Charles Angelich wrote in a message to Roy J. Tellason:

CA>>> I really never did feel that UNIX or any clone thereof
CA>>> was going to be a great OS for newbies or the 'home
CA>>> market'. A glorified XBox or PlaysStation would be better
CA>>> for the 'home market' if they added some way to store all
CA>>> the pirated music, video, and pr0n they would sell faster
CA>>> than ice cubes in Hell. 

TW>> They are working on that one. There are Hacks already out
TW>> there to use one of those boxes as a computer as I recall. 

CA>> Could be a conflict of interest or some such but if SONY
CA>> ever wakes up to what a silly computer most home users
CA>> really want they could take over the home computer market
CA>> in no time. ;-) 

RJT> There was a mention somewhere in a magazine some time back
RJT> about somebody taking a whole pile of those machines,
RJT> loading linux on them, and using them as a cheap "array"
RJT> of computers for something or other. Or maybe that was
RJT> playstations, I don't recall. 

CA> "Imagine a beowulf cluster of these ..." is a running gag at
CA> SlashDot for just about anything and everything.

I've been to that site for a few articles here and there,  but not often
enough to pick up on that.

CA> If you find that concept interesting I do have a link to 
CA> instructions for setting up a beowulf cluster of legacy hardware 
CA> DOS machines at my tech website and it's not a gag, it's real. ;-) 

How old is the hardware you refer to here?  The thing that gets me about
that stuff is that it still takes up space,  I'd need to find someplace to
*put* all those machines,  it takes power (there are only _two_ outlets in
this room),  and it takes networking (I have some cards,  but don't plan to
use them all up like that).  And what do you get out of it?  My
understanding is that this sort of thing is good if you're running
something that has a pretty heavy computational load,  but that's not the
case for most of what I do here,  which tends to bottleneck with
communication speeds (both LAN and modem),  and with storage space,  which
is why my next project is going to be the server I've started but haven't
gotten around to finishing yet.

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