Perhaps Amazon S3 can be used to make thin devices more effective. You have only a 8mb flash for basic bootstrapping, a bigger chunk of RAM and an S3 account. All the configuration and software packages are kept on S3, and get downloaded into memory each time the device starts. It would be faster, simpler, cheaper and more reliable than setting up your own storage network. And I'll surely bet that Amazon will start putting S3 mirrors all over the world, so the latency will start to get pretty low.
I'm thinking about this specifically in reference to my wireless network company.
Ah but the cost of flash due to digital cameras is getting such that even 512MB would not be overly expensive for such a device. Add in eXecute in place and that becomes to me a more attractive option. The idea of having remote apps is a good one, I just think that loading them at boot is unatractive at the moment.
David / 4:45pm / 13 May 2006
But if you’re distributing thousands of them, it adds up. It’s probably easier to manage as well. For something that reboots once every 6 months, boot time is not really a factor. Even if it downloads 100MB, it would only take a minute or so.
Ryan / 4:16pm / 14 May 2006