By David Ponce
Now, how lame is it that you’re an alpha geek, yet you still have your PC sitting on your desk rather than having it embedded in your wall? Huh? Tell me that. The Israeli company ChipPC at least has got it’s thinking cap on, and is already selling a thin PC client so small it can be embedded in a network wall port; it’s called the JackPC.
To be fair, this isn’t really intended for home use; sysadmins reading this should perk up though. Thin clients are essentially terminals with the ability to process data, but have no hard drive. They connect to servers and are much easier to maintain than desktop PCs, for a bunch of reasons, one of which being that they don’t catch viruses due to their having no hard drive. This particular one happens to be really small, and costs between ?209 to ?349. What’s under the hood?
The units utilise the latest AMD Au 1550 RISC processors running at either 333 or 500MHz. That’s the equivalent of a 800MHz or 1.2GHz x86 desktop processor. They have either 32 or 64MB flash memory to store the operating system (Windows CE .NET 4.2/5) and 64 or 128MB RAM. They can be powered either through a plug on the front or, ideally, using Power over Ethernet (PoE).
[ Jade Integration ] AND [ ChipPC ]
[ Update: We’d like to point out that this is indeed old, like moldy electronic cheese that embeds into your wall. -Ed. ]