Reflections on Technology and Society

The TV in the kitchen has long had a Mac Mini attached to one of its inputs. We used it to watch Youtube videos, listen to music from iTunes and Google Music, to browse the web, to show photographs from our trips, and so on. Sadly, the little Mini passed away earlier this year, refusing to power up. When we priced out replacement machines we discovered that the new Minis were a lot more expensive, even if a the same time more capable. Given that we were not planning to store lots of data on the machine, we decided to leverage the lessons we had learned from building our little collection of NUC servers and design and build a small desktop on one of the NUC engines. We conducted some research and selected a machine sporting an i3 processor. The parts list we ended up with was: Intel NUC DCCP847DYE [1 @ $ 146.22] Intel Core i3 Processor Crucial CT120M500SSD3 [1 @ $ 72.09] 120GB mSATA SSD Crucial CT25664BF160B [2 @ $ 20.97] 2GB DDR3 1600 SODIMM 204-Pin 1.35V/1.5V Memory ...

There is a lot of interesting information about the processor hardware in /proc/cpuinfo. Here is a little bit from one of my NUC servers: processor : 0 vendor_id : GenuineIntel cpu family : 6 model : 69 model name : Intel(R) Core(TM) i5-4250U CPU @ 1.30GHz stepping : 1 microcode : 0x16 cpu MHz : 779.000 cache size : 3072 KB physical id : 0 siblings : 4 core id : 0 cpu cores : 2 apicid : 0 initial apicid : 0 fpu : yes fpu_exception : yes cpuid level : 13 wp : yes flags : fpu vme de pse tsc msr pae mce cx8 apic sep mtrr pge mca cmov pat pse36 clflush dts acpi mmx fxsr sse sse2 ss ht tm pbe syscall nx pdpe1gb rdtscp lm constant_tsc arch_perfmon pebs bts rep_good nopl xtopology nonstop_tsc aperfmperf eagerfpu pni pclmulqdq dtes64 monitor ds_cpl vmx est tm2 ssse3 fma cx16 xtpr pdcm pcid sse4_1 sse4_2 x2apic movbe popcnt tsc_deadline_timer aes xsave avx f16c rdrand lahf_lm abm ida arat epb xsaveopt pln pts dtherm tpr_shadow vnmi flexpriority ept vpid fsgsbase tsc_adjust bmi1 avx2 smep...