Looks reminiscent of the Structured Visual Navigation Widget from 1994, and SVN itself is older than that. And there are certainly various apparently-similar displays around various DECwindows and X Window applications.
Cellphones aren't viable for use in emergency services. The towers jam up, or tip over, or loose power. Or all three. Sure, having a cellphone is handy for patching patient information to a hospital or ordering up sandwiches and beverages for the emergency crews. But typical cellphone handsets just aren't built for rough service (eg: getting hit with a fire hose, falling off the running board of a moving fire truck), nor are cellular networks known for disaster-tolerance, nor are cellphones viable for handset-to-handset operations.
Digital trunking -- the equivalent of cellular telephone sold for land mobile radio -- only works if you have replacement towers and controllers available, and if you're within the coverage. This because the towers and communications centers are critical to the digital network, and these can be vulnerable. Digital trunking is computer-controlled radio. And we all know what can happen when computers and computer networks get confused or frustrated; when a digital client radio can't communicate with a digital server, we get a digital brick.
Analog radio -- like analog TV -- degrades rather more nicely than digital radio or digital TV. With analog, you tend to know when you're on the edge of coverage, or in a bad spot. With digital, you have a signal or you don't. You go from good to pixellated to down. And when moving from an analog trunking or analog repeater system to a digital system, you'll usually need more repeaters. Some radio installations will undersell the towers needed in order to low-ball the price or because they don't understand the differences in coverage in the margin, creating dead spots and incremental system costs. Or the upgrade to digital will cost more to provide the same service coverage.
Digital trunking is arguably a way for big vendors to sell big systems with big price tags with massively expensive handsets. A US$300-600 hand-held portable radio becomes a US$3000 to US$6000 radio. And a low-cost repeater or cross-band repeater becomes equally expensive. The FCC has had an affair with software-defined radio (SDR) for some years now. Makes impressive-sounding text content for presentations and papers and forward-looking sending-a-signal marketeering, and it helps sell up-rated gear.
Yes, there are some nice features in digital gear. Mobile Data Terminals and other such.
And SDR gear isn't there yet, either. Most (all?) existing current-generation radios are already software-programmed.
Interoperation isn't a case of needing fancy radios or massively expensive systems. It can be as simple as having spare radios available that you can hand out to another agency, if they don't already have your frequencies and regional programmed into their own radios. If you work with the local cops, you have their frequency.
And anybody that thinks that a national frequency will work has never seen what happens when a gazillion agencies all try to use it, after having never practiced using it or never used the frequency. Any such common frequency is just an invitation for a frequency pile-up. And who in their right mind would use it? For what? Sure, it looks nice in the poster for the communications band plan de jour.
And though they often get no credit for it and can often be subject to derision or outright scorn, ham radio operators are a far more valuable resource to emergency responders when disasters hit, and they're in a better position to provide backup communications than any radio network FEMA ever designed. Ham gear is inherently frequency agile. So we spend $3000 to $6000 per hand-held digital radios and big bucks for digital trunking to use the full capabilities of the radios -- some agencies are using these radios on existing old analog systems, wasting thousands each, and some large agencies have purchased radios that are not interoperable with adjacent departments -- and these folks can't interoperate with neighboring agencies on different bands -- or we work with the local hams
EFI makes it fairly easy to boot from an arbitrary file system. This in terms of the relative difficulties of creating bootstraps.
You cross-boot into whatever file system you want, and the FAT file system (from the EFI boot partition) and the EFI callbacks mean you're not dealing with the device primitive boot drivers or the file system issues until you're ready.
Diagnostics and other such can also be available at the EFI Shell, and there is an execution environment available for these tools.
There are certainly downstream issues that can and will arise with adding ZFS support, as simply dealing with a 128-bit block ZFS address space is not something many user-land applications can be expecting. But as for the bootstrap itself, you're in the full run-time environment, and not debugging the gnarly bits of the bootstrap.
Various other console platforms require substantially more coding and customization around the bootstrap environment.
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Looks reminiscent of the Structured Visual Navigation Widget from 1994, and SVN itself is older than that. And there are certainly various apparently-similar displays around various DECwindows and X Window applications.
Cellphones aren't viable for use in emergency services. The towers jam up, or tip over, or loose power. Or all three. Sure, having a cellphone is handy for patching patient information to a hospital or ordering up sandwiches and beverages for the emergency crews. But typical cellphone handsets just aren't built for rough service (eg: getting hit with a fire hose, falling off the running board of a moving fire truck), nor are cellular networks known for disaster-tolerance, nor are cellphones viable for handset-to-handset operations.
Digital trunking -- the equivalent of cellular telephone sold for land mobile radio -- only works if you have replacement towers and controllers available, and if you're within the coverage. This because the towers and communications centers are critical to the digital network, and these can be vulnerable. Digital trunking is computer-controlled radio. And we all know what can happen when computers and computer networks get confused or frustrated; when a digital client radio can't communicate with a digital server, we get a digital brick.
Analog radio -- like analog TV -- degrades rather more nicely than digital radio or digital TV. With analog, you tend to know when you're on the edge of coverage, or in a bad spot. With digital, you have a signal or you don't. You go from good to pixellated to down. And when moving from an analog trunking or analog repeater system to a digital system, you'll usually need more repeaters. Some radio installations will undersell the towers needed in order to low-ball the price or because they don't understand the differences in coverage in the margin, creating dead spots and incremental system costs. Or the upgrade to digital will cost more to provide the same service coverage.
Digital trunking is arguably a way for big vendors to sell big systems with big price tags with massively expensive handsets. A US$300-600 hand-held portable radio becomes a US$3000 to US$6000 radio. And a low-cost repeater or cross-band repeater becomes equally expensive. The FCC has had an affair with software-defined radio (SDR) for some years now. Makes impressive-sounding text content for presentations and papers and forward-looking sending-a-signal marketeering, and it helps sell up-rated gear.
Yes, there are some nice features in digital gear. Mobile Data Terminals and other such.
And SDR gear isn't there yet, either. Most (all?) existing current-generation radios are already software-programmed.
Interoperation isn't a case of needing fancy radios or massively expensive systems. It can be as simple as having spare radios available that you can hand out to another agency, if they don't already have your frequencies and regional programmed into their own radios. If you work with the local cops, you have their frequency.
And anybody that thinks that a national frequency will work has never seen what happens when a gazillion agencies all try to use it, after having never practiced using it or never used the frequency. Any such common frequency is just an invitation for a frequency pile-up. And who in their right mind would use it? For what? Sure, it looks nice in the poster for the communications band plan de jour.
And though they often get no credit for it and can often be subject to derision or outright scorn, ham radio operators are a far more valuable resource to emergency responders when disasters hit, and they're in a better position to provide backup communications than any radio network FEMA ever designed. Ham gear is inherently frequency agile. So we spend $3000 to $6000 per hand-held digital radios and big bucks for digital trunking to use the full capabilities of the radios -- some agencies are using these radios on existing old analog systems, wasting thousands each, and some large agencies have purchased radios that are not interoperable with adjacent departments -- and these folks can't interoperate with neighboring agencies on different bands -- or we work with the local hams
EFI makes it fairly easy to boot from an arbitrary file system. This in terms of the relative difficulties of creating bootstraps.
You cross-boot into whatever file system you want, and the FAT file system (from the EFI boot partition) and the EFI callbacks mean you're not dealing with the device primitive boot drivers or the file system issues until you're ready.
Diagnostics and other such can also be available at the EFI Shell, and there is an execution environment available for these tools.
There are certainly downstream issues that can and will arise with adding ZFS support, as simply dealing with a 128-bit block ZFS address space is not something many user-land applications can be expecting. But as for the bootstrap itself, you're in the full run-time environment, and not debugging the gnarly bits of the bootstrap.
Various other console platforms require substantially more coding and customization around the bootstrap environment.