Exchanging Mini-ITX Boards For Feedback: A Mid-Week (And One-Week-Duration) Competition

I’ve just wrapped up the data collection portion of the hands-on project which will, in less than two months’ time, appear in print as a cover story on performance- and power consumption-benchmarking ‘value’ x86 CPUs such as Intel’s single- and dual-core Atom and Via’s C7 and Nano. Many of the hardware platforms I leveraged for my testing took the form of mini-ITX boards, a fact which initiated remembrances in my noggin of the last time I heavily leveraged that particular form factor…for a two-part article series in EDN’s March 4 and April 29, 2004 issues. Being the packrat that I am, I still have two barely used and fully adorned (cables, software, I/O shields, documentation, etc) units of Via’s EPIA M10000 board based on a 1 GHz C3 processor. While I wouldn’t necessarily recommend trying to run Windows Vista Ultimate on them (or even claimed lighter-weight upcoming Windows 7, for that matter), they’d work great with a svelte Linux distro…Microsoft’s Robotics Studio 2008 introduced just two days ago also comes to mind.

As such, I thought a contest might be appropriate, with potential benefit for both you and EDN. Some time in the next week (the contest will end at 11:59:59PM MST on Thanksgiving Eve, November 26), please respond to all of the following questions via this post’s "Add your comments" link (post multiple comments, if necessary, in case you run into per-post character count limitations). Don’t forget to include your (valid) email address so that I know how to get in touch with you. I’ll pick the top two entries, email the winners for their shipping information, and send them an EPIA M10000 (just in time for Christmas!). Good luck, and thanks in advance for your interest!

1. What thing(s) do you like best (and/or dislike most) about EDN in print?
2. What thing(s) do you like best (and/or dislike most) about EDN online?
3. What thing(s) do you wish EDN would do (that it’s not currently doing), and/or do more of, in print?
4. What thing(s) do you wish EDN would do (that it’s not currently doing), and/or do more of, online?
5. Since headcount, time and money are finite resources, what thing(s) could EDN decrease and/or drop in print in order to encompass your suggestion(s) regarding question 3?
6. Similarly, what thing(s) could EDN decrease and/or drop online in order to encompass your suggestion(s) regarding question 4?
7. Do you primarily read EDN in print, online, or in roughly equivalent proportions of each?

p.s…emailed entries aren’t acceptable, sorry.

p.p.s…and no, it’s not necessary to say only nice things about EDN in order to win…;-)