It may be the 1st that can be found now, but I find it hard to believe that >1 yr of the www a jpeg was the 1st banner ad, jpegs were quite new, many browsers didn't support them (Xmosaic early versions certainly didn't). I suspect advertising oriented annoying banner ads were in gif format before this one. I was around online back then but everyone just used irc, archie, fsp, ftp and usenet back then the www was fairly unpopular.
One of the so called strengths of MS Operating systems is ease of use via a graphical interface, applications and service configuration windows, with menus and context sensitive screens that guide anyone towards a successful setup of a server hosted service.
The problem is that this stance can lead to a situation where somebody with absolulely no experience with the service in question, making live a service such as a webserver which is poorly configured, opening up the server in question to any number of possible exploits.
My question is, are you considering this an issue at all? Can you think of any way to address this problem other than simply making it pointlessly harder to get things done?
I can't find any evidence that it actually has a wheel or middle button, the latter is essential for me as I can't stand 'Option "Emulate3Buttons"' in X, it's just not confortable (if you're a windows or mac user and don't understand this, don't stress it, just ignore this post).
It looks like it might have a sort of touch pad middle for perhaps click and scrape-like scroll. I'd have to try to see.
I guess in the mean time we can practice what this'll be like with any other pcmcia^WPCcard devices, some sellotape and a plastic leg, to see if it's as uncomfortable as people are saying they think it'll be.
Well that would be stupid, also non geeky. But apart from all of that, it does actually say "0". But you might be on to something, perhaps the artist is just that. Somebody who things gauges should start at 1, they initially had that and then somebody pointed out how stupid that was and they changed it to a "0" without fixing the scale.
Why does it start at 0, get to 4 but mark it at 5? This also makes 15 not quite centred* at the top. (*I'm british)
This is right out of Stargate SG1
on
Throwable WiFi Camera
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
These look and act exactly like the G'oauld devices used in many episodes of Stargate SG1. I can't believe I'm the first to mention this, maybe it's my threshold setting? Theirs are silver with no obvious camera lens, but otherwise look and are used in the same way.
I used to be about 60% Netscape 35% IE 5% misc like lynx etc, when I started in 1998. Then it got to about 95% IE, so 85% is quick a marked drop in IE support.
Do remember that the BBC is hardly a generic site for your average Internet user, it attracts a significant quantity of beginners and is dull for anyone technical (there are a higher proportion of technical users on the Internet than you'd meet on a street). So these stats are quite good.
I know the way they are worked out should be quite fair.
Most Windows users I know wouldn't know how to tell other users are on the system in the first place, so a rootkit isn't even necessary. You just need the exploitable code to not take over too much system resources or bandwidth, which are the only clues most users will spot.
Even a noob in the unix world would use something like "w" at a command prompt to gain some basic knowledge of a user being connected in.
I completely agree. In fact if you add in the umteen year old unix apps finger() and write() in to the equation you basically/have/ IM. This was the case in the early 90s, IM is just a combination of existing systems not bothering to follow existing protocols and making it available to the Mac/Windows users of the world. But then that's how things have been over the past decade.
We did this in 1998 ! We had a b/w realvideo stream from the front of the train which users (we assumed would be thousands) could choose to stop at a time for any duration, it only went in circles. It also had an overhead webcam for those unable to use realvideo (probably windows users). This was on the Sun+perl+apache+real based BBC website so many years ago it's not funny.
The Zaurus runs Linux, it's not really an embedded OS. In fact if you plug in more compact flash storage you can affectively install an entire distribution of any major Linux system. It's not that slow but 64M of ram would make OpenOffice start a tad slowly.
If you plug a Monitor and Keyboard+Mouse in to a Zaurus you end up with a system which is ample to use as a full desktop. This becomes awkward as you are limited in expansion slots available, it has IrDA (keyboard+mouse combo maybe) CF and SD and a propriatory connector, there is a CF card that provides USB host abilities so you could tag some hubs on and have webcam/keyboard/mouse etc, but you'd then have used up the CF and that is where you need the Monitor plugin, or 802.11. So a newer Zaurus with more built in would then be able to be your only desktop PC which the OQO is touted as but at a fraction of the price.
Remember Linux is opensource so pretty much all normal Linux software can be compiled for the Zaurus.
Please note that #3 is available only on x86, while #2 is available on alpha & x86 (might be more if realplayer ran on other versions of linux)
um?
List of clients in the pulldown for UNIX on the real site:
Linux/Alpha (Debian) Linux/Alpha (Red Hat 6.2) Linux/Sparc (Red Hat 6.2) Linux/PPC 2000 (TiVo?) Irix 6.5 (Mips - same as Agenda/PlayStation2 arch). Irix 6.3 AIX 4.2 (Power CPU) AIX 4.3 Solaris 2.6 (Sparc) Solaris 7 (Sparc) Linux 2.x (libc6 i386) Linux 2.x (libc6 i386) RPM hp-ux 11 (God knows what CPU) Unixware 7 (i386)
In fact..
Known clients from my head:
MacOS - all version to the best of my knowledge, including 68k Mac! BeOS (heard of, not seen) QNX (read press releases about, never seen) TiVo (read press releases about, never seen - would be v2 ppc only) RiscOS (up to Real v3 - milky had) linux 1.2.* (up to v5 - still able to download it) win3.1 (still able to download) new cmdline player splay for linux-x86 no X needed / hxplay
Win32 (everything) - This is a large list.
PocketPC/Symbian/Mobile Real - Many devices, different compiles of
RealONE for the different devices due to screen size etc..
There are probably others I've forgotten about.
Ogg is completely open source, so in/theory/ it's available on all platforms. But anyone guarentee somebody has bothered to compile Ogg on as many platforms ?
It's basically a two horse race and Real have always made efforts to provide for just about every platform. Those who complain about the player are basically admitting to being Windows uses as the UNIX players have always been very nice to use. None of this shite theme/skin crap I have to worry about with pointless slow shaped windows in the OS players.
I hired a few for my wedding, I'll encode the video of their use at a later date, but we used them for Usher duties:
http://trap.me.uk/wedding/tabletpc/pics/
It was extremely fun getting Linux working on them, and they added a techy feel to the wedding. I'd probably use them more if they were lighter. I'd be disappointed to see the technology die due to poor marketing or reliance on MS.
I assume you're in the US and don't know who the BBC are. We're talking 30,000 staff spread across the globe, some some noddy office block. This was setup over 5 years ago and computing hardware wasn't necessarily going to cope with 4 boxes.
It's http://www.bbc.co.uk/newsa/n5ctrl/radioseq/analysi s.ram but was typoed on the link. The realmedia 404 equivalent STILL hasn't been fixed by the content guys - ie, just creating one and uploading. [Damion - One of the techies behind it]
Surely a 4* will mean it'll try later keeping it the queue for a while until it gives up and also confirming the address is valid. a 5* response should mean sorry you're wrong to even try this address. Which should make it now go and bounce this back to whoever sent it. This means that a 5* will fill the disks just as well but it'll be spending it's time trying to email back to the Sender.
Realproducer wants to talk to/dev/dsp we can't make it use esd, though it's worth noting that the realnetwork techies did add esd support to realplay. Yes we want to run several encode processes on one box. Cheap PCs are using 5% of cpu to do encoding so the capacity is there. We have video capture on the spare pci slot (these are 1U boxes) though we've thought about making some of the boxes audio only so they have two cards as a solution. This would work, but is a pain, it means splitting the audio and also limits us to only two encodes on the box*. A more generic shared audio access would be much better. Some of the vid-capture cards we've used (Osprey I believe) also had audio inputs with no linux support. One of my colleagues developed an audio driver for this which did work to some extent but same limitation as above, but it needed some work and was limited in the sample rates it could set the audio capture at (I believe this is more fully supported in 2.4 and 2.5 now). We've also got hold of the SDK from real which in theory should make it possible to write our own encoder but we lack time at the moment. Making solaris/linux allow as many apps to open /dev/something and receive audio on it would be VERY useful.
*we stream a great many stations live 24x7 and want to make many programmes available on demand. Sometimes a programme description might be for a 3 hour show, but another smaller show wants a 30 minute snippit from that, so we'd need 3 simultanious encodes at that point. A more common problem is that realproducer takes a few minutes to finish writing to disk once it's finished streaming, it holds the audio device during that time so nose->tail encodes don't fit.
That's my article! -Answers to some of the queries
on
Linux At The BBC [updated]
·
· Score: 5, Informative
(scuse formatting, on 9210 keyboard at 9,600 baud:( - new house as of Monday - no connectivity yet, no computer... explained below)
Yes it's almost 3 yrs old, I did point out to/. at the time of launch that they
should link to the article. After all it had just taken some efforts getting
permission to have it published, there are a lot of open source fans/users in
the BBC but it's difficult to get yourself heard. Impartiality is supposed to
be the number one rule for any broadcast, this is printed on to a piece of
laminated card all staff will have received, yet you don't see anything but
Windows shown on telly. For all I know MS might be offering them 10 quid off
the 400quid price of office on the 27K staff as long as they keep it up. After
the issues of being allowed to say we saved licence fee by using free systems I
thought sod it, I'm not going to ask first:) I'll tell who I like. I then did
a talk at ManLUG covering some of the more technical issues we'd faced in using
Linux.
Why not FreeBSD?
We do realmedia encoding with linux, realnetworks don't provide a *BSD binary to
the best of my knowledged. The dtext boxes simply needed to be reliable, not
massively scalable servers. One possible project will need vmware which is also
linux only. We have Free/Open and NetBSD fans in Internet Services, but we're
all capable UNIX admins so we're running secure reliable systems on Solaris and
Linux, there is nothing to gain from using FreeBSD for example. Personally I
like playing q3a so my desision is obvious at home.
The Ogg Vorbis streams should restart shortly, we've had permission to go for it
now! We might even get real links from the same JS popups that the 'real' links
are on. We've had some space problems...
We have to provide realmedia encoding for loads of parts of the bbc, there
is a massive quantity of scheduled encoding events. The number of spare
realmedia encoding servers was limited, as was audio matrix outputs and
rackspace. We were able to set up ogg on a few when we had spare boxes,
once we were streaming live Ciaran contacted monty who worked on making it
closer to comparible to real, which quite frankly was far superior at
lower/modem bitrates. Ogg was rivaling mp3 at 96/128kbps not wm/real at
less than that. We also spent months convincing internal red tape using
peeps to let us advertise this slightly! Eventually Ogg at the bbc was
available, but only to l33t/. kiddies (preaching to the c..), it didn't
really get discovered by enough average joes of the public. We also needed
to nick back some encoders for real streams we'd promised the internal BBC
people. The AOD (audio on demand) project needs loads of encoders, the
embeded player popup crashes NS4 with embeded Linux or Solaris realplay.
[Please help out by complaining to the site owners so it's not just us
doing do! - but not postmaster/support/noc etc, that is us]. We're working
on coding a Solaris and/or Linux kernel module or LD_PRELOADable bit of
code to allow multiple processes to open the audio device and be none the
wiser, this will mean we won't need as many boxes for live 24x7 streams
along side recoded on-demand streams. [help us out] Then we'll have ogg
back in a jiffy! Alternatively you can wait for our move to complete* and
we should have extra encoding capacity. Next task [when asked to provide
feedback about ogg streaming, emails that say "Real is shit it makes popups
and adverts in my desktop waa waa waa.." REALLY don't help Ogg. Many in
the BBC believe it's Windows VS Real, Real can encode on many platforms, be
served reliably on many platforms and be received on many platforms.
Windows Media can only be encoded on Windows and there are limited
platforms that can play it. We're fighting for Ogg, but if your Realmedia
moans get us converted to WMT then the team that are fighting for you will
have quit. Real aren't evil, they are even now supporting Ogg! Real works
on the 9210i, I've checked our scottish footballs streams on one while
ssh'ed to the encoder it was started on!].
*http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/7/25730.html
Well as of 9am 23rd of Sept nearly 40% of what was BBC I.S. of Ogg fame,
started work at the new location, we've suffered a lot, but the new
building is bigger and probably will work out well, if not least due to much
more rackspace for ogg encoders.
New distro? Well the followup article would cover that, there kinda is a BBC
specific dist, it would be dry humoUr of course. It's more the build mechanism.
Tim Hurmans work on serial net boot and PXE, a shrunk version of slacks color.gz
(should be coloUr!)
Supplying FreeDOS with an OS-less machine was just a token gesture to use the loophole in the licence MS has with them. It's small and basic, and to coin a phrase used in the UK "It does exactly what it says on the tin". It's unlikely to be installed by anyone getting one of these PCs, they are going to know a fair amount about OSes anyway or possibly already have a windows version ready to pirate on to the box. Had Dell provided Linux as the token OS offering, they would have no doubt received countless support calls and possibly constant complaints for the most basic of things like getting online or installing new software. Also which distribution? What about a *BSD? They would have had every linux vendor begging to be a partner causing them hastle possibly expecting some money too (unless they shipped with the honest-it-is-easy-to-install debian, but I won't go there). FreeDOS is clearly the best way to go, Linux would have opened a very large can of worms.
This phone can run ssh and has a querty keyboard. I fail to see what more you want? If you're a techy then a 80x24 screen is enough to do your entire job. The phone is not that large and 4 people in our office use them constantly for remote admin for Europes most popular content website. Personally I can type at over 20wpm on the keyboard which means SMS and ssh sessions are easy. Having to carry two devices might be okay but one of them would have to be roughly this size anyway to cater for the keyboard and screen. 9210i comes out shortly and will allow streamed realmedia at up to 42kbps (HCSD), so you could get video or radio stations in your palm almost anywhere (well in Europe anyway, the USA is a tad backwards in the mobile phone world).
Slashdot Mirror
It may be the 1st that can be found now, but I find it hard to believe that >1 yr of the www a jpeg was the 1st banner ad, jpegs were quite new, many browsers didn't support them (Xmosaic early versions certainly didn't). I suspect advertising oriented annoying banner ads were in gif format before this one. I was around online back then but everyone just used irc, archie, fsp, ftp and usenet back then the www was fairly unpopular.
One of the so called strengths of MS Operating systems is ease of use via a graphical interface, applications and service configuration windows, with menus and context sensitive screens that guide anyone towards a successful setup of a server hosted service.
The problem is that this stance can lead to a situation where somebody with absolulely no experience with the service in question, making live a service such as a webserver which is poorly configured, opening up the server in question to any number of possible exploits.
My question is, are you considering this an issue at all? Can you think of any way to address this problem other than simply making it pointlessly harder to get things done?
I can't find any evidence that it actually has a wheel or middle button, the latter is essential for me as I can't stand 'Option "Emulate3Buttons"' in X, it's just not confortable (if you're a windows or mac user and don't understand this, don't stress it, just ignore this post).
It looks like it might have a sort of touch pad middle for perhaps click and scrape-like scroll. I'd have to try to see.
I guess in the mean time we can practice what this'll be like with any other pcmcia^WPCcard devices, some sellotape and a plastic leg, to see if it's as uncomfortable as people are saying they think it'll be.
Well that would be stupid, also non geeky. But apart from all of that, it does actually say "0". But you might be on to something, perhaps the artist is just that. Somebody who things gauges should start at 1, they initially had that and then somebody pointed out how stupid that was and they changed it to a "0" without fixing the scale.
Why does it start at 0, get to 4 but mark it at 5? This also makes 15 not quite centred* at the top. (*I'm british)
These look and act exactly like the G'oauld devices used in many episodes of Stargate SG1. I can't believe I'm the first to mention this, maybe it's my threshold setting? Theirs are silver with no obvious camera lens, but otherwise look and are used in the same way.
I used to be about 60% Netscape 35% IE 5% misc like lynx etc, when I started in 1998.
Then it got to about 95% IE, so 85% is quick a marked drop in IE support.
Do remember that the BBC is hardly a generic site for your average Internet user, it attracts a significant quantity of beginners and is dull for anyone technical (there are a higher proportion of technical users on the Internet than you'd meet on a street). So these stats are quite good.
I know the way they are worked out should be quite fair.
I'll reply to this for each I do..
Most Windows users I know wouldn't know how to tell other users are on the system in the first place, so a rootkit isn't even necessary. You just need the exploitable code to not take over too much system resources or bandwidth, which are the only clues most users will spot.
Even a noob in the unix world would use something like "w" at a command prompt to gain some basic knowledge of a user being connected in.
I completely agree. In fact if you add in the umteen year old unix apps finger() and write() in to the equation you basically /have/ IM. This was the case in the early 90s, IM is just a combination of existing systems not bothering to follow existing protocols and making it available to the Mac/Windows users of the world. But then that's how things have been over the past decade.
It's probably automatically corrected by IE so none of the windows using /. editors even know what these threads are talking about.
We did this in 1998 ! We had a b/w realvideo stream from the front of the train which users (we assumed would be thousands) could choose to stop at a time for any duration, it only went in circles. It also had an overhead webcam for those unable to use realvideo (probably windows users). This was on the Sun+perl+apache+real based BBC website so many years ago it's not funny.
These [cr|h]ackers/geeks would probably claim that their 1st language is perl/C/asm not English. :)
already been here 7.5 years..
> ..the ability to run non-embedded OS..
The Zaurus runs Linux, it's not really an embedded OS. In fact if you plug in more compact flash storage you can affectively install an entire distribution of any major Linux system. It's not that slow but 64M of ram would make OpenOffice start a tad slowly.
If you plug a Monitor and Keyboard+Mouse in to a Zaurus you end up with a system which is ample to use as a full desktop. This becomes awkward as you are limited in expansion slots available, it has IrDA (keyboard+mouse combo maybe) CF and SD and a propriatory connector, there is a CF card that provides USB host abilities so you could tag some hubs on and have webcam/keyboard/mouse etc, but you'd then have used up the CF and that is where you need the Monitor plugin, or 802.11. So a newer Zaurus with more built in would then be able to be your only desktop PC which the OQO is touted as but at a fraction of the price.
Remember Linux is opensource so pretty much all normal Linux software can be compiled for the Zaurus.
Please note that #3 is available only on x86, while #2 is available on alpha & x86 (might be more if realplayer ran on other versions of linux)
/theory/ it's available on all
um?
List of clients in the pulldown for UNIX on the real site:
Linux/Alpha (Debian)
Linux/Alpha (Red Hat 6.2)
Linux/Sparc (Red Hat 6.2)
Linux/PPC 2000 (TiVo?)
Irix 6.5 (Mips - same as Agenda/PlayStation2 arch).
Irix 6.3
AIX 4.2 (Power CPU)
AIX 4.3
Solaris 2.6 (Sparc)
Solaris 7 (Sparc)
Linux 2.x (libc6 i386)
Linux 2.x (libc6 i386) RPM
hp-ux 11 (God knows what CPU)
Unixware 7 (i386)
In fact..
Known clients from my head:
MacOS - all version to the best of my knowledge, including 68k Mac!
BeOS (heard of, not seen)
QNX (read press releases about, never seen)
TiVo (read press releases about, never seen - would be v2 ppc only)
RiscOS (up to Real v3 - milky had)
linux 1.2.* (up to v5 - still able to download it)
win3.1 (still able to download)
new cmdline player splay for linux-x86 no X needed / hxplay
Win32 (everything) - This is a large list.
PocketPC/Symbian/Mobile Real - Many devices, different compiles of
RealONE for the different devices due to screen size etc..
There are probably others I've forgotten about.
Ogg is completely open source, so in
platforms. But anyone guarentee
somebody has bothered to compile Ogg on as many platforms ?
It's basically a two horse race and Real have always made efforts to provide for just about every platform. Those who complain about the player are basically admitting to being Windows uses as the UNIX players have always been very nice to use. None of this shite theme/skin crap I have to worry about with pointless slow shaped windows in the OS players.
I hired a few for my wedding, I'll encode the video of their use at a later date, but we used them for Usher duties:
http://trap.me.uk/wedding/tabletpc/pics/
It was extremely fun getting Linux working on them, and they added a techy feel to the wedding. I'd probably use them more if they were lighter. I'd be disappointed to see the technology die due to poor marketing or reliance on MS.
I assume you're in the US and don't know who the BBC are. We're talking 30,000 staff spread across the globe, some some noddy office block. This was setup over 5 years ago and computing hardware wasn't necessarily going to cope with 4 boxes.
It's http://www.bbc.co.uk/newsa/n5ctrl/radioseq/analysi s.ram
but was typoed on the link. The realmedia 404 equivalent STILL hasn't been fixed by the content guys - ie, just creating one and uploading. [Damion - One of the techies behind it]
Surely a 4* will mean it'll try later keeping it the queue for a while until it gives up and also confirming the address is valid. a 5* response should mean sorry you're wrong to even try this address. Which should make it now go and bounce this back to whoever sent it. This means that a 5* will fill the disks just as well but it'll be spending it's time trying to email back to the Sender.
Realproducer wants to talk to /dev/dsp we can't make it use esd, though it's
/dev/something and receive audio on it would be VERY useful.
worth noting that the realnetwork techies did add esd support to realplay. Yes
we want to run several encode processes on one box. Cheap PCs are using 5% of
cpu to do encoding so the capacity is there. We have video capture on the spare
pci slot (these are 1U boxes) though we've thought about making some of the
boxes audio only so they have two cards as a solution. This would work, but is
a pain, it means splitting the audio and also limits us to only two encodes on
the box*. A more generic shared audio access would be much better. Some of the
vid-capture cards we've used (Osprey I believe) also had audio inputs with no
linux support. One of my colleagues developed an audio driver for this which
did work to some extent but same limitation as above, but it needed some work
and was limited in the sample rates it could set the audio capture at (I believe
this is more fully supported in 2.4 and 2.5 now). We've also got hold of the
SDK from real which in theory should make it possible to write our own encoder
but we lack time at the moment. Making solaris/linux allow as many apps to open
*we stream a great many stations live 24x7 and want to make many programmes available
on demand. Sometimes a programme description might be for a 3 hour show, but another
smaller show wants a 30 minute snippit from that, so we'd need 3 simultanious encodes
at that point. A more common problem is that realproducer takes a few minutes to finish
writing to disk once it's finished streaming, it holds the audio device during that time so
nose->tail encodes don't fit.
Why not FreeBSD?
We do realmedia encoding with linux, realnetworks don't provide a *BSD binary to the best of my knowledged. The dtext boxes simply needed to be reliable, not massively scalable servers. One possible project will need vmware which is also linux only. We have Free/Open and NetBSD fans in Internet Services, but we're all capable UNIX admins so we're running secure reliable systems on Solaris and Linux, there is nothing to gain from using FreeBSD for example. Personally I like playing q3a so my desision is obvious at home.
The Ogg Vorbis streams should restart shortly, we've had permission to go for it now! We might even get real links from the same JS popups that the 'real' links are on. We've had some space problems... We have to provide realmedia encoding for loads of parts of the bbc, there is a massive quantity of scheduled encoding events. The number of spare realmedia encoding servers was limited, as was audio matrix outputs and rackspace. We were able to set up ogg on a few when we had spare boxes, once we were streaming live Ciaran contacted monty who worked on making it closer to comparible to real, which quite frankly was far superior at lower/modem bitrates. Ogg was rivaling mp3 at 96/128kbps not wm/real at less than that. We also spent months convincing internal red tape using peeps to let us advertise this slightly! Eventually Ogg at the bbc was available, but only to l33t /. kiddies (preaching to the c..), it didn't
really get discovered by enough average joes of the public. We also needed
to nick back some encoders for real streams we'd promised the internal BBC
people. The AOD (audio on demand) project needs loads of encoders, the
embeded player popup crashes NS4 with embeded Linux or Solaris realplay.
[Please help out by complaining to the site owners so it's not just us
doing do! - but not postmaster/support/noc etc, that is us]. We're working
on coding a Solaris and/or Linux kernel module or LD_PRELOADable bit of
code to allow multiple processes to open the audio device and be none the
wiser, this will mean we won't need as many boxes for live 24x7 streams
along side recoded on-demand streams. [help us out] Then we'll have ogg
back in a jiffy! Alternatively you can wait for our move to complete* and
we should have extra encoding capacity. Next task [when asked to provide
feedback about ogg streaming, emails that say "Real is shit it makes popups
and adverts in my desktop waa waa waa.." REALLY don't help Ogg. Many in
the BBC believe it's Windows VS Real, Real can encode on many platforms, be
served reliably on many platforms and be received on many platforms.
Windows Media can only be encoded on Windows and there are limited
platforms that can play it. We're fighting for Ogg, but if your Realmedia
moans get us converted to WMT then the team that are fighting for you will
have quit. Real aren't evil, they are even now supporting Ogg! Real works
on the 9210i, I've checked our scottish footballs streams on one while
ssh'ed to the encoder it was started on!].
*http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/7/25730.html
Well as of 9am 23rd of Sept nearly 40% of what was BBC I.S. of Ogg fame,
started work at the new location, we've suffered a lot, but the new
building is bigger and probably will work out well, if not least due to much
more rackspace for ogg encoders.
New distro? Well the followup article would cover that, there kinda is a BBC specific dist, it would be dry humoUr of course. It's more the build mechanism. Tim Hurmans work on serial net boot and PXE, a shrunk version of slacks color.gz (should be coloUr!)
Supplying FreeDOS with an OS-less machine was just a token gesture to use the loophole in the licence MS has with them. It's small and basic, and to coin a phrase used in the UK "It does exactly what it says on the tin". It's unlikely to be installed by anyone getting one of these PCs, they are going to know a fair amount about OSes anyway or possibly already have a windows version ready to pirate on to the box. Had Dell provided Linux as the token OS offering, they would have no doubt received countless support calls and possibly constant complaints for the most basic of things like getting online or installing new software. Also which distribution? What about a *BSD? They would have had every linux vendor begging to be a partner causing them hastle possibly expecting some money too (unless they shipped with the honest-it-is-easy-to-install debian, but I won't go there). FreeDOS is clearly the best way to go, Linux would have opened a very large can of worms.
This phone can run ssh and has a querty keyboard. I fail to see what more you want? If you're a techy then a 80x24 screen is enough to do your entire job. The phone is not that large and 4 people in our office use them constantly for remote admin for Europes most popular content website. Personally I can type at over 20wpm on the keyboard which means SMS and ssh sessions are easy. Having to carry two devices might be okay but one of them would have to be roughly this size anyway to cater for the keyboard and screen. 9210i comes out shortly and will allow streamed realmedia at up to 42kbps (HCSD), so you could get video or radio stations in your palm almost anywhere (well in Europe anyway, the USA is a tad backwards in the mobile phone world).
You should still work there quitter!