I pay more than %30 in (federal) income tax in the US. Living in a state like Illinois, they can easily take another %10. I then have %7 sales tax on ALMOST everything (except certain things like unprepared food) and outrageous property taxes. Oh yeah, my employer and I also pay %100 of my medical insurance. I can't wait to find out what percentage of my income I get to hold onto this year (probably a bit less than %40)... Not to mention paying social security, etc for a system that might not be there in 40 years when I need it. Meanwhile, we still don't have any national healthcare or guarantees of higher education. We can all complain about something!
All of this in one of the wealthiest countries in the world. The thing about Brazil (and other countries like it) is that as long as the average (and minimum) incomes are so low taxing %40 of income still isn't much money... As I'm sure you know, the "minimum wage" in Brazil is something like 300 reals / month. That's about $140 US. Even taxing as much as %40 is only $56 of income for the government. With a less burdensome tax code (taking maybe %10), you get $14.
According to the CIA world factbook, the GDP per capita in Brazil is about $8600. In the US it is $43,500. Obviously that turns into MUCH more income for the government on all levels...
Several things... First of all, Soekris Net48xx, PC Engines WRAP and RouterBoard 22x are all practically the same board. A reference design from National Semiconductor - SC1100. They have identical base features, with options like PCI slot, RTC battery backup, memory, cpu speed and the like. They can route across the ethernet interfaces at a max of about 30mbit/sec with Linux 2.6. Reading from disk is much slower, and 2.5" IDE drives are unreliable when used 24/7. Using them for a fileserver is not a good idea.
However, with that being said I would use them above mini-itx stuff anyday. Mini-itx boards just don't have the reliability that they should for most SBC-type applications. Depending on what you are doing with them, they can be a big pain because most of them will have as many as four USB controllers that will use all of the available IRQs - and they don't support APIC!
Shameless plug: Use AstLinux to create a PBX. AstLinux has been submitted to Slashdot a few times, but has never made it to the front page.
PBX - built around Asterisk, The Open Source PBX
Small - 26mb including Asterisk, mini_httpd, openssh, openssl, ntp, PHP, various other daemons.
Flexible - Custom init system, development tarball available.
Portable - runs on x86, ppc, ARM/xscale (and probably MIPS)
Slashdot Mirror
I pay more than %30 in (federal) income tax in the US. Living in a state like Illinois, they can easily take another %10. I then have %7 sales tax on ALMOST everything (except certain things like unprepared food) and outrageous property taxes. Oh yeah, my employer and I also pay %100 of my medical insurance. I can't wait to find out what percentage of my income I get to hold onto this year (probably a bit less than %40)... Not to mention paying social security, etc for a system that might not be there in 40 years when I need it. Meanwhile, we still don't have any national healthcare or guarantees of higher education. We can all complain about something!
All of this in one of the wealthiest countries in the world. The thing about Brazil (and other countries like it) is that as long as the average (and minimum) incomes are so low taxing %40 of income still isn't much money... As I'm sure you know, the "minimum wage" in Brazil is something like 300 reals / month. That's about $140 US. Even taxing as much as %40 is only $56 of income for the government. With a less burdensome tax code (taking maybe %10), you get $14.
According to the CIA world factbook, the GDP per capita in Brazil is about $8600. In the US it is $43,500. Obviously that turns into MUCH more income for the government on all levels...
Several things... First of all, Soekris Net48xx, PC Engines WRAP and RouterBoard 22x are all practically the same board. A reference design from National Semiconductor - SC1100. They have identical base features, with options like PCI slot, RTC battery backup, memory, cpu speed and the like. They can route across the ethernet interfaces at a max of about 30mbit/sec with Linux 2.6. Reading from disk is much slower, and 2.5" IDE drives are unreliable when used 24/7. Using them for a fileserver is not a good idea.
However, with that being said I would use them above mini-itx stuff anyday. Mini-itx boards just don't have the reliability that they should for most SBC-type applications. Depending on what you are doing with them, they can be a big pain because most of them will have as many as four USB controllers that will use all of the available IRQs - and they don't support APIC!
Shameless plug: Use AstLinux to create a PBX. AstLinux has been submitted to Slashdot a few times, but has never made it to the front page.
PBX - built around Asterisk, The Open Source PBX
Small - 26mb including Asterisk, mini_httpd, openssh, openssl, ntp, PHP, various other daemons.
Flexible - Custom init system, development tarball available.
Portable - runs on x86, ppc, ARM/xscale (and probably MIPS)
And of course it's free (speech/beer).
Check it out!
http://www.astlinux.org/