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IPad Colocation
- thehodge 17y agoIts linkbait... but very funny
- jasongullickson 17y agoPerhaps, but I thought relevant based on the recent lively discussion of their mac mini colocation service.
- petercooper 17y agoVery funny, but.. there are commercial offerings for Apple TV based hosting, believe it or not: http://www.beasts.org/appletvdedicated.html http://www.beasts.org/appletvdedicated.html (running Linux, though)
- sadiq 17y agoThat's pretty neat. I'm wondering if there are places looking at hosting little boxes like: http://linitx.com/viewproduct.php?prodid=12678 http://linitx.com/viewproduct.php?prodid=12678 Power-wise, they must be on-par with the Mac Mini/AppleTV but seem to be a fair bit cheaper.
- lsc 17y agoI've spent some time looking at it... the problem is mostly organizational. getting atoms in rackmount form factors usually adds considerably to the price (and often sticks you with a shitty power supply that means your tiny atom eats 50watts, making it uneconomical) but without the rackmount form factor, sticking a reasonable number of those in a rack quickly becomes a nightmare of a ratsnest. I'm not saying it's impossible, it just is going to take some work to build a proper rack, and even then, you are probably going to want to take the 'if it fails, cut power and leave it' approach which doesn't do as well with the 'send me your server, I host it' model. or, maybe they are just really careful stacking it? I don't know. There is a whole lot of demand for cheap co-lo on dedicated boxes.
- sadiq 17y agoI've never actually seen one in action but LinITX do a quad 1Ghz Via (sloow) rack which looks pretty interesting: http://linitx.com/viewproduct.php?prodid=11485 http://linitx.com/viewproduct.php?prodid=11485 Shame they don't take more ram. Seem to be some other cheaper ones on http://linitx.com/viewcategory.php?catid=160&pp=160 http://linitx.com/viewcategory.php?catid=160&pp=160
- lsc 17y agoIf you have infinite monies, Rackable has a 'cloudrack' that is quite similar: http://www.sgi.com/products/servers/cloudrack/cloudrackc2.html http://www.sgi.com/products/servers/cloudrack/cloudrackc2.ht... problem is that this is a company that sells to large corporations, so the markup is, ah, out of my price range.
- sadiq 17y agoSounds like a gap in the market!
- lsc 17y agoyeah, if you have some sheet metal skills and a Chinese factory, it's definitely an opportunity. Note, though, the vast majority of people buying in this space are the large corps who don't care as much about money as your brand, so, uh, good luck, I guess? Honestly, I don't know enough about the costs involved with making chassis to know if there is much margin in the conventional server chassis business.
- petercooper 17y agoI'd rather have a VPS on an extremely powerful box with redundant power, etc. It's like being mayor in a rich country instead of being a third world dictator (the dedicated low power box). The problem is, there are no good standards on VPS provision of CPU time. Memory and disk space are easy to count, but guarantees of CPU are harder to come by and pin down.
- noonespecial 17y agoYou can get one for $39/month here: https://interserver.net/custom-managed-dedicated-servers.html https://interserver.net/custom-managed-dedicated-servers.htm...
- Tawheed 17y agoI love their solution for getting around the lack of multi-tasking.
- drawkbox 17y agoThat and the server rack of iPads is hilarious.
- dandelany 17y agoUm, you should probably mention it's a joke someplace other than on the "Sign up" page. The way it is now, the only people who find out it's a joke are the people stupid enough to want to use it and the people smart enough to know that no one would ever, ever run a service like that. There's a whole big chunk of your customers that will fall into a middle range: they'll be smart enough to know that this is a terrible idea, but gullible enough to believe that you would try it. They certainly won't click on the "sign up" link, and therefore may not be let in on the joke. And you really don't want your smarter customers thinking that you're actually selling this service.
- dkarl 17y agoAnd then there are the people who will think, "Oh God, this is a terrible idea. My boss will make me use this. And he's probably already heard of it. Shit, I'd better go recommend it to him right away."
- houseabsolute 17y agoRelax.
- dandelany 17y agoReally? This was worth 4 downvotes? I'm not being offensive or stupid or uptight, I'm just expressing my opinion. I know it's a joke. My point is that, when I first saw it, I didn't immediately recognize the joke. If I hadn't clicked the Sign Up page, I probably would have left the site without fully getting the joke. If a potential customer didn't get the joke, it might leave them with a bad opinion of the company. (edit: by company, I mean Mac Mini Colocation, not this fake sub-business) I know how we love our nerdy humor, but all I'm saying is that companies have to be a little bit careful not to inadvertently let inside jokes hurt business.
- dandelany 17y agoJesus effing Christ. It saddens me sometimes that my fellow HN'ers treat unpopular opinions the same way they treat trolls.
- nroach 17y agoAwesome. Would have been +1 if they'd rickrolled you after the signup click-through. Although ... you _could_ do this with a custom app. Wouldn't be too hard, really.
- Sidnicious 17y agoMaybe, but it'd be a bitch considering the SDK doesn't allow fork()/exec().
- gojomo 17y agoHmm, a tiny, slim, all-RAM-and-Flash A4-powered serving appliance might not be such a bad idea...
- wmf 17y agoLike a SheevaPlug?
- zitterbewegung 17y agoIt is optimized to decode 720p so it might be a good choice for appletv.
- badave 17y agoSheesh, April 1st isn't for a month and a week.
- dan_the_welder 17y agoYeah, this is perfect for an April's fools gag. It's still pretty good. It's weird they did not put in a more visible link to their real service. http://www.macminicolo.net http://www.macminicolo.net
- ashishbharthi 17y agoThis gives a cool idea for side project. Port http://www.jibble.org/jibblewebserver.php http://www.jibble.org/jibblewebserver.php to Android and use Nexus One as web server. I wonder if somebody has already done this.
- CrazedGeek 17y agoWonder no more: http://code.google.com/p/i-jetty/ http://code.google.com/p/i-jetty/
- ashishbharthi 17y agoThank you!!
- danw 17y agoNokia S60 has been able to run Apache with mod_python for a few years[1] and I've used a jailbroken iPod Touch running apache and php to demo web apps previously. [1] http://opensource.nokia.com/projects/mobile-web-server/ http://opensource.nokia.com/projects/mobile-web-server/
- BigZaphod 17y agoI know this is a joke, but... I can kind of imagine a system where you setup a "service" per pad. You might configure a database on an individual pad which is dedicated to that task only, or a mail account, or whatever you need. Then plug the pad into the rack slot for safe keeping and powering - actual communications are all wireless. I imagine this not unlike how "crystals" and other such things are used on a lot of scifi shows where they have to pull the crystal/pad thing and tap on them a bit to reprogram them... Granted, it's probably easier to just have a remote tool (ssh, web interface, etc) to reconfigure services like we do now all in one place (and from any physical location), but there's something very compelling about being able to just pull the pad, tap a few things on it's custom UI, and put it back in the slot to reconfigure something. :)
- csytan 17y agobut there's something very compelling about being able to just pull the pad, tap a few things on it's custom UI, and put it back in the slot to reconfigure something. :) Yes, like disabling the cognitive circuits of an AI gone bad..
- gfodor 17y agoThe best pranks are the ones are just un-ridiculous enough that you consider that they might be real. In that sense, bravo.
- froo 17y agoAgreed. As I skimmed through the text, it almost had me up until I saw the robotic hand... followed by a slight smirk on my face.
- GeoJawDguJin 17y ago( ≖‿≖)
- bbsabelli 17y agoAn ipad form factor without a screen running linux? That's actually not a bad idea for colo, an I bet it'd be cheap!
- statictype 17y agoI'm surprised that they are actually offering mac minis as a hosting service. Is there any reason to use one instead of a linux box running the same software on superior hardware for the same cost?
- icefox 17y agoIdentical, small, and easily replaceable hardware for years on end?
- delackner 17y agoCocoa + Quicktime provide very powerful APIs for video/audio processing. I don't know of any legally clean way to say, encode AAC files and provide them to your users without paying a royalty rate. You could just have the server run a script that passes it through Quicktime Pro.
- cmelbye 17y agoA Linux box running a hacked up version of Mac OS X would not be better than a Mac mini natively running Mac OS X, in my opinion.
- jessedhillon 17y ago"A linux box running a hacked up version of Mac OS X" is a contradiction. It runs either one or the other, I think the OP was noting that the same price can get you much better hardware if you are willing to ditch the Mac, which is true. In this case though, they are offering to serve an OS X desktop environment, not just web sites, so there's one thing that can't be done (well) on Linux.
- igrekel 17y agoExpect service interruption on new years eve, football games etc when they use them as a giant screen... Or maybe they could just use them as decoration in a night club, or as lighting on highways... Oh and it is forbidden to send sexy emails on you iPad mail server, it could be used to remove the software from the app store. That means you will have to unregister from that viagra mailing list that keeps sending you offers.
- aheilbut 17y agoOn a related topic... does anyone have recommendations for a more traditional colocation provider in the Boston area?
- brk 17y agoI do... Contact me offline.
- zitterbewegung 17y agoI think people are interested in ARM colocation since they are getting the processor speeds high enough and low power enough for it to work.
- reeses 17y agoI created http://nanocolo.com http://nanocolo.com a few April Fools' Days ago, and had an amusing exchange with the macminicolo guys. Glad to see I was inspirational. :-)
- Tichy 17y agoThe scary bit is that my web server is still an old 600MHz machine, whereas my phone now has a 1 GHz CPU. There has to be a new way of of hosting in there.
- limmeau 17y agoWhile this is a joke, the idea of using the spare computational power of all those phones and gadgets is worth thinking about (e.g. [1]). [1] http://oubiwann.blogspot.com/2009/04/after-cloud-to-atomic-computation-and.html http://oubiwann.blogspot.com/2009/04/after-cloud-to-atomic-c...
- hexley 17y agoI actually have a faulty iPhone 2G with a damaged LCD/digitiser. Fortunately it has SSH and VNC enabled, so I wonder what server I could make out of an old iPhone. Talk about stealth ;) 400MHz ARM, 128MB RAM - surely I can do something with this?
- joezydeco 17y agoI'll wait for the TonidoPlug colocation service. Like a huge powerstrip that runs the length of a warehouse or something.