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On my blog, I wrote about when HP thought they'd "solved" e-books the last time.

The only cool motion-based user interface I've found so far is MacSaber. But I do use two displays at the same time every day at work.

Nope. Stinkpads, at least in my experience, are the crappiest laptops money can buy.

I work at a company that standardized on T-series IBMs.

First I had a T30. which sucked for a variety of reasons.

Then there's now a T41 to replace it. Which has a whole new set of problems, like how the VGA port has a noise problem, the DVI port will only do 1280x1024 (apparently mostly because they didn't enable anything higher in the drivers), the docking station's USB ports simply don't work, and stuff.

I'm not sure if it's just that the alternatives suck even more or that I just keep getting lemon machines.

Dude, you make it sound like IBM makes good hardware. But, in fact, hate my Stinkpad. Apparently, there's an astonishingly failure rate on the T30 mainboards. And we can't forget about IBM's 75GXP failure fun.

Indeed.

As has been established by my sigfile, I hate my thinkpad.

They continue to spam you after you "remove" yourself from the list. I've been doing controlled experiments on these sort of things.

Somebody spidered an autogenerated e-mail address *once* from my webpage (the address encodes the time and IP address of the requester) in violation of the robots.txt file.

This has proven most instructive. I've written up some of my experiences on my weblog. That single address has since been sold, resold, and resold again to a variety of folks. At one point, it was sent an e-mail trojan. It's received all kinds of different spam. Interestingly enough, it has not received any Nigerian advance-fee fraud scams.

Lately, there was a removal form with a JavaScript script included that would prevent you from typing in an address to be removed.

One really funny spam is a dating site that said that one of my friends has set me up on a blind date. To an address only known by spammers.

I think a better resolution to the problem is to enforce a certain amount of purity in the mail headers.

If you are spam, you should mark your message as being such. If you are a mailing list, you should mark your message as being such.

And then we need to have a network of trust between the mail servers. Something lightweight enough that it works 90% of the time. Servers who are trusted are trusted that they will send out mail with proper headers. Servers who aren't trusted will get their mail bounced most of the time.

Thus, spam can be dropped on the floor at the option of any mail server. And server admins who don't mark spam as spam are marked as untrusted servers. At the option of the country that the mail server exists in, this can be declared as fraud.

I wrote up some notes on it on my webpage but I'm not sure how well it would really work in practice.

Well, I see that somebody already posted about where to get LCD screens..

For the actual CPU module, I suggest you check out a place like EMJ Embedded systems (or a better deal you find via the web -- They are the only URL I've got).

Really, one of the MIPS or StrongARM heavily integrated processors with the LCD controller integrated would be rather nice. But it seems that nobody's selling general purpose SBCs based on those chips -- at least not as far as I can tell from my limited glances. Linux Devices might have some information you want, however.

Hope that helps. I've been yearning for inexpensive devices like you are wanting that because I'd love to put that sort of feature into my game.

Well, my project is using OpenGL and OpenAL as the 3D library and audio library, respectively. For a 2D library, OpenPTC is always nice, but you can also try faking some 2D under OpenGL. That is the first step on getting your software cross-platform.

Input is not as problematic as you'd think and is relitively easy to port across platforms. Especially for joystick, mouse, and keys.

Right now I'm using GLUT to handle input and windowing for the actual game executable and wxWindows for the other tools. I'm tempted to switch entirely over to wxWindows, although it doesn't have an up-to-date Mac port. The problem with GLUT is that it isn't fast and isn't powerful, but it's great for getting things up and running quickly.

But as long as you just have to rewrite the program that popps up a window and sets up the OpenGL/OpenAL contexts, it's not as big as starting in DirectX and porting to GL. Just carefully architect the basic framework and there won't be any problems.

Also note that Mozilla's C++ Portability guide may prove to be useful. The goal is to think about portability from the beginning.