--- crowd-funded eco-conscious hardware: https://www.crowdsupply.com/eoma68
On Mon, Jul 25, 2016 at 11:41 PM, Matt Campbell <[email protected]> wrote: > Hello: > > I read the white paper referenced on the Crowd Supply campaign page [1], and > I was particularly interested in the section on "good enough" computing. The > following paragraphs describe some problems that, as far as I recall, aren't > addressed in the rest of the paper: great - ok let's go through it. > This "upgrade treadmill" has bothered me for a while. Yes, with modular > hardware like the EOMA68 cards and housings, the environmental impact is > lessened because we only have to discard computer cards, don't do that!!! re-use them in down-stream devices, sell them please or give them away! for example using them in a freedombox, router or low-power NAS device which would normally be served by a struggling sub-500mhz MIPS, such devices could *really do* with a 1.2ghz dual-core boost! don't do it! > not whole laptops. > But unless we can stop the upgrade treadmill, we'll still have to discard > our old computer cards when they would otherwise still be functional. $3 / month is the going rate for co-located low-power hosting services with a static IPv4 address. 2gbyte of RAM would be seriously welcome, the hosting company would be delighted to be able to slap more EOMA68-A20 computer cards into a convenient rack, i'm sure they'll take them off your hands. > software development, and listening to music. Now I don't know if X would > run at all in 64 MB of RAM. xf86fb version 3 would be fine - i compiled that up in 2004 using bitbake / openembedded... it worked perfectly, the actual executable was only... 450k. .. but 64mb of RAM is a total luxury for routers, most openwrt devices have only 32mb, some even only have 8mb. ... looks a bit weird to be running a laptop from that era as a router, but hey. > So what can we do about this? The only idea I've got is that I and other > software developers should do all of our work on the most underpowered > computer that will let us get buy, rather than the nicest one we can afford. > Then maybe, out of necessity, we won't be so wasteful. But then maybe we > won't be as productive either, particularly if not being wasteful means we > have to write everything in C or C++. And of course, it won't do any good if > I'm the only one who chooses to make those sacrifices. > > At least with free software, there's always the possibility to fork projects > that succumb to the upgrade treadmill. For example, the MATE desktop > environment is a fork of GNOME 2, and Trinity is of KDE 3.5, i actually have that for my clients because they prefer it and are used to KDE 3.5 - i was forced to put XFCE4 in front of them recently, they *really* don't like it. > and one of its explicit goals is to run > well on non-compositing graphics hardware. I imagine MATE will run quite > well on something like the A20 card. most likely. > But still, we can't live in a forked, > time-warped world. man i run fvwm2 - i realise i'm odd... > We have to interact with mainstream websites, which means > using a mainstream browser or at least one of the major rendering engines. > In this regard in particular, I wonder if the upgrade treadmill has already > left the A20 behind, particularly since we can't use full GPU acceleration. > I can certainly understand why the JZ4775 wasn't chosen, though it checks > all the other boxes for ethical computing. i'd add it... if i had time to, and if i can get past the boot phase. i have the early bootloader up, i just need to get u-boot into memory so i can investigate. but if i add it to this campaign, it will have to be at quite a high per-unit cost. > Anyone else have any thoughts on this? Sorry if this is too much of a rant > or off-topic here. no not at all, discussion is great. interested to hear from other people too > FWIW, I just backed the campaign by ordering an A20 card. yay! thanks matt > Matt > > [1]: http://rhombus-tech.net/whitepapers/ecocomputing_07sep2015/ > > _______________________________________________ > arm-netbook mailing list [email protected] > http://lists.phcomp.co.uk/mailman/listinfo/arm-netbook > Send large attachments to [email protected] _______________________________________________ arm-netbook mailing list [email protected] http://lists.phcomp.co.uk/mailman/listinfo/arm-netbook Send large attachments to [email protected]
