On 02/13/11 15:04, Paolo Aglialoro wrote: > Hi all, > > there's much hype around about these plugcomputers which are going to spread > in the market.
I've heard that. many years ago, actually. (heh. Wikipedia says "plug computers" are only a couple years old. That's not my memory. Not worth me looking closer at this) These will probably beat the flying car and controlled Fusion power sources to serious market penetration, but... > Here are some interesting models: ... Before getting excited about these, go look at what has happened to other stuff like this. Usual process goes somewhere along the line of: Developer spends a lot of time getting the OpenBSD toolchain ready for a new platform, and fighting with the vendor of these "Open-source friendly" (which should be read as "Linux...and only THEIR implementation") systems to get full (and accurate) documentation on the hardware. About the time the system is ready to be introduced as a mainstream platform, several of the following happens: * Manufacturer turns out to be a fraud. * Manufacturer fails to make a profit and "goes away". * Manufacturer won't release documentation in a NDA-free, BSD compatible way. * Product is discontinued. * Product is replaced by a new product which has almost the same model number and same color case but none of the same guts, and thus is a whole new product requiring a new porting effort. * Availability proves to be a problem for people interested in buying. * Cost is higher than superior hardware that already Just Works. * Boot ROMs are buggier than the pile of dog droppings at a summer picnic. * each new boot ROM revision breaks compatibility with existing code (tested only on theirs!). * Manufacturer discovers people are using the product in unintended ways and revises the boot ROM to make booting an alternative OS more difficult/impossible and incompatible with past porting effort. * People discover the performance is that of a ten year old computer, and they remember why they quit using ten year old computers. * Manufacturer is found to have spent more time developing the website and the hype machine than actually doing development of the product, and success was defined as getting to a command prompt long enough to take pictures. I'll even go as far as to predict "power supply problems", just because that's usually what we see. I suspect the people that coded for these things can add to this list. Please feel free to build a box and not fulfill any of my above predictions. I look forward to being made to look like a fool, but I'm not betting on it. (I'm also having difficulty figuring out what to do with a wall-wart format computer. uh... I HATE wall warts! Do we REALLY want to run more wires to the wall wart? I actually kinda like the "NAS box" format systems -- a lot more practical for my uses, but which all suffered the above problems, too) Nick.
