Slashdot Mirror

But why is it suddenly some sort of innovation

Because it's cheap and tiny. And because no one else has made a fully functional computer that is this cheap and this small -- generally, it's been just the opposite, where smaller costs more.

If they were able to put something comparable to even an AMD X2 processor into it

You speak as if an X2 is slow?

And...

As for me, I want to carry around something faster than my PC

Why? Seriously, why?

What is it that you need to do on the train, bus, plane, in a car, in the park, etc, that requires a dual-core processor? Under what circumstances do you need to do something that requires that much power, and you can't simply go back to a desktop somewhere? Or even remote to one?

these things would be crazy popular!

They are. Or didn't you notice?

And before anyone says it, yes it's all because of battery life.

That makes even less sense.

You want something extremely powerful, so that it can use less battery life? WTF?

Here's a hint: All the computers I currently own tend to clock themselves back to 1 ghz, in order to save power. Why is it that you think a faster processor would give you more battery life? A newer one, sure, but not a faster one.

It might also be worth investigating how big a battery you can buy for the eee, or how cheap they are. It's not exactly pleasant, but you can certainly shut down, swap batteries, and boot again -- assuming it doesn't have a couple minutes of onboard battery (probably not, but maybe). Or give it some extra storage and figure out how to make it hibernate while you do that. Or find an outlet and plug in -- I'm again left wondering under what circumstances you need a powerful laptop with a long battery.

not the slowest portable they can still force to run an OS?

Do you know what an OS is? The iPhone runs a modified OS X. There's Windows Mobile and Linux devices, too.

Very rarely will you find a portable device these days that doesn't have some kind of OS, even if it's something like tron.

If you meant "fully functional desktop OS", nope, still not accurate. While people have put XP on the eee, its default configuration is a pretty heavily customized Linux, in a mode which minimizes the RAM used just to show you a desktop environment, giving you more for actual apps. But if your standard is "able to show me windows and a Firefox browser", I've still got you beat -- even old Jornada handhelds can do that (slowly), by compiling a full desktop Firefox for ARM.

TRON is an embedded OS that Japan tried to use as a general-purpose desktop OS as well back in the late '80s, but was stopped from doing so by a Federal Government lawsuit claiming it was anti-competitive:

http://www.tron.org/index-e.html

Or is this an extension to TRON? (The article is really slim), though it seems to be about OSEK:

http://www.osek-vdx.org/

William

Advansys is selling Ezra-800MHz SOM (system on module) in ETX form factor (3.7 x 4.5 ") for twice EPIA prices, at this link; while their EVA SOC (system on chip) only reports 80186 performance levels, and have embedded RTOS, probably TRONso it's not what you're looking for.

Before making such a bold statement, name two companies that have succeeded selling an operating system.

Microsoft
Wind River
TRON - article on ITRON

That's three.. what were you saying now?

http://www.assoc.tron.org/itron/home-e.html

From that page: We have developed an ITRON-specification kernel with protection functions called the IIMP Kernel. The IIMP Kernel will be distributed as free software soon.

So it seems that there is nothing to download yet.

JP

Here, and here.

(All links courtesy of google).

Sure, there's google, but there seems to be the TRON OS home page, in english.

Besides, what devices run than OS ? anyone know ?