[Cerowrt-devel] living in the future is fun

[Dave Taht <dave.taht@gmail.com>]

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