OSNews

I completely agree. There is a lot of wasted power out there. I'm currently using a Toshiba Satellite 300CDS notebook computer (which is roughly 10 years old) as an intranet web-server and web-controlled jukebox. It has been working great for months now. It uses roughly 10W of power with the LCD off and the battery fully charged, which is acceptable by my standards.

If apple had an affordable thin-client system, I'd spring for an xserve or macpro, put it in a rack in my coat / wire closet and be all done with PC's on desks.

Unfortunately, the linux offerings don't have the software that I and my family would require in order to do that. Or else it'd already be done.

Apple does have a relatively affordable thin client. It's $299, a bit steep for a thin client, but it has NVIDIA graphics, HDMI with HD audio, 40GB hard disk, and 802.11n, which are high-end features for a thin client.

The problem is that they don't want you to use it as a thin client. They call it AppleTV. It's for playing iTunes content on your TV. But it could have been a thin client that extends your Mac onto any display in your home.

But thankfully, those monster machines with gigs of RAM and GHz of computing power that we use to write software, encode video, host email/web/db servers, and frag our buddies scattered hither and yon across the intraweb can also be used for streaming music and writing emails and letters.

Now a days, even geeks, can better consolidate their machines. That's what I do on my Mac Pro. Its hosts EVERYTHING now.

Development databases, app server(s), email server, web server(s), music and video library.

4 cores of love, 4GB of RAM, revolting amount of disk space.

Some servers run native on the machine, others run in Linux or Solaris under Parallels. The VM tech is the hot tip here.

Got a "spare heater^WPC" running linux and email server? Migrate it. Create a VM, and copy your install over. Give it a 128M or so.

Consolidate these "little servers", get rid of the wall wart forest, or the cheap power strips, or the aged Pentiums in the the half open cases.

Yup, it's a single point of failure, but so is the power in my house. Most of these services are lifestyle services, and not life or death services. I can handle my email being down a day.

Consolidation to a single server does not scare me.

And that's what any thin client project is doing as well (punting on the potential "thin client talking to cluster" meme).

Now add in that new ASUS flash based laptop with wireless for a cheap, wireless, low power, thin client display.

Now if I can only figure out how to get a thin client to talk to my main Mac. I'd love to be able to log and use my Mac from an arbitrary client. Not clear if that's what Remote Desktop is for or not. I can always X Windows in to one of the Solaris VMs, but..it's not the same.

You are clearly not an average user, or classroom child at which this adequate technology is aimed at.

Your hardware may be free, but the power it uses is not. Perhaps if this device is everything the developer and the reviewer claim it is, you could begin to replace your old systems as they die off with these boxes. Depending on how much the hardware will sell for, they would probably pay for themselves very soon with the energy saved. Noise and heat would become less of an issue as well.

noise and heat are not an issue. its a doctor's office and the systems are in exam rooms, but they are locked in cabinets so they can't be accessed by the patients. as for power, i don't know. i disconnected the hds and cd drives. all the systems are p3s and only have a video card, ram, ethernet card, and floppy drive to boot from.

The power savings would probably still be impressive; the system you describe most likely draws 200 watts or so just sitting idle. I guess it all depends on whether the money saved in power bills would ever make up for the cost of replacing otherwise free hardware.

You are overestimating by far!

I have measured my computer with 160 W peak and 140W idle.

The machine contains:

1.4GHz AMD Athlon
500 MB RAM
2 Hard drives, 30 + 80 GB
Network card
Old graphic card (without any cooling device)
TV tuner card
sound card

so if he uses some old P3 with 300 MHz without hard drives and graphic card I would be astounded if it sucked up more than 60W.

There was an interesting article about Ndyio in the Guardian newspaper a couple of weeks ago, which suggests that the Nivo is more of a tiny VNC client than a thin client. I thought killermike's article was great, but also felt it didn't really highlight this as a major difference between the Nivo and traditional thin clients. This really is the thinest of thin.

The Guardian article also points out that they've had "fullscreen DVDs playing down an Ndiyo link", which sounds very impressive to me.

I also think it's intersting that they're integrating this technology directly into screens. I could imagine a time when you can't buy a monitor that doesn't have this built in, and I think that would be great.

Anyway, here's that article for anyone interested:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2007/aug/02/guardianweeklytech...

Well, very nice article, but I had to laugh at some of the points.

First of all: Heat pump. If you really have a heat pump, then you have it to save energy. If you put one kWh (kiloWatthour) of electrical energy into a heat pump, then you should get at least 3 or 4 kWh of thermal energy out of it (the rest coming from the 8 degC cold earth or water you cool down to 4 degC).

So if you have a heat pump running in winter with 15 kW of electrical power consumption, this would mean close to 60 kW of thermal energy (!). This would be enough to heat a large house containing approximately 10 - 15 3-room flats in the middle of a harsh winter!!! At least if this house is properly insulated (I am using the current standard for newly buildt houses in Austria, Europe).
So if you want to save energy, INSULATE YOUR HOUSE .

The next was the refigerator. I know, that people from the USA tend to have twice as large fridges as we in Austria, but my refrigerator consumes 160W when it is running, and it is running approximately 1/4 of the time. So this would result in an average power consumption of 40 W. The deep-temperature (-18 degC) cooler is half that size and consumes probably the same, so all together they use 80 W. Even if USA fridges are twice as large, they are not supposed to have a higher average power than maybe 200 W. If they consume more (like the 1000 W mentioned), they are not properly insulated, best get a new energy-saving fridge, look at the wall thickness, then you know which one is the best insulated.

The other things are not so bad, so when exchanging every 60 W light bulb with a 20 W low-energy bulb, you can save money (because the low energy bulb lasts 5-8 times longer), you can save more money (because it consumes less energy), and you will have a brighter room (because a 20 W low-energy bulb is as bright as a 100 W conventional one). So in effect, anyone who does NOT use low-energy bulbs is just plain stupid (at least after having read this comment).

On energy saving in my case: My household consumes very close to 3000 kWh/year, approximately 1450 of which are for electrically heating my water. So for me, the first thing to do will be to get some solar panels onto the roof.