If there are any questions about my belief that technological advancements will save us before political actions this story should answer them:
Snuggly situated in an industrial section of Oakland, CA is Next Thing Co. a team of nine artists and engineers who are pursuing the dream of a lower cost single board computer. Today they’ve unveiled their progress on Kickstarter, offering a $9 development board called Chip.
The board is Open Hardware, runs a flavor of Debain Linux, and boasts a 1Ghz R8 ARM processor, 512MB of RAM, and 4GB of eMMC storage. It is more powerful than a Raspberry Pi B+ and equal to the BeagleBone Black in clock speed, RAM, and storage. Differentiating Chip from Beagle is its built-in WiFi, Bluetooth, and the ease in which it can be made portable, thanks to circuitry that handles battery operation.
$9 for a computer with a 1Ghz process, 512MB of RAM, and 4GB of storage? And it runs Linux? Sign me up! I never thought I’d live to see this day. My family’s first computer, and we came to the computer game fairly late, was a real piece of shit 3.11 machine and must have cost at least $2,000 or $3,000. Back then the idea that a computer would be available for $9 was inconceivable.
This is another example of the market providing real solutions to real problems. Is there any wonder why us market anarchists have more faith in it than politicians who seem incapable of identifying, let alone solving, real problems?
If $9 can you you that much computing power, surely we could live in a world where nobody needs to spend more than a couple of hundred for computing.