Friday, February 01, 2008

3rd XO Arrived

Incidentally, XO #3 arrived at my house today. I'll be shipping it off to a friend of Bill Kerr's. I was worried that a lot of the XO's that hadn't arrived by now would be really late. I'm sure some will be regardless. Anyone who thought OLPC could just ramp up a retail distribution chain from nothing (and then turn it off again) without having some major glitches along the way was smoking crack. All things considered it has gone better than it might have.

In the meantime, I'm considering my options for a school server while waiting for my active antenna. I'm not going to order anything until I have it in hand. I'm pretty much down to a Mac Mini, which would then become the main Mac in the house when my G4 PowerBook gives up the ghost, or one of these Mini-Box mini-ITX systems, which could subsequently turn into a quiet, low-power, headless MythTV box, backup server, web cache/firewall, music server, or something else.

The Mini would be $600, although it would be hard to buy it without the biggest disk possible to handle my iTunes without having to run an external drive, which is a real pain, so that's an extra $150. The Mini-Box would be $387, with a 60 gig drive and the cool front lcd display (which would be genuinely useful if used as a headless music or video server). I could do a bare bones (relatively, still having 1 gig of memory & 40 gig drive) version for $327.

So the price difference is pretty significant, but on the other hand, if I don't buy the Mini now, I'll probably be buying one later. I'll have to discuss it with Jennifer.

1 comment:

DRS said...

Tom, I'd appreciate if you'd weigh in on my post about the XO. I'd value your opinion.

http://ideasandthoughts.org/2008/01/31/are-we-spoiled/