Re:Imagine There's No YouTube
by bruceboughton on Friday February 26, 2010 @04:29AM
(#1152810)
Won't you also have the problem of desktop- and especially laptop-grade hardware not being designed for these usages? They tend to use cheaper, less resiliant hardware (for example HDD lifetimes)
I hope to get a sheevaplug* at some point to be a small multi-purpose home server. If we can get setup of that (or something similar) to be as painless as setting up a facebook account and friending, we might be on to something.
I also want to use it for things like storing scanned images and possibly home automation/monitoring.
In short there might be a market niche for a low-power headless server to solve this kind of situation
Re:Imagine There's No YouTube
by loup-vaillant on Friday February 26, 2010 @09:40AM
(#1153197)
As Blasa suggested between the lines, power is not a problem at all. A full featured web server consumes 10W tops. Most likely less than 2 or 3.
The current problems are security, upload bandwidth, and NAT traversal. As well as that your computer has to be on whenever your friends are accessing your stuff.
If (when) ipv6 becomes widespread, we will be able to cut out the NAT. If lots of people start doing it, then the upload bandwidth that ISPs give you will probably increase. And security should be solvable for most consumer purposes when the quality of software (both server and OS level) goes up -- it needs to ensure that your firewall is properly configured, etc.
So we're left with leaving your computer on. And that's an expensive problem, because it's not very power-efficient to leave a desktop computer running all the time to serve a website that gets two hits a day. That actually seems to be a strong argument against everybody running their own webserver. But maybe it doesn't really matter, because a lot of people run a computer all the time anyway. I'm not sure.