I live near a university with an unbelievably fast network. The network in my apartment complex is shit. Every time I need to download something large, I've thought about planting a little device in the library and picking it up when the download is complete. $40 is cheap enough to risk theft or confiscation.
Criminals could park these in public WiFi zones to implement compute/storage nodes in a kind of Guerilla "cloud." Or give them mobile broadband and pay off truckers to keep them. (And activate a self destruct if the cops come around.)
While interesting, I think that as a product, I'd personally be more interested in Ubiquiti's routerstation pro, which has 4 GigE ports, POE, slower processor, more ram, 3 mini pci slots, and depending on what you do with the mini pci slots, less power consumption. And the routerstation pro is cheaper too.
The routerstation pro has a 680 MHz processor with 256 MB RAM, which is okay for certain applications. But for many uses, 680 MHz is kind of low. The SheevaPlug has 1.2 GHz processor and 512 MB RAM, which isn't too bad considering the cost.
How about a new kind of flat-panel screen that has WiFi and the ability to VNC? (tunneled for security) Be able to detatch it from its stand, and use it as a tablet or an eBook reader.
Adding a few of these in a rack box with small HDs plus an internal hub and you have a small "datacenter" in a colocation environment for a fraction of cost. Neat.
The advantage of this little computer over buying a slice of a slice of somebody's EC2 box would be had in cases where IO had to happen in a particular physical place. And, this is primarily limited to cases where one wants to monitor/control physical things and pipe that data to/from that physical ___location. So, monitoring one's swimming pool temperature might be a good use case, but why would anyone want a small network server, especially in a future of more ubiquitous connectivity? I get the whole mobile use case as well, but I think it falls into the category of wanting IO close to a physical thing (in this case, yourself).
Agree. I was just suggesting that, presuming people wanted to purchase computing power in units this small, people could sell 1/500th of a EC2 slice with a gig/month of bandwith or whatever. It's proximity to non-networked IO that makes this thing necessary/useful.
Wow, at $40 it would be about the same price as an Arduino and 50-100 times more powerful. Add WiFi and some I/O pins and you've got a fantastic gadget controller. They should be marketing to inventors and hardware startups. What is a consumer going to do with it?
On the other hand, do we really want to live in a world of Linux lightswitches and doorknobs? Just of think of all the things that won't work.
"Huge cases are out" if your computer is an appliance. If I need to get in there and swap out drives, motherboards, etc., I'll take the nice big case with room to swing a cat, thank you very much.
