Modify Colors
We are beginning to see two interesting and related trends: quick-boot second computers within laptops and wall-wart sized, very inexpensive, Linux-based computers.
The overall trend across both of these are cheap, small Linux computers built in to various other devices. How will this go, though? If the additional cost is small enough, why not put them right in monitors (not as a replacement for the main computer, but as an additional option) or even keyboards.
It seems likely that, in the future, we will not have “a computer,” but rather all of our devices will have computers in them. Today this would seem very inconvenient, since your files would be spread all over the place (“whoops, I left that report on the toaster”), but cloud computing will have solved that problem by the time this all arrives.
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it is called a laptop
There is also another interesting and fast growing phenomenon, namely, the mini(?) distro. These little distros pack a huge amount of functionality in to a very small space, typically sub 100MB. Very quick to download, quick to boot, and will boot from a USB or CD/DVD. My favorite is Puppy Linux. Check some out……………..
We already have computers in monitors. Many thin clients can work that way. Some are a small module that bolts onto the VESA mounting holes and others are inside the case of the monitor. They make a physical desktop much less cluttered. Because networks are so fast, the real work gets done on a server in the other room, like our own mini-cloud. While the client is tiny, cheap, cool and quiet, the performance is actually better than a regular PC because the server can have more power/faster storage/huge RAM and can run many clients at one time.
toaster,,, O,o