The Everex Mini, which looks exactly like someone spray painted a Mac Mini black, has two intended purposes, both of which have one critical flaw that will probably prevent the Everex Mini from getting anywhere.

According to the Everex website, the first purpose of the Everex Mini is to be “a space-saving PC.” You are problably wondering how you can fail to make a computer “a space-saving PC.” I would have wondered the same thing. After all, the Everex Mini is small and attractive with decent specifications. The answer is that you can leave out the VGA port so that anyone that does not have an expensive, fancy screen can’t use it without an adapter. I have no idea what thinking (if any) led to the omission of a VGA port. To be fair, it is possible they include the necessary adapter in the box, but they make no mention of it anywhere on the website that I can see.

The second purpose of the Everex Mini, again according to the Everex website, is to be able to “connect it to your big screen television.” The flaw here is that there is no media interface. To really sell a computer as a box to hook up to your TV, you have to do more than make it small and attractive. At a minimum, including MythTV or something like that would have been a good idea, as would the inclusion of a remote. Once again, I cannot guarantee there is no media interface provided, but they are definitely not advertising it, which would be very weird if there was a media interface.

It is unfortunate to see these small flaws in a little PC that is otherwise a good idea. The specifications are slightly better than the gPC and the design, even if it is a take off from Apple, is very nice. Hopefully Everex will fix these problems in the next version.

Just 3 days since the launch of Ubuntu Brainstorm, the site is already showing an impressive amount of participation. As of right now, the top idea on Brainstorm has an impressive total of 2933 votes up, and that is after subtracting all the down votes. At the rate the numbers are going up now, even if you expect the rate to slow some, the top idea will probably have 4000 or 5000 votes, if not more, by the end of next week. This is particularly impressive when you consider how big a number this is compared to Dell’s IdeaStorm, which Brainstorm was closely based off of.

The idea with the most votes on the front page of IdeaStorm, which has been around for over a year and has Dell behind it, has 134,359 points or votes, which sounds like a lot, except that each person that presses the “promote” or “demote” button changes that number by 10 points, not 1. In other words, the real number of votes up, again after subtracting the down votes, is only 13,436. (Don’t ask me how the 9 on the end of 134,359 got there. I have no idea.) In the end, the real numbers come out to 13,436 votes over an entire year versus 2933 votes over three days. Those numbers are very impressiv, but can Brainstorm keep up the pace or is this just a momentary surge?