back in days of yore, power supplies were big, honking things, requiring a fan and so on and were usually the most unreliable part in a box.
Once, I was on a beach in Belize in 2002, and the hotel asked me to see if I could fix a couple computers. I merely touched one of their power supplies and the accumulated corrosion made it crumble away in my hands... Now the AC-DC conversion problem is in ever smaller sealed bricks, and DC-DC conversions we can do from a 12v supply is amazing. PCs have complex voltage requirements, and I remember being blown away a few (6?) years back when I saw my first solid state "pico" DC-2-DC converter which did maybe 30 watts and was a bit larger than this: http://www.mini-box.com/picoPSU-160-XT Battery life and power density have also improved dramatically, 3 axis accellerometers are cheap and plentiful, cpus run at ghz speeds with multiple cores (the first embedded linux box I ever built (1998) was a 25Mhz 486SX), and run on 10 watts or less, wifi has gone from 2mbit to 1gbit, ethernet from a gigabit to 40gigE, memory from megabytes to gigabytes, storage from spinning rust to flash... ...and "acceptible" internet latency (for people other than us) is still way above 100ms. -- Dave Täht Fixing bufferbloat with cerowrt: http://www.teklibre.com/cerowrt/subscribe.html _______________________________________________ Cerowrt-devel mailing list [email protected] https://lists.bufferbloat.net/listinfo/cerowrt-devel
