[BlueOnyx:12398] Re: Solarspeed / Compass / BlueOnyx stores

[Michael Stauber]

Hi Dave,

> I think you might be surprised. There are now over 1.2 million Raspberry
> Pis in the world, and any supported distribution gets well promoted by
> the site. One of the commonest requests is for a simple-to-use/maintain
> LAMP stack, and I don't think it gets any better than BO. 

You see, generally this is the kind of challenges that I'd really like
to take on - in an ideal world: Just throw me the gear and let me lock
myself up for a month or three and see what I can crank out. But then
again: I doubt that it's commercially viable to go that route. If it's
available free of charge, it might get a good reception, but will never
pay off the development costs, nor the costs for maintaining it. And as
soon as you attach a price tag to it, hardly anyone will buy it.

I always had a faible for computers with a small footprint. Be it the
various Mini-ITX boards, the RISC or ARM architecture. My first hands on
exposure to the world of computing was actually a Sinclair ZX Spectrum
(yes, rubber keys!), then the Schneider CPC, the C=64 and the Amiga,
before it all went "IBM-compatible" (which is a contradiction in itself
<g>)  with the first 286. I find it still sad that the inherently much
worse design ("IBM-compatible") won the race both on the consumer market
as well as in the corporate world. But that's water down the drain.

Yes, even today there there is a lot of good opportunities for RISC and
ARM powered gear. However, I don't see much potential for BlueOnyx on
things like the Raspberry Pi. The 512MB RAM are also a limiting factor,
where it already from the start would make sense not to use Apache, but
something with a lighter footprint.

Ah, I already start dreaming of doing it <g>. But it would be three
months of my life that I won't be getting back in any way or form. :-)

It's also like Chris said: The current server hardware is cheap and I
don't see people throwing their servers away to re-purchase them with a
different architecture that (to the outside world) just does the same
things a little more efficient and in a better way.

-- 
With best regards

Michael Stauber