I had the NSLU2, but just ordered this guy: http://www.furrygoat.com/2004/12/asus_wlan_hard_.html .. It’s a HD enclosure with 802.11g/Lan/USB, but, here’s the neat bit: supports UPNP (more here: http://www.tomsnetworking.com/Reviews-179-ProdID-WLHDD25-2.php) – I’m wondering if it will support the home electronics upnp so you can stream photos/videos/etc to a consumer player from it.

Of course, the firmware is GPL, so I’m sure someone will hack out an iTunes/Tivo/etc server for it.

What’s great about this is that each device
generally does just one thing, does it well, and
does it without much fuss or interference with
the workings of the other devices.

I think you are throwing together a couple of unrelated things here. The Router could swallow up your Linux Box, because the Router is supposed to do work in the background, it doesn’t want interaction, this does not work for most of the things a PC is used for. I would say that the most interesting things “being done” with a PC actually need interaction (and thus an interface), the “dumb” background things are usually just supportive (or secondary) activities that are, well, secondary, and only ever have arisen as sub-tasks while trying to achieve primary purposes (things that require interaction).

All those primary purposes of a PC are interaction based, thus need display and input, and I don’t think that people are willing to move to different displays and different input devices for every task they want to do. We have a lot of “legacy devices”, that we are using a lot, because that’s what we are used to, but I don’t think they are going to multiply further, when we already have all the stuff at our fingertips.

I would like to note that you are using a hacked X-Box, that is a specialized tool, re-programmed to be a (more) general purpose tool.
The fact that all of your machines are doing different things are self-imposed barriers, not hardware/software-limitations, which I think would makes a lot of people very skeptical.

This goat rocks Exploded PCs — some really interesting thoughts here. What’s most interesting is that the problem of how to get the smaller, focused, specialised components to talk to each other and cooperate effectively is a hell of…

This goat rocks Exploded PCs — some really interesting thoughts here. What’s most interesting is that the problem of how to get the smaller, focused, specialised components to talk to each other and cooperate effectively is a hell of…

This goat rocks Exploded PCs — some really interesting thoughts here. What’s most interesting is that the problem of how to get the smaller, focused, specialised components to talk to each other and cooperate effectively is a hell of…

This goat rocks Exploded PCs — some really interesting thoughts here. What’s most interesting is that the problem of how to get the smaller, focused, specialised components to talk to each other and cooperate effectively is a hell of…

This goat rocks Exploded PCs — some really interesting thoughts here. What’s most interesting is that the problem of how to get the smaller, focused, specialised components to talk to each other and cooperate effectively is a hell of…

This goat rocks Exploded PCs — some really interesting thoughts here. What’s most interesting is that the problem of how to get the smaller, focused, specialised components to talk to each other and cooperate effectively is a hell of…