111 karma · joined January 20, 2024
The article doesn't mention the costs or complexity in building each unit but definitely implies it's cheaper than storing it batteries, which makes sense if it's essentially a heating element buried in sand.
Wonder what the smallest viable size would be, could you have one for each street / block of flats? One of the comments mentions burying them for better insulation which I'm assuming they didn't want to do just for the prototypes?
It sounds like a hell freezing over situation but maybe they'd even release their own Linux distro with compatibility tools only they'd ever be able to make with access to source code and engineer experience, and just push their web based versions of apps as much as possible.
Either way it seems like Linux will be profiting from the situation at the moment as a huge number of devices out there won't support Windows 11 but will perform perfectly fine with Linux. If Ubuntu / Redhat are smart they'll put the effort in to make transitioning as easy as possible and scoop up all the people who don't want to pay for a new device, and given the financial issues more and more people are having I don't think that's a small group.
Unfortunately it was a industrial vendor so don't think you can buy it in low quantities and the price is probably way too high for what it is.
I feel like there must be a market for something like that tough, a board with the bare essentials to make it cheap enough to have a few around the house / office and leave it up to the customer to find a wireless card that could be upgraded down the line.
To be fair there may be a jump in desktop linux use with the windows 10 eol making a ton of usable devices unsupported, if silverblue and flatpaks could be polished up a bit in time it could be a good opportunity given people having less money for new devices at the moment.
Has a pretty amazing number of categories / artworks, and some of them are genuinely beautiful. It feels very old internet but the domain was registered in 2018, although could have been migrated?
Almost happy for it to stay a mystery but on the off chance the maintainer(s) see this thank you for adding a bit of brightness to the world :)