You may not be a big fan of ChromeOS but there's no denying that Chromeboxes on low-spec hardware make it easy to easy to get on line and access web services. And
Acer's hoping that's a market with room to grow.Acer's Chromebox CXI, announced on Thursday (and pictured mounted on a separate Acer monitor above), puts the Chrome OS into a small enclosure measuring 0.6 liters in volume. It runs an Intel Celeron 2957U dual-core 1.4GHz processor, has a 16GB solid-state drive, and promises a boot-up time of just 8 seconds.
The device can include up to 4GB in RAM, has four USB 3.0 ports, an SD card reader, LAN port for wired network connection, and HDMI and DisplayPort outputs. It's priced from $179.99, including a keyboard and mouse.
Also covered by Engadget.
[Ed. note: I think I want one of these babies, but I'm hoping they'll allow newer versions of ChromeOS to access network shares first, since that's where I've put all my stuff.]
What do the Raspberry Pi and the Commodore 64 have in common? More than you think. Lifehacker has published a decent compendium of retro operating systems you can run on Raspberry Pi hardware, and the C=64 is one of them. Others include Microsoft DOS, the ZX Spectrum, the Macintosh System 6 OS, and the quite-rare MSX. Read more at Lifehacker, and if you do go for the Commodore 64 system, make sure to pair it with one of these awesome refurbished C=64s by Tynemouth. They've been reworked into USB keyboards and despite the price, look awesome.