Slashdot Mirror
First Prototype of Open Source TechCrunch Tablet
holy_calamity writes "Big mouth tech blogger Mike Arrington decided earlier this year to 'teach gadget-makers a lesson' and make his own portable, touch screen web tablet. The first, very rough, prototype is complete. Despite the claims it would be fully open source — even the hardware — there's no sign of a project site or any other openness yet."
I know this is hardly a journalism site. And let's face it the MSM does the same thing the Author of this piece does. Crap like "Big mouth tech blogger Mike Arrington" isn't proper journalism, it's insulting. The opinion of the writer should never go in the story.
Yeah, I've given up on the networks already.
even though the writing seems to be hastily done, it is still a pretty neat article... and actually looks pretty cool!
"they didn't know it was impossible, so they did it!" - Mark Twain
we put a laptop in a metal box and removed the keyboard
Hey its a prototype, id give them a chance before you pounce on them.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Come on....dude posts a pic of a prototype (pre-alpha), and you're already slagging him in the summary? No idea who he is, but seems a bit premature to rip him, at least to someone not following his concept. I don't expect a full schematic from other open source hardware projects this soon in the pipeline.
'But I don't want to go among mad people,' Alice remarked.
If you haven't got one yet, then they have no obligation to give you the source.
No you are new here. I think this guy has been on slashdot since before you were born.
My favourite tablet PC, and possibly my favourite laptop overall is/was the HP-Compaq tablet. Wonderful machine. Small, light, detachable keyboard, Wacom stylus, and everything worked perfectly under Linux. Also, the keyboard hinged from the middle, so it was the most usable machine I've experienced on aeroplane tray tables. Also, the hard glass screen was pretty much indestructable.
Shame they seemed to stop updating them. Anyway, I'd buy a machine with a comparable formfactor.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
Well hell, Compiz already has the basic handwriting tools: Annotate.
It'd be cool to hook up a handwriting detection engine (theres already one for kanji in Linux) so that one could annotate ANYTHING on any screen. There could even be layers to show different annotations on what date.
Beautiful, for pre-alpha hardware. Too bad theres no pics of it being used. Probably cause the software needs to be re-written for proper usage.
As for the slamming and openness: Im up for him making profit on it. After all, thats what the patent and copyright clause is for in the Constitution. He's furthering the arts and sciences. We need more people like him.
... will inevitably evolve WiFi functionality and touch screens (now that the patents on touch screens are expired) and in 12 months or so, we'll see devices exactly like Mike Arrington is thinking of, for $200 and then for $100.
We're only at the start of the "let's see what we can cram into a tiny box and run under Linux" phase of the Chinese computing industry. It's going to be huge IMO.
No way anyone can compete making something by hand but as an experiment, it's very cool.
My blog
I believe the main reason you open source something is to get more eyes on the problems and more brains on the solutions. Sure, there's the whole free thing that comes along with it, but without the combined efforts of people across the globe, progress is slow. Also ideas other people have aren't even thought of, due to the unknowns of the project.
but it will be a stretch for them to pull it off. It is one thing to sit in Mom's basement blogging about websites and gossiping around SV people, and another to pull of a working, hardware & os & software that actually works, not to mention in a usable way, between blog posts.
If someone is looking for a real, usable tablet, perhaps one of the slate-style ones from Motion Computing would be the way to go. I picked mine up for under four hundred dollars on eBay, complete with a good battery and a docking station.
This isn't really an innovative, exciting, new product.
--saint
1. That's a clause of the GPL you're referring to, not an inherent attribute of open source licenses.
2. Regardless of the license involved, the creator of a program is not bound by it, hence the whole "dual licensed" arrangement for things like Qt.
I couldn't agree more. I'm seeing nothing bad here and, frankly, my first though on reading the piece linked to was "where can I send a check to contribute?" I would be happier if he was posting more details. I would be happier if I knew that more people were working on the project. But I'll take what I can get and since I've been hungry for such a device like this since at least 1978, I'm not going to complain about details if he gets this puppy advanced enough to release specs.
And remember, the folks at ASUS have admitted that it was the goad of the OLPC that got them to create the EEE PC. Even if this device never reaches the public, just the documented (hence "big mouthed" = feature) existence of working prototypes helps us out by increasing the odds that somebody else will get such a device out the door.
It's all about the information. And what we do with it.
Totally different industry, and we didn't follow through because we were teen-agers with half-assed ideas but, the research turned up some amazing knowledge which cleared the way to many awesome skills for navigating the world. We went on and did something completely different, but we used a lot of what we learned during this first process.
--One of the first places we visited was a spring manufacturer. We told the plant manager what we were trying to do. Turns out it would have cost a hundred bucks or so to get a machine cranking out little springs to our specifications, and after that you bought the springs by weight; pennies per pound. --Same with all the other parts. We discovered that you can make pretty much whatever you want out of metal and plastic; any shape imaginable and. . , well, this is basic engineering/business 101 and I imagine not terribly surprising to anybody who reads this, but it was a real education for a couple of teenagers at the time.
The world opened up! We realized, "Hey, we can make any darned thing we want. Industry is set up precisely to make this possible. It's just a matter of coming up with a good design and then making some phone calls and working out a sales route, assembling the thing, packaging and shipping. Heck, if you can get advanced orders from enough retail chains you can pretty much know before you start how much money you need and what your profit margins will be, and with that information you can put a plan together for a bank and get a loan to start cranking products out. If you plan carefully, it's like printing money! Ah. . . So THIS is where millionaires come from. Dang! This isn't hard at all. It just takes smarts and effort. Wow! We can do ANYTHING!"
Or something like that. It feels good to know that goods don't just magically appear on shop shelves, but that you can put them there yourself; you can shape the world. You barely even need seed capital before the business loan, unless you need to hire engineers and programmers and such for the prototype, and even that can be worked into a more advanced business plan to take to a bank. You can start the whole thing with bus fare and a clean shirt and slacks!
One bank manager took an interest and gave me a half-hour lecture and several pieces of really awesome advice which I still use today. One of which was that banks don't care much for small loans, but that thinking REALLY big is more likely to procure a willing investment. (I don't know if that is still true today in the current economic climate, but back then it was apparently so). And second, I met a couple of professionals, (one of whom was a lawyer who did a few hundred dollars worth of paper work for me for free), who lived by that rule from the movie, "Pay it Forward" --but a decade and a half before that movie was even a twinkle in some script-writer's eye. "I'm going to do this for you for free, but one day when you are successful, a young, bright-eyed kid is going to come to you for help. You must promise to help that kid the way I'm helping you now. Will you do this?"
My god, yes! I almost hugged the man. --And that came from a lawyer, no less. Dang! People can be SO awesome.
So I think this tablet project is totally boss. If nobody is making what you want and you want it enough, then darn straight, go make one yourself! Chances are there are a bunch of somebodies out there also trying to wish the thing into existence, and that's your market right there. So why not do it? --It will fill your life with a purpose you created within yourself, it will give you a fascinating obstacle course of scalable challenges to work through and that sort of thing brings real joy. And at the end of it, if your aims are right and you put in the work and you don't allow yourself to fall into wishful thinking, then you'll succeed and have made the world a better place in the process. So these guys completely rock, and Open Source is definitely a cool way to go! I can see their business plan evolving thusly.
He posts dumbass click bait articles every day of the week about how Twitter can't scale or some other nonsense.
Especially when Twitter has been scaling up to 14 sockpuppets by now. To paraphrase Samwell: "I said GNU too (in the loo)."
Are there any licences that require you to give away the source at your own expense (bandwidth) to anyone who wants to download it?
The Affero GPL is one, with its requirement that all derivative works of a quine also be a quine, but I can't think of any others.
The nokia tablets work well enough for minor stuff. I borrow my lab's sometimes and it's not that much more annoying than my thinkpad tablet (which really, I like for reading on, more than anything else.) For portability, there are also iphones (which are dropping in price all the time) and some other toys.
There's also hacking a chumby: wifi + touchscreen, but a little too small to be fully functional.
open source modern art: laser taggi
I just started to work on a similar project (for a small niche market).
Thank you for your story and inspiring words!
I am stuck writing this mammoth report.
Could you please help me?
Their goal is a device "as thin as a Macbook Air". What they have is a laptop screen in a large aluminum box. It's like a kid drawing a screen on a cardboard box and proclaiming it "my first computer".
... and then they built the supercollider.