It seems like it'd be really helpful for a lot of the people that regularly blog to have a pretty non-technical introduction to it, but I'm not sure those same people would know anything about O'Reilly or read Slashdot.
HP needs a big cash inflow to survive. Microsoft currently supplies that. Linux currently doesn't. Case closed. Corporations tend to think of themselves of amoral money-making ventures, and often, with huge companies like HP, any overtures to supporting open source are simply PR moves. PR moves are usually less important than simple cash inflow. If the inflow is going to disrupted by PR (like Bruce Perens), they just chop it off.
It seems like they could still couple hardware and software if they went to x86, just not as tightly. They could keep lists of "recommended" hardware, with some sort of rating or ranking system. Perhaps they wouldn't even attempt to write drivers for more than a couple peripherals and allow open source drivers to emerge if they're needed.
Slashdot Mirror
Chris Dede's group at Harvard is doing something like this:
http://muve.gse.harvard.edu/muvees2003/
I saw him present this at AERA this year.
You have to root around to find the science experiment stuff.
It seems like it'd be really helpful for a lot of the people that regularly blog to have a pretty non-technical introduction to it, but I'm not sure those same people would know anything about O'Reilly or read Slashdot.
HP needs a big cash inflow to survive. Microsoft currently supplies that. Linux currently doesn't. Case closed. Corporations tend to think of themselves of amoral money-making ventures, and often, with huge companies like HP, any overtures to supporting open source are simply PR moves. PR moves are usually less important than simple cash inflow. If the inflow is going to disrupted by PR (like Bruce Perens), they just chop it off.
It seems like they could still couple hardware and software if they went to x86, just not as tightly. They could keep lists of "recommended" hardware, with some sort of rating or ranking system. Perhaps they wouldn't even attempt to write drivers for more than a couple peripherals and allow open source drivers to emerge if they're needed.
Just a thought.
Here is an example of a lego robot designed by a genetic algorithm.