The Zonbu PC is basically a low-power consumption, loosely Mac Mini format computer (VIA based) with solid state storage (4GB), no optical drive, Gentoo with a fairly good pre-installed set of OSS Linux apps, and bundled online storage (25GB), no wifi or bluetooth. It consumes relatively little electricity (15W, albeit not including a display, putting it at the low end of notebook consumption when not actively charging a battery), although I haven't seen a statement on the net additional energy consumption associated with the backend fileservers and so on.
Promises to be a relatively plug and play implementation of Gentoo,
It's sold in an initial fee ($99) plus monthly charge ($12.95) model, and can also be purchased (without the net-based services such as the network storage) for $250.
Reviewed in the NYT today.
Their Zonbu.com site.
Interesting concept. I think it's a little irresponsible to advertise so heavily based on environmental benefits, though, without education / discussion of the total environmental impact of the offloaded activity of their site, let alone the total power consumption of a Zonbu setup with a display (which probably won't be much lower than that of an iMac, for instance).
Still, not bad.
Promises to be a relatively plug and play implementation of Gentoo,
It's sold in an initial fee ($99) plus monthly charge ($12.95) model, and can also be purchased (without the net-based services such as the network storage) for $250.
Reviewed in the NYT today.
Their Zonbu.com site.
Interesting concept. I think it's a little irresponsible to advertise so heavily based on environmental benefits, though, without education / discussion of the total environmental impact of the offloaded activity of their site, let alone the total power consumption of a Zonbu setup with a display (which probably won't be much lower than that of an iMac, for instance).
Still, not bad.
