I did a little research when trying to find a wireless network for my project. Zigbee is such low bandwidth, that unless they adapt the standards, it won't be very useful for much past sensor networks. Plus, you have to recalibrate the routing nodes if they move, which means it's really not adaptable for a moving environment (hence the reason we discounted it) because the bandwidth is ~32k/s and recalibration often enough to make it useful for networking drops this well below anything practical for much past small sensors.
In a word, Zigbee is cool, but right now it's too low bandwidth to be a 'Bluetooth' killer.
Above it's posted that you can't have a laptop capable of playing games... Sure, in August, outside, it's too hot for that. But I played Battlefield on Veterans Day over there, I played Quake3 on July 4th. It's really not *that* bad of an environment unless you're in the south, closer to Kuwait (where the British are).
I really just recommend a semicheap laptop. Put it away when you are away, knock the dust out when you start hearing the fan grind.
I had a Toshiba Satellite. It worked pretty well, but you have to blow out the fans and interior semifrequently. Sager makes good laptops, but the one that I knew of out there had pretty big problems with the power supply dying in the heat, and in general being very hot.
You can pick up Satellite's pretty cheap now (A15-S157 is my particular model). It's still going strong.
I don't think Google needs to 'give' back since no one "pays" for their service (I don't pay for news or search or gmail, but the ads I don't follow do).
Perhaps this will boost OSS a notch, if a company like Google can contribute, why can't other companies?
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I did a little research when trying to find a wireless network for my project. Zigbee is such low bandwidth, that unless they adapt the standards, it won't be very useful for much past sensor networks. Plus, you have to recalibrate the routing nodes if they move, which means it's really not adaptable for a moving environment (hence the reason we discounted it) because the bandwidth is ~32k/s and recalibration often enough to make it useful for networking drops this well below anything practical for much past small sensors.
In a word, Zigbee is cool, but right now it's too low bandwidth to be a 'Bluetooth' killer.
Above it's posted that you can't have a laptop capable of playing games... Sure, in August, outside, it's too hot for that. But I played Battlefield on Veterans Day over there, I played Quake3 on July 4th. It's really not *that* bad of an environment unless you're in the south, closer to Kuwait (where the British are).
I really just recommend a semicheap laptop. Put it away when you are away, knock the dust out when you start hearing the fan grind.
I had a Toshiba Satellite. It worked pretty well, but you have to blow out the fans and interior semifrequently. Sager makes good laptops, but the one that I knew of out there had pretty big problems with the power supply dying in the heat, and in general being very hot.
You can pick up Satellite's pretty cheap now (A15-S157 is my particular model). It's still going strong.
I don't think Google needs to 'give' back since no one "pays" for their service (I don't pay for news or search or gmail, but the ads I don't follow do).
Perhaps this will boost OSS a notch, if a company like Google can contribute, why can't other companies?