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As a fellow christorian I think that in chris's mind whatever he's doing at the moment represents a "new long tail revenue stream" and when it doesn't work out he's failing fast. We're talking about a 400 pound dude who thinks he's going to be riding public transit to his temp job every day for infinity. So if he makes even 1 dollar every ten years, in Chris's mind he's made infinity dollars

He once said he wanted 30 revenue streams. I wish we could shrink chris down to a toddler, put him in a tiny suit and give him the most powerful computer V-Tech ever made the dual 486:
https://books.google.com.ly/books?id=E9TvMcu1mIwC&lpg=PA346&ots=t8v8d3K4Ed&dq=vtech%20dual%20486&pg=PA346#v=onepage&q=vtech%20dual%20486&f=false

It would be cute

Here I was wondering how video games could not be involved at a shooting at vTech. It's amazing the lengths of madness Dora the Explorer can send people to. *tsk* *tsk*

When I read "V-tech rampage", I thought it was talking about a game for this. It would be pretty sad if they were harping on how violent those edutainment titles are.

> vtech used a custom compiled kernel, and have also been using Linux on the cluster.

Holy shit, batman. You run a modified version of OSX kernel on a cluster of vtech ? You can't be much geeker than that...

Actually, yes, quite a few people really have tried to make them user-friendly. Their efforts have resulted such wonderful devices and software as the Canon Cat (and its successor, Archy), the WebTV, various Vtech products, and many others.

Now, what do all these things have in common? None of them even come close to the functionality of a general-purpose PC running "complicated" software like Windows or unix, and none of them are used by any even slightly sophisticated user because of it.

The bottom line is that the general-purpose computer is inherently complex, because the functions it can perform are a superset of the functions of every other household electronic device combined, as well as some devices that aren't even electronic! The computer can replace the TV, VCR, stereo, radio, alarm clock, typewriter, filing cabinet, video game console, telephone, fax machine, graphing calculator, and even pen, paper, and envelopes (for writing letters and such).

Now do you see? You can't compare personal computers to a single appliance, you've got to compare them to the sum total of everything else. The question is, which is harder: learning to use a computer, or learning to use all of the other things I mentioned?

Let's do away with every game genre that could be influenced by these programs, starting with games aimed at poor, innocent children.

And who's the most guilty? V-Tech and Leap Frog! Those companies need to have criminal charges filed against them, because they're marketing video games designed to brainwash little children!

</sarcasm>

I had an old VTECH toy laptop, with a black-and-white screen and a little ball mouse. On it were some games, some "learning programs", a word processor, and a full BASIC interpreter. It was kid-safe and used good old C batteries, but it was also a great introduction to computing. You can get the modern equivalent at this site, but they appear to have dropped the BASIC functionality, which makes it relatively useless. You can probably find a used one on eBay, though...