Those rules only work if you're willing to stab people in the back and you are as pathetic as you think everyone else is.
If you're your own man and in control of your life you can "take the risk" You're a lot less likely to be stabbed in the back by a friend and if it happens then you go get another job, not hard.
You're paranoid if you think everyone is out to get you. You also should consider some career changes if you do work in an environment where everyone is your competition. At my place only a handful of us are engineers and most of the engineers aren't in competition. Nobody who isn't an engineer is going to compete with an engineer. There is no reason to fear the HR department or the marketing department.
Again not in the distribution war vein but I've been kicking around the idea of CatB and wondering if Linux distributions are an area where the idea breaks down. The slick, up-to-date ones are all made by companies. Community efforts don't seem to work nearly as fast.
For the record I do have a machine that runs debian, I'm not bashing it but Mandrake 8.1 compared to the newest debian is night and day and I've had the mandrake for a while now. It's kind of a large scale organizational problem and perhaps it requires a really strong centralized leadership and workforce to create a good linux dist. fast. I don't know, just an idea.
That's partially true. Floppies seem to have a halflife of about 10 years before you can't find a device to play them (if they are still good) 3.5 are in the 15 year range and they are starting to go away, slowly. 5.25s are gone.
CDs are 20+ years old though and still one of the most common media formats.
I think there is some kind of qualification here. 4000 years ago they put important things on stone and leather because they would last. They didn't write everything on stone or leather, they chose to write the important things. As more and more people get their photos developed on to CDs and burn CDs with their pictures, the CD will become and even stronger standard since the data is important to us. Archival grade CDs are already believed to last 100 years if kept properly, that research will continue and the standard will become stronger.
The whole idea behind markup and HTML is to remove the presentation aspect from the content and let intelligent software figure that out. Since the early netscape days they've been adding HTML tags and people have been doing tricks with tables to make the content provider have control of the presentation rather than the software.
"Best Viewed with _" is inevitable if businesses are going to use it and they are going to let their marketing groups have any say. You think they are going to like it when Foo Browser renders their page in to ass? No, they are going to say that it should be used with "Monopoly Browser" and if they're really serious they'll put javascript or some kind of filter on their http server to block the others out. To make matters worse, they probably paid some 22 year old "programmer" $200,000 to build the page and make it hip in the first place.
Ironic how the beauty of it initially was that you didn't need to pay artists to produce content because it was so simple and software figured it out for you but that's life, we'll complicate things if were given a chance to.
It's a killer idea to integrate it for AMD. To finish the job they should also integrate a fair amount of the south bridge as well. That was one of the bigger bumps with the athalons initially, they had a great chip but no south bridge to drive it and then there have been flakey ones.
AMD has been battered but they can still run with intel on cost, so long as motherboard makers can buy support chips dirt cheap and that's where intel can really take off.
That's correct. In fact, I'd go as far as to say the the very concept of window managers has been a hurdle slowing down the progress of the GNOME.
For a while there was a debate about "the GNOME window manager" and then there was the whole E thing when people were getting frustrated and quitting their jobs. Sawfish came out to fill a void and that's what it has done and now it doesn't seem as important that it get's all the newest wiz-bang gadgetry.
Newer versions of E are sounding more and more like they are trying to build a desktop or new environment than simply a window manager, that's great, more power to them.
But the essential truth is that for the majority of Linux users the window manager concept has come and gone and that desktops are where it is all happening now.
The grail browser supports pythong plugins. It hasn't been supported in a while though but it was a fairly complete HTML 3.2 browser written in python and tk.
It doesn't look like it would be too hard to make a new version of something like grail with pygtk and gtkhtml or maybe even mozilla.
Wasn't part of the essay saying something about th frontal lobe controlling emotion or something. Playing outside, with other things, people, parents, etc.. Seems like it could do a lot to stimulate emotional growth. Interacting with other living things.
DSL is just one of many available broadband technologies. There is microwave, sprint broadband, cable, satellite and others.
Most of the posts sounds like sour grapes to me, dinky little companies go up against titans like PacBell and Qwest, they over extend themselves and they rely upon those titans and then they get plowed over when those titans wake up and start to actually compete. What do you want or expect? Are they supposed to disallow phone companies from the DSL market? Covad, Northpoint and Rhythms are where they are for a very good reason, they weren't bringing anything to the table, they were simply middlemen. Now if they were cutting deals with cable companies and microwave providers and phone companies and they were building their own infrastructure they might have a chance. The analog is wireless, how come those wireless companies can compete? Because they aren't relying upon their competitor's infrastructure. This has nothing to do with regulation or not, I'm a covad customer and very happy with their service but it's really qwest's service that Covad undercharges for. In 6 months, I'll probably have to start dealing with qwest more. I'm a happy customer but I rely on my DSL lines for business and Covad hasn't provided me with an escape route or done a lot to sure up their position.
I don't see how you can bitch about the resources a big company has. When you go up against giants they have more stuff, can last longer and will win unless you are on top of your game like nothing else and you bring value to the table. These DSL companies haven't been doing either. If they were good they would have got their hands in to different parts of broadband.
Don't give me shit about TOS either, that's a different matter all together. Lousy TOS doesn't mean you can't get broadband or cheap broadband. It's the area that these DSL providers should have really pushed the envelope to compete against the RBOCs who have strict rules, it's what shows that there is room to compete and do things better provided they protect themselves and secured infrastructure.
I think there are still companies making and selling tons of 386 based processors. I know Intel was making 386ex processors as recently as 18 months ago, they may still be doing it.
If you're doing something like controlling a VCR, a sprinkler system, TV channel changer, a thermostat, a stereo, or numerous other tasks a processor like that might be a bit too powerful. Zilog and others are still making bank off of 8bit processors.
I'm not sure how much this will matter, there are more than a few companies making cheap x86 clones and hopefully what will happen is pentium class chips will fill in the low end and become cheaper but AMD is making a statement about where they see their growth and future profit coming from. AMD also made a solid performing clone, you could count in Intel matching performance from their parts which was nice for some "embedded tasks" but it is definitely a split, on one hand they are making the fastest desktop CPU in the world and on the other they're trying to sell CPUs for pennies.
With all the embedded linux stuff going on and all the talk I've been expecting more internet appliances, more CPUs in more things, more smart toys and devices. Now that the economy is slipping a little that stuff may have to wait and this could be AMDs way of weathering the storm if they think people won't have as much disposable income for high priced electronic toys.
I scanned the list kind of quick but did I miss those?
There wasn't a lot on there that I thought shouldn't be, just the placement was a little screwy but I honestly don't see how you can have StarCraft and WarCraft in the top 20 and not have Myst or Rivan or a Sierra game like King's Quest. That was hugely revolutionary shit when it came out. In PC land I would say it was probably the most revolutionary game until around the time tetris showed up.
It made it sound to me like/48 was the most common way to allocate addresses. In mobiles it was/64 and if you've got huge network they'll double it to a/47.
Pricing may get more complex since there is that distributed DHCP replacement. I'm suspecting that there might be service fees for resolving blocks or something.
Any way you cut it though, you should be able to get enough IP's cheaply for a good number of the atoms that make up your posessions.
I don't know, I'm not in favor of making things extinct but if early man could take down a mammoth with sticks and stones then I'm all in favor of letting early man decide fate of those beasts who clearly did not have the needed skills to survive. Early man was hardcore if he was killing mammoths at will.
More importantly, I don't believe Mach was "based on" any BSD. Mach is Mach and quite a bit different from a BSD kernel.
Now there is the Lites server for Mach that provides 4.3lite services but that's not mach. I'm not sure why there is always the rush to put mach based microkernel designs in to the BSD family tree, it's not that different than taking the NT posix API layer and trying to label NT as a brand or flavor of UNIX.
Be had 2 problems. They talked the talk but couldn't walk the walk. Linux is a meritocracy, a brutal one at times and when it comes down to it, Linux stands and delivers or they find problems to fix. I have never seen a benchmark showing BeOS to be a better SMP scheduler, I have never seen any thing clear that shows they have anything other than a kernel based GUI that is very smooth, yet Be and Be advocated boast about it.
Then Be down plays the significance of an OS. They were talking about being the next MacOS, Apple never did but Be did. Be had no chance in hell against Next. Next was 10years old, it was tried and tested and works. Be was a fresh starter out of the gate that still doesn't have all the functionality of the MacOS. And you know what else? When your OS only supports 5 pieces of hardware and it doesn't really do anything yet (no networking stack, no multiuser support, etc) why shouldn't it be plug-n-play and do everything smooth and quickly? I'm sorry but I'm not convinced by seeing a spinning tea pot and it auto detecting my video card when it only runs on 5 video cards.
That being said, I still like BeOS and I think that if they are smart they would opensource as much of it as possible. It's the only way it will stick around. I doubt that there is much room for cross polination between it and linux though. Just for the Be users and investors though, they'd at least get something out of the deal other than broken promises.
Most consumers wouldn't be able to tell the difference in performance between the two. Those benchmarks are showing, 5-10% difference when running quake at 150 FPS. If it wasn't for the frame counter/speedometer you wouldn't be able to tell the difference.
The PIV is clearly designed to go to ultra high clocks, that has been the business. Intel has also done poorly, historically, with first revs of a new architecture. I'm guessing by summer there will be a refined PIV and by this time next year they will have tuned the caching and probably changed the branch prediction hardware enough to eek out that enough performance to sit on top, this is intel.
The one real thing that article does show is that AMD has put together a very competitive processor. It has been pretty clear for some time but it was nice to see a new generation Intel part come out that didn't destroy everything in it's path. Moore is catching up.
Isn't bluetooth the wireless equivelant of ethernet? Ehternet takes no security considerations in to mind, it is simply a transport layer and security is a higher level concern.
There are some subtle security issues since you can control the physical security of an ethernet lan and anyone can jack in to a bluetooth simply by walking in to range.
You have to understand where the business is going and who controls it. The trend is for proprietary digitally encrypted signals and decoding at the device. This is the way the big networks and the movie companies want it. DVI is the plug/protocol they plan on using.
This gives a lot of leverage to the media content providers, if they don't like a feature that JVC or TiVo adds to a product because it can hurt ad revenue then they can stop giving them access to the data. If ad revenue is significant enough.
It shifts the revenue stream for the media content providers, they can cut a profit from device manufacturers who want to show their movies and shows and will pay licenses to decrypt data, they can cut a profit from services who distribute their shows (satallite companies, cable companies, blockbuster, internet?) then they can cut a profit from subscriptions and then their is ad revenue. In this picture they have other sources and ads aren't 100% important, they also have leverage so they can pit the ad people against the TV manufacturers.
I'm working in this business on a product kind of like TiVo and there are tons of cool things you can do for the user, TV shows have ratings encoded, ads do not, you can easily write code to switch channels or PIP focus or pause the recording when a commercial comes on. We aren't doing that, in fact you didn't hear me suggest that it was technically possible.. MPEG files need to be protected too, if you don't protect them then you run the risk of having the movie studios and networks cut you off. The TiVO hack everyone wants (raw MPEG access and an ethernet port) will be the one the ends TiVO as we know it. Most likely scenario would be that the big players who have supported them will drop them. (Sony, don't think for a second that Sony needs TiVO, Sony is using them to quickly enter the market)
The foundation isn't in effect yet so the movie studios, networks, and powers that be (is this BOWLOLAM and not BOWLOMAG: Big org with lots of lawyers and money, not money and guns) can't really do anything to TiVO yet since they are somewhat independant of the process, in theory they could refuse to let them decrypt their data or worse (possibly sue them since they aren't protecting the copyrights?) in the near future if TiVO added commercial skipping features such that ad companies got pissed.
I predict that there will be no technology which will be popular and useful that will remove ads from the data stream any time in the near future. Skipping them with a WebTV or TiVO box that does digital recording will be kosher until the ad companies can detect a loss and then ad costs will go down, subscription costs will rise a little, and they'll just put more tricky stuff in like atvef triggers that kind of push the ad at the user. Ads are internet anyways, you can't even go to slashdot or linux.com without seeing ads, the mainstream corporate sites are filled with them and ads may eventually pull out of TV and go more into interactive TV and internet where they can target market that much better.
Also with the huge mega conglomerates taking over and invading, you have to question the value of ads on TV. Does IBM or Redhat get really anything from putting ads on MSNBC? Over the last few years some of the better news organizations (*cough*, ABC, *cough*) have shown that they aren't above the wishes of their owners (*cough* disney, *cough*) I can't remember seeing a Westinghouse ad on NBC(GE) anytime over the last 20 years or so. I think that medium is already shut off to certain groups of companies and products. It's better to get cokes can and BMWs visibly on screen with logo shown and perhaps a few words of dialog containing your trademark in the next James Bond movie than it is to place an ad on your competitor's network.
Sounds like a very ambitious project to me, I wish them the best.
Judging from WINE's "success" just doing the win32 API, I would assume that this is a nearly impossible task to accomplish unless these guys are incredibly brilliant or they are doing something fundamentally better than most other opensource projects. (Or they are planning on have win 3.1 support around the time Window 2020 comes out)
I'm a functional advocate from CMU also. I totally and completely think that it is the most important thing in programming these days. I don't do it for my job though..
I think it has to do with the demathing of the CS business. The importance of math isn't stressed as much as it used to be, hold for a handful of schools.
You can also put a 7 year old behind a computer and with BASIC or SmallTalk or some other language (Pascal or python, or anything really but the clean syntax ones seem to be more popular with children) and she can make things happen. It's usually fairly primitive but they can make it do things. The math required to appriciate (not understand) functional programming may never be taught to that 7 year old or it may be 12 years before it is taught to them. Any adult can also go pick up a book at the store and start learning how to program but most of these books stay away from functional programming. By the time someone can understand functionalism they've been entrenched into the imparitive world for so long that it's not easy to break free and if you want to work it's cake to find a java or C++ job but the Standard ML and Haskell jobs are a little bit more rare.
They are much cheaper. You should be able to find a pentium-166 class PC/104 from Jumptec for under $500 Try here
Buy the time you get the modules you want it may be in the thousand dollar range, VGA lcds aren't so cheap either. Test kits aren't cheap either but you should be able to find a PC/104 with VGA out and super I/O for under $500 and then it's just a matter of putting it all together. If you go embedded and dump the super I/O you can probably get them for half that but you'll need a test/developers kit to work on it.
To be honest, with the low costs of those machines, I'm surprized there haven't been more hacking efforts. You could easily crank out an MP3 juke with those for you car (all you'd need is the PC/104 and an audio module and a drive) Or little firewall bricks or all sorts of cool things can be done with them cheap.
Slashdot Mirror
If you're your own man and in control of your life you can "take the risk" You're a lot less likely to be stabbed in the back by a friend and if it happens then you go get another job, not hard.
You're paranoid if you think everyone is out to get you. You also should consider some career changes if you do work in an environment where everyone is your competition. At my place only a handful of us are engineers and most of the engineers aren't in competition. Nobody who isn't an engineer is going to compete with an engineer. There is no reason to fear the HR department or the marketing department.
For the record I do have a machine that runs debian, I'm not bashing it but Mandrake 8.1 compared to the newest debian is night and day and I've had the mandrake for a while now. It's kind of a large scale organizational problem and perhaps it requires a really strong centralized leadership and workforce to create a good linux dist. fast. I don't know, just an idea.
CDs are 20+ years old though and still one of the most common media formats.
I think there is some kind of qualification here. 4000 years ago they put important things on stone and leather because they would last. They didn't write everything on stone or leather, they chose to write the important things. As more and more people get their photos developed on to CDs and burn CDs with their pictures, the CD will become and even stronger standard since the data is important to us. Archival grade CDs are already believed to last 100 years if kept properly, that research will continue and the standard will become stronger.
"Best Viewed with _" is inevitable if businesses are going to use it and they are going to let their marketing groups have any say. You think they are going to like it when Foo Browser renders their page in to ass? No, they are going to say that it should be used with "Monopoly Browser" and if they're really serious they'll put javascript or some kind of filter on their http server to block the others out. To make matters worse, they probably paid some 22 year old "programmer" $200,000 to build the page and make it hip in the first place.
Ironic how the beauty of it initially was that you didn't need to pay artists to produce content because it was so simple and software figured it out for you but that's life, we'll complicate things if were given a chance to.
AMD has been battered but they can still run with intel on cost, so long as motherboard makers can buy support chips dirt cheap and that's where intel can really take off.
If it just simple dollars and cents then why is the real world different?
For a while there was a debate about "the GNOME window manager" and then there was the whole E thing when people were getting frustrated and quitting their jobs. Sawfish came out to fill a void and that's what it has done and now it doesn't seem as important that it get's all the newest wiz-bang gadgetry.
Newer versions of E are sounding more and more like they are trying to build a desktop or new environment than simply a window manager, that's great, more power to them.
But the essential truth is that for the majority of Linux users the window manager concept has come and gone and that desktops are where it is all happening now.
It doesn't look like it would be too hard to make a new version of something like grail with pygtk and gtkhtml or maybe even mozilla.
Wasn't part of the essay saying something about th frontal lobe controlling emotion or something. Playing outside, with other things, people, parents, etc.. Seems like it could do a lot to stimulate emotional growth. Interacting with other living things.
Most of the posts sounds like sour grapes to me, dinky little companies go up against titans like PacBell and Qwest, they over extend themselves and they rely upon those titans and then they get plowed over when those titans wake up and start to actually compete. What do you want or expect? Are they supposed to disallow phone companies from the DSL market? Covad, Northpoint and Rhythms are where they are for a very good reason, they weren't bringing anything to the table, they were simply middlemen. Now if they were cutting deals with cable companies and microwave providers and phone companies and they were building their own infrastructure they might have a chance. The analog is wireless, how come those wireless companies can compete? Because they aren't relying upon their competitor's infrastructure. This has nothing to do with regulation or not, I'm a covad customer and very happy with their service but it's really qwest's service that Covad undercharges for. In 6 months, I'll probably have to start dealing with qwest more. I'm a happy customer but I rely on my DSL lines for business and Covad hasn't provided me with an escape route or done a lot to sure up their position.
I don't see how you can bitch about the resources a big company has. When you go up against giants they have more stuff, can last longer and will win unless you are on top of your game like nothing else and you bring value to the table. These DSL companies haven't been doing either. If they were good they would have got their hands in to different parts of broadband.
Don't give me shit about TOS either, that's a different matter all together. Lousy TOS doesn't mean you can't get broadband or cheap broadband. It's the area that these DSL providers should have really pushed the envelope to compete against the RBOCs who have strict rules, it's what shows that there is room to compete and do things better provided they protect themselves and secured infrastructure.
If you're doing something like controlling a VCR, a sprinkler system, TV channel changer, a thermostat, a stereo, or numerous other tasks a processor like that might be a bit too powerful. Zilog and others are still making bank off of 8bit processors.
I'm not sure how much this will matter, there are more than a few companies making cheap x86 clones and hopefully what will happen is pentium class chips will fill in the low end and become cheaper but AMD is making a statement about where they see their growth and future profit coming from. AMD also made a solid performing clone, you could count in Intel matching performance from their parts which was nice for some "embedded tasks" but it is definitely a split, on one hand they are making the fastest desktop CPU in the world and on the other they're trying to sell CPUs for pennies.
With all the embedded linux stuff going on and all the talk I've been expecting more internet appliances, more CPUs in more things, more smart toys and devices. Now that the economy is slipping a little that stuff may have to wait and this could be AMDs way of weathering the storm if they think people won't have as much disposable income for high priced electronic toys.
There wasn't a lot on there that I thought shouldn't be, just the placement was a little screwy but I honestly don't see how you can have StarCraft and WarCraft in the top 20 and not have Myst or Rivan or a Sierra game like King's Quest. That was hugely revolutionary shit when it came out. In PC land I would say it was probably the most revolutionary game until around the time tetris showed up.
Pricing may get more complex since there is that distributed DHCP replacement. I'm suspecting that there might be service fees for resolving blocks or something.
Any way you cut it though, you should be able to get enough IP's cheaply for a good number of the atoms that make up your posessions.
Why not if we're going to make shit up and present it as a possible history?
I don't know, I'm not in favor of making things extinct but if early man could take down a mammoth with sticks and stones then I'm all in favor of letting early man decide fate of those beasts who clearly did not have the needed skills to survive. Early man was hardcore if he was killing mammoths at will.
Now there is the Lites server for Mach that provides 4.3lite services but that's not mach. I'm not sure why there is always the rush to put mach based microkernel designs in to the BSD family tree, it's not that different than taking the NT posix API layer and trying to label NT as a brand or flavor of UNIX.
You also won't find a repeating string of 101010 500 times in pi.
Then Be down plays the significance of an OS. They were talking about being the next MacOS, Apple never did but Be did. Be had no chance in hell against Next. Next was 10years old, it was tried and tested and works. Be was a fresh starter out of the gate that still doesn't have all the functionality of the MacOS. And you know what else? When your OS only supports 5 pieces of hardware and it doesn't really do anything yet (no networking stack, no multiuser support, etc) why shouldn't it be plug-n-play and do everything smooth and quickly? I'm sorry but I'm not convinced by seeing a spinning tea pot and it auto detecting my video card when it only runs on 5 video cards.
That being said, I still like BeOS and I think that if they are smart they would opensource as much of it as possible. It's the only way it will stick around. I doubt that there is much room for cross polination between it and linux though. Just for the Be users and investors though, they'd at least get something out of the deal other than broken promises.
Most consumers wouldn't be able to tell the difference in performance between the two. Those benchmarks are showing, 5-10% difference when running quake at 150 FPS. If it wasn't for the frame counter/speedometer you wouldn't be able to tell the difference.
The PIV is clearly designed to go to ultra high clocks, that has been the business. Intel has also done poorly, historically, with first revs of a new architecture. I'm guessing by summer there will be a refined PIV and by this time next year they will have tuned the caching and probably changed the branch prediction hardware enough to eek out that enough performance to sit on top, this is intel.
The one real thing that article does show is that AMD has put together a very competitive processor. It has been pretty clear for some time but it was nice to see a new generation Intel part come out that didn't destroy everything in it's path. Moore is catching up.
Gilat and starband are the same.
There are some subtle security issues since you can control the physical security of an ethernet lan and anyone can jack in to a bluetooth simply by walking in to range.
This gives a lot of leverage to the media content providers, if they don't like a feature that JVC or TiVo adds to a product because it can hurt ad revenue then they can stop giving them access to the data. If ad revenue is significant enough.
It shifts the revenue stream for the media content providers, they can cut a profit from device manufacturers who want to show their movies and shows and will pay licenses to decrypt data, they can cut a profit from services who distribute their shows (satallite companies, cable companies, blockbuster, internet?) then they can cut a profit from subscriptions and then their is ad revenue. In this picture they have other sources and ads aren't 100% important, they also have leverage so they can pit the ad people against the TV manufacturers.
I'm working in this business on a product kind of like TiVo and there are tons of cool things you can do for the user, TV shows have ratings encoded, ads do not, you can easily write code to switch channels or PIP focus or pause the recording when a commercial comes on. We aren't doing that, in fact you didn't hear me suggest that it was technically possible.. MPEG files need to be protected too, if you don't protect them then you run the risk of having the movie studios and networks cut you off. The TiVO hack everyone wants (raw MPEG access and an ethernet port) will be the one the ends TiVO as we know it. Most likely scenario would be that the big players who have supported them will drop them. (Sony, don't think for a second that Sony needs TiVO, Sony is using them to quickly enter the market)
The foundation isn't in effect yet so the movie studios, networks, and powers that be (is this BOWLOLAM and not BOWLOMAG: Big org with lots of lawyers and money, not money and guns) can't really do anything to TiVO yet since they are somewhat independant of the process, in theory they could refuse to let them decrypt their data or worse (possibly sue them since they aren't protecting the copyrights?) in the near future if TiVO added commercial skipping features such that ad companies got pissed.
I predict that there will be no technology which will be popular and useful that will remove ads from the data stream any time in the near future. Skipping them with a WebTV or TiVO box that does digital recording will be kosher until the ad companies can detect a loss and then ad costs will go down, subscription costs will rise a little, and they'll just put more tricky stuff in like atvef triggers that kind of push the ad at the user. Ads are internet anyways, you can't even go to slashdot or linux.com without seeing ads, the mainstream corporate sites are filled with them and ads may eventually pull out of TV and go more into interactive TV and internet where they can target market that much better.
Also with the huge mega conglomerates taking over and invading, you have to question the value of ads on TV. Does IBM or Redhat get really anything from putting ads on MSNBC? Over the last few years some of the better news organizations (*cough*, ABC, *cough*) have shown that they aren't above the wishes of their owners (*cough* disney, *cough*) I can't remember seeing a Westinghouse ad on NBC(GE) anytime over the last 20 years or so. I think that medium is already shut off to certain groups of companies and products. It's better to get cokes can and BMWs visibly on screen with logo shown and perhaps a few words of dialog containing your trademark in the next James Bond movie than it is to place an ad on your competitor's network.
Judging from WINE's "success" just doing the win32 API, I would assume that this is a nearly impossible task to accomplish unless these guys are incredibly brilliant or they are doing something fundamentally better than most other opensource projects. (Or they are planning on have win 3.1 support around the time Window 2020 comes out)
I think it has to do with the demathing of the CS business. The importance of math isn't stressed as much as it used to be, hold for a handful of schools.
You can also put a 7 year old behind a computer and with BASIC or SmallTalk or some other language (Pascal or python, or anything really but the clean syntax ones seem to be more popular with children) and she can make things happen. It's usually fairly primitive but they can make it do things. The math required to appriciate (not understand) functional programming may never be taught to that 7 year old or it may be 12 years before it is taught to them. Any adult can also go pick up a book at the store and start learning how to program but most of these books stay away from functional programming. By the time someone can understand functionalism they've been entrenched into the imparitive world for so long that it's not easy to break free and if you want to work it's cake to find a java or C++ job but the Standard ML and Haskell jobs are a little bit more rare.
Try here
Buy the time you get the modules you want it may be in the thousand dollar range, VGA lcds aren't so cheap either. Test kits aren't cheap either but you should be able to find a PC/104 with VGA out and super I/O for under $500 and then it's just a matter of putting it all together. If you go embedded and dump the super I/O you can probably get them for half that but you'll need a test/developers kit to work on it.
To be honest, with the low costs of those machines, I'm surprized there haven't been more hacking efforts. You could easily crank out an MP3 juke with those for you car (all you'd need is the PC/104 and an audio module and a drive) Or little firewall bricks or all sorts of cool things can be done with them cheap.