and more modern chipsets will use less power overall, although for less demanding uses (web, word processing) I'm not sure if there would be a huge difference.
I agree, this is a dreadful idea. The CPUs are going to hog a whole load of energy (as are the motherboards). The HDDs are going to be seriously used and probably prone to complete breakdown.
An ARM SoC would do this same job much faster probably at much less cost, with FAR less energy consumption.
I agree, I love the concept, but you also have to add the cost of a monitor + keyboard + mouse AND the fact that everybody wants (needs?) a laptop these days.
"you also have to add the cost of a monitor + keyboard + mouse AND the fact that everybody wants (needs?) a laptop these days."
Not really...
with RDP/SSH/Telnet/etc, you can access this without the need a dedicated keyboard/mouse/monitor.
Also, I can live without a laptop due to my "phablet". I already have a desktop. Something like this would be a good for hiding a server (or two) somewhere.
The question is... the energy saved by reusing this. The energy saved by not destroying this. The landfill space not taken up by this...
Is it enough to offset the energy savings on newer pc's that are more powerful but use less energy? What is the tipping point that makes a new machine better?
That depends. If they happen to heat a small area around the user, then it will allow the ambient room to be at a lower temperature overall, leading to a net power savings because (counterintuitively) of lower efficiency.
There are a number of factors influencing that conclusion. Many people opined on this issue a little while ago, "heating people rather than spaces" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9034678
Could be. I'm just observing that there is a law of conservation of energy and that heat can be useful, so the question of using old computers in terms of environmental impact is not as clear cut as many internet comments suggest.
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.
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.
When I first moved to Portland I volunteered at Free Geek. But it was mostly because I didn't know anyone and it seemed like a good way to make like-minded people.
I wonder how anyone makes use of Ubuntu for even just 'web work' with just 2GB RAM. The browsers are becoming ever more bloated; I know I had swap issues on my non-SSD laptop before I upgraded from 4 to 8. Right now it uses 3.3 with 9 Chrome tabs open, an IM client, gedit and terminal.
It's unfortunate, of course, because 4GB of older DDR1/DDR2 memory would be much more tough to find/expensive than 2.
I regularly use a netbook with 1GB of RAM (Dell Mini 9). It's on #! (I know, I might need to look for an alternative), which uses Openbox, but I have no problems with web surfing as long as I max at about 5 tabs. I also don't use a lot of web apps. With HTML5 video, videos work well enough. I can even run Eclipse if nothing else is open without too many problems, although for development work on it I'm usually using RDP.
Edit: I'll add I use Firefox on it. I find on Windows and Linux that Chrome takes up quite a bit more RAM than the alternatives. I use IE11 on my Windows machine with 4GB which I am using now, because Chrome would eat away my memory with the same usage.
I guess that's true, although in theory it would be quite easy to install a lighter WM and/or DE. I don't know why they picked Ubuntu default and Unity.
I can have four or five tabs open without much struggle. Gmail, Google Drive, Spotify, Facebook, Wikipedia, all the typical stuff works. Thre's a built in SSH client that's nice. YouTube videos play at full speed, even via Flash, up to 720p.
Performance will pale in comparison to anyone's modern machine. But this still works fine for many common uses.
I expect these refurbished PC's would have similar performance, which isn't great -- but it's probably "good enough" to get the job done, even with a modern supposedly-bloated copy of Chrome or Firefox on it.
The funny/sad part is web browsers alone (I believe) have experienced the most growth in RAM usage, compared to many other categories of software. Hell, even Outlook still uses only 50-100MB. So if you wanted to use the box for anything other than web browsing...
Edit: oh, I forgot about flash. Earlier today Firefox with one tab was hovering at 400MB and flash was at 200MB.
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.
I was thinking the same thing. The increased power usage (over something like an ARM based Chromebook) is probably easily offset by the power needed to manufacture new but from a cost perspective to the user it may be a false-economy (assuming the machines are in use 24/7).
You also have the power consumption of the VGA monitor to contend with.
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 uses far more electricity in operation. The short lifespan of computers and the variety of computing needs of users suggests that extension of lifespan, for example by promptly reselling to users who need less computing power, is a promising approach to mitigating environmental impacts.
This is from a study[1] from 2004 of a 1990 PC, inclusive of CRT... I suspect the figures are similar if not worse, as power consumption has come down a lot while chip sizes have remained similar... regardless, the point is so strong that it seems quite likely to remain true whatever the case -- unless your idea of a 'PC' is a rPI.2, which might be useful for some of the same scenarios, but certainly not all-- it's still far from the CPU power of a 2.8ghz p4. So, in many (most?) cases this is credibly a 'green' thing.
But I am talking about something like RPi2 on higher frequency, more ram and small ssd. I bet it will run better than this archaic machine with P4. Faster memory transfer rate, SSD, proper video acceleration makes a huge difference. P4 had terrible chipsets
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.
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 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.
40 watts while idle = 28.8 kwh a month so 13.5 cents per kwh = $3.88 / month to run. Rasberry Pi B+ uses 1.21 watts while idle so about 11 cents /month. So a Rasberry Pi will pay for itself in about 10 months.
I'm not sure why they even considered P4's, the pre-prescott P4's don't even have Speedstep. That means they run full voltage/speed all the time which is terribly inefficient.
Core 2 Duos are much more energy efficient, they are not in short supply by any means and cost about the same used ($2-3).
Well, ship them North (South) - somewhere with electric heating (regulated by a thermostat). Then the 40 watts become a non-issue. Anywhere you need air-conditioning, things are a bit different.
Morgan Computers! I bought a few bits from them nearly 15 years ago. Good to see they are still in business, I'd have thought eBay would have finished them off.
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.
Just to be clear, I didn't mean the price point of the parts if you bought them separately and assembled them yourself. (My bet is they'd cost you more that way, if only because of the shipping/gas expenses.) What I meant was the price you'd pay when buying a P4-era PC whole when it is sold as working by the previous owner or a small reseller.
I agree with you on the testing; if it's rigorous enough that will likely the biggest sale point.
I take the point, but suppose you were a school after 30 boxes to run in a computer drop in room in the café?
One quote from the company and a definite (back to base) guarantee would be more acceptable to accountant than lots of small transactions on ebay/local suppliers.
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.
>>> Symple PC runs the open source Ubuntu Linux operating system and doesn't require you to give your data to a company you may or may not trust.
How is this possible? It has ethernet connection and so it is possible to connect to internet and thus same as any other interconnected device. How this machine will be more trustworthy than other PC's/phones?
>>> cost of $89
Following dell[1] at 500 GB hard disk is at $229. It can work safely for at least 2 years and if we go by advanced replacement warranty of in this case, symple comes to around $170. So price-wise it is not much different but configuration of 80 GB HDD is just too small.
"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-conscious" yet it utilizes recycled components which by their nature are from unknown sources. There is no chain of custody for recycled components. As such, do they have a lab which is verifying the firmware of any of those recycled components haven't been tampered with in a way which will result in a breach of privacy? If they do, that's cool but I'd think it would add significantly to the cost. This has been a major challenge in the re-use space for years as it's possible to tamper with firmware on motherboards, hard-drives, and network cards in a way which breaches privacy, independent of the operating system. I get the whole reuse thing, it's cool, but I'd be very cautious about making binding claims as to either the privacy or security of devices using recycled components which can be re-flashed.
No offense, but tampering with firmware on motherboards, hard drives, and network cards to breach privacy sounds more like NSA/EquationGroup/TAO, not parts recycling centers. Unless you're implying that we should be checking every component for NSA tampering, I'd need some solid statistics to back up the idea that firmware backdoors are suddenly commonplace from refurbished/recycled computer parts.
NSA/EquationGroup is just in the news right now. There have been growing concerns about UEFI for years as well as a lack of reporting. Note this from Dick Wilkins UEFI report:
"Examples come from Intel, Microsoft, Mitre, NIST, Linux
distros and others. Some are public and some are available
only under NDA via direct communications with the involved
companies."
Is it likely to be seen in the wild often? Likely not, but that's not the point. If it's seen more than once, then you have a problem if you build an entire business selling "trusted platforms" based on recycled equipment. At that point, expect your claims to be busted. What happens the first time someone actually finds a confirmed trojan in a firmware component of a product they sell? It doesn't matter if it is legitimate or a plant, it will reverberate through the news cycle like Lenovo-Superfish and the damage will be done.
This isn't to say this business model is a bust. Just be very cautious about claiming it supports privacy. There are plenty of educational scenarios where hardware which has been compromised would be of no issue.
Any time I buy a used board I check the board carefully for any kind of modification or odd looking solder joints and re-flash the bios/uefi with the latest version.
Of course something could still be modified, but so could a board direct from amazon or newegg I suppose.
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?
It's a good but difficult question to answer if one wants to break into the details of it.
The process of manufacturing all of the components likely results externalities that are represented in the price. There is also the cost of how the disposed machine is processed.
You can also factor in the user behaviors. My grandmother probably is not going to leave her desktop powered on for longer than the 1 hour or so per day that she might use it. People here, myself included, are probably used to running their machines 24-7.
There's also the perspective that if this machine is going to a 10 year old kid, that it's a machine s/he can break and it won't be a big deal. This can be a significant advantage for a low income home.
I think it really depends on what you mean by 'a low end PC'.. if you mean a full desktop with an extensible (PCIe etc) motherboard.. I believe the answer is... way after you'd ever want to use the old PC[1]. But if you're moving towards the something in the vein of the Raspberry Pi, much sooner.
I don't know about more planet friendly, but just in terms of dollars, if you're paying for your own electricity getting a modern desktop for $200 is more economical after a couple months.
There are android mini pcs with Android OSs, much larger selection of apps/games, for less than half that price. They can easily be found for ~$35 http://www.laptopmag.com/android-sticks
Basically, proprietary PowerVR graphics chip driver source was leaked. Anyone who has read the leaked code is considered "tainted" and is unable to contribute to the open-soruce, cleanroom implementation alternative PowerVR drivers.
It generally makes it difficult for ANYONE to develop open-source PowerVR drivers, as their lawyers could argue that they had seen the leaked source code and copied it (regardless of whether or not that fact is true).
The PowerVR chips on Intel platforms came in binary blobs, and were only supported in a few fairly specific configurations. As such, they were obsolete almost as soon as they were released, with little to no support. Thankfully, though, they only put PowerVR chips in their Atom boards for a fairly short period of time, so you won't have to worry about them in these machines.
Intel does a good job producing and supporting their open source graphics drivers. The PowerVR chips aren't designed by Intel, so they don't receive the same level of support.
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.
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!)
Agreed, the late P4's check the box when it comes to performance, but they are right at the worst point possible in terms of power consumption, the next gen (I would include CoreDuo, or P4 era A64) are vastly more appealing because of that.
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?
Hopefully they're not selling the Athlon XP series. While they seem like perfectly-capable x86 CPUs at first glance, they're no longer compatible with software that requires SSE2, like Chrome and Flash.
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?
They're a remanufacturer, and probably work with a lot of off-lease computers and the like. The $89 price point suggests they're taking 7-8 year old dells and the like, testing them to make sure they work, and putting them in a snazzy new case. So, some machines may be loaded with new ram, some may have faster processors, etc. It's a bit of a lottery, but with a nicer warranty than the 90 days you get with most off-lease stuff.
Love the concept. BTW I'm about to start a new linux-friendly hardware shop here in Italy (more geared towards laptops and desktop workstations - any suggestions?) - it's refreshing to see Symple did this!
Add the fact they they have to be shipped to the long, long, list of the reasons this is a bad idea. I'm surprised so many people were fooled by the marketing materials.
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.
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.
Because they aren't setting the spec sheet, they're selling refurb computers from it departments, and most of those were originally specced with 10/100
very nice. would love to see an SSD option for slightly more, which would decrease the size, power & shipping weight and speed up the overall benchmark.
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 ARM too (all my Linux boxes are x86_64).
End of life according to who? That's not how it works, one company doesn't just declare something EOL and everyone else stops using it out of obligation.
VGA will stop being used when it stops fitting most use cases out there, and not before. The connector standard is capable of 2048x1536 at 85hz, which, making an educated guess here, is probably a higher resolution than the monitor you're using right now. Most monitors and TV's sold nowadays are 1920x1080.
4K will probably be what finally kills it off (3840 x 2160), but I'd give that another 2-5 years before the hardware reaches enough market penetration for manufacturers to stop including the plug out of necessity.
VGA is terrible. The specs you just rattled off don't account for the innate fuzziness of the analog signal. I've reduced a lot of eyestrain from various people by confiscating their VGA cables and telling them they're forbidden from using 'the cable with the blue ends'.
Yes, VGA still has to be used for devices that only accept VGA (like a lot of projectors, very few of which can handle those specs), but apart from that, it should be avoided because the image quality is just that bad.
Those sound like bad cables to me. I'm typing this on a 1920x1080 display, connected via VGA, and next to that is an identical monitor connected over DVI.
The displays are identically sharp and colorful. Nobody would be able to tell you which is connected over which interface.
Beats me. When were the projectors purchased? Lots of legacy crap around because people are slow to adopt standards that are a decade old. That kind of equipment will linger for years.
The warning has been going out for quite some time:
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 might wanted to do with it, but the Pi2's a nice little device. It's silent and it sips power. The support and software ecosystem around it is well worth a few extra bucks over similar devices (the first time it saves you even 30 minutes of hair-pulling frustration, which likely won't be long after you open the box, you'll be glad you went with a Pi)
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.
I'm happy with it, and I can't really imagine a case being any smaller and still protecting the Pi while providing access to its various ports (including the SD card). I'm not really into the see-through case thing, but I couldn't find an opaque case I liked better for the same amount of money or less.
I mean something like this [0], but more efficient as you need an outer enclosure only. Blade-server like would be idea (where the Pis are vertical) with some more efficient Ethernet cabling to connect them to a switch.
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 performance) is worlds better than what these are offering. On the one hand, the recycling is great, but on the other hand, it's like putting a 1953 Chevy back on the road - sure, we didn't have to manufacture another one, but it still might not be the best thing for the environment.