Slashdot Mirror
Netwinder is Back
Vic writes "The Ottawa Business Journal is reporting that a new company, Netwinder Inc., is being started to resurrect the Netwinder project. In case you don't remember, this was a small linux-based server appliance started by Corel Computer, which died when Rebel.com went under. See also the National Post article."
what would make these investors believe that the final outcome of this new venture will prove to be any more profitable
They bought it for less than $300k. Someone else took the mulimillion dollar bath on the R&D of this thing, so they don't have much to lose. It's all upside potential and little or no downside.
Send lawyers, guns, and money. Dad, get me out of this.
I may be misremembering, but I thought what led to rebel.coms demise was paying a ludicrous figure for a domain name, and being run by idiots that didn't realize that that was a bad idea.
--
E_NOSIG
The first time around, while a netwinder could hypothetically save money because of its low-power consumption, in practice the premium one paid over faster, better supported hardware would have made it tough to break even over the useful life of the product.
How much did rebel.com pay for the domain name again? And for using the James Dean logo? For hot tub parties? For limos?
The variant of Linux on the Netwinder was quite old, to the point of being outdated and making it quite difficult to install other programs.
The netwinder hardware has impressed me since I first read about it. IMHO, if they would have taken the design to slightly ruggedized portables (Apple Message Book style) and PDAs and spent more money on attracting developers, they would have made a killing.
The big thing, though, is to keep from repeating the spending mistakes of the past.
Regards,
-l
The web-based interface was nice, frankly, but the modified Redhat distro it comes loaded with is ridiculously sparse, and the omission of certain little things like, say, GCC makes adding any functionality a real pain in the ass. Unless, of course, you can find all the binaries you need for its StrongARM architecture. Not that they encourage you to expand it anyway, but as far as I'm concerned that slashes its hack value in half.
You had an "office server". It shipped with a stripped-down distribution designed for end users. It wasn't *supposed* to have any hack value.
There was also a development model (same hardware, give or take some RAM and HD) that included all the necessary tools and utilities. The DM disk images were available for download from www.netwinder.org, so you could have easily upgraded your unit if you'd ever bothered to look. IIRC there was also a Debian version for the Netwinder.
When it came out, there was only the development model. Its first market was Linux hackers, and the core development team were very active (and helpful) on the newsgroups and mailing lists.
The Netwinder is an underfeatured, overreviewed device which encourages incompetent administration and ruins people's lives. Trust me.
No, the Netwinder is a very-cool-but-now-outdated Linux-friendly hardware platform that was hijacked by a group of clueless marketroids who thought that spending $BIGNUM on a cheesy domain name and a stack of glossy brochures was a better idea than actually continuing to develop the product.
That became the "selling point" and the privilege fell to me of going to the site, completely reconfiguring the entire office to access the Internet via a gateway (which involved actually installing TCP/IP on several of the Windows 95 machines,[...]
So you're blaming the Netwinder for the trouble you had re-configuring an office full of mongrel Windows 95 boxes???
Scenario:
I'm not saying this is what happened here, but when I read the story it gave me the idea. The shareholders in the old company would probably attempt to go after the new company and/or declare the Open Sourcing illegal, after the cat's out of the bag.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
Just so y'all know the "device" that netwinder inc will actually be selling is probably not the old strongarm version (2100) but probably the (3100) which included : 10+GB hdds, 128+ MB of ram and a 533MHZ Crusoe Processor. 2 Serial Ports (One for console) 3 Realtek Nics, 2 USB ports (USB Modems and some Nic's). No Video, No Keyboard, No mouse, only a serial console. These run much nicer 4-5 times the hard drive throughput... FYI
"Be glad you sailed for a better day, But dont forget there will be hell to pay" - Dave King/Flogging Molly