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Cisco's Cloud Vision: Mandatory, and Killed At Their Discretion
An anonymous reader writes "Last week, a number of Cisco customers began reporting problems with three specific Linksys-branded routers. When owners of the E2700, E3500, are E4500 attempted to log in to their devices, they were asked to login/register using their 'Cisco Connect Cloud' account information. The story that's emerged from this unexpected "upgrade" is a perfect example of how buzzword fixation can lead to extremely poor decisions."
My PC-as-a-router draws about 50 watts under load and 40 watts idle, so using your calculation above. Let's assume it's always under load, so that's 438 kwh. My last electric bill was about 11 cents per kwh, which comes to $48/yr to run it or about 13 cents a day. Considering it gives better performance than any dedicated consumer-grade router I've ever used, I'll glad shell out a dime a day for the upgrade. And that doesn't even account for the fact that I can set up my PC-as-a-router to go to sleep while I'm at work and at night, which drops its power usage lower than the dedicated consumer router. In the end, the energy cost increase is negligible as long as you're not using something horribly overpowered.
This "upgrade" that they performed for me last Tuesday, prompted me to perform an upgrade myself -I installed DD-WRT on my router.
"You want to know how to help your kids? Leave them the fuck alone." -George Carlin
Try building your own x86 PC that takes 5 watts out of the wall.
Well, you asked for it. I've been a happy customer of these guys no financial gain. This is buying a complete system with case and everything although you get to purchase drives and possibly RAM separately.
http://www.zotacusa.com/
The zbox makes a great, ridiculously overpowered mythtv frontend.
http://soekris.com/
This box is commercial / semi-industrial grade and is basically a router platform ready to go.
You have to carefully avoid google to avoid finding "single digit wattage" PC-like hardware.
Only on /. would a guy paying $75/month for cablemodem to connect to a $2000 gaming PC that gets a new $500 graphics card every couple months worry about 5 watts of electricity, considering that in a civilized area 1 watt costs about $1 per year.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
Dd-wrt and tomato-USB firmware builds run on several buffalo and asus brand routers.
Buffalo even ships dd-wrt on select units.
EA David Gardner -"... but the consumers have proven that actually what they want is fun."
They're called embedded systems. Maybe you've heard of them? Not free, but when you load a Linux distribution tailed for embedded systems (like this one) they're MUCH more stable than anything you can buy at any big-box store (even if you're flashing the firmware with something less retarded).
Here is another embedded system vendor with pfsense. Their products have intrigued me but I have never got around to trying one myself, although I have used soekris with monowall.
http://store.netgate.com/Desktop-Kits-C82.aspx