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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.
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.
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.
And after reading the comments on here, no wonder why people think that Linux people are freeloaders and whiny asses who want everything for FREEEE.
Im up for capitalization on his product if he can make it mass market. All the better is if he offered schematics of the PCB, firmware, and software source used. It's just like the old tvs, radios, and other electronic devices that had the whole PCB on a paper attached on the inside of the box.
... 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
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.