I wouldn't bill per hour on this- in reality, I'd contribute to an OpenSSH project (Never mind that they work on OpenBSD as well- what they do so long as they support OpenSSH is none of my business...kind of like my GPL/LGPL based projects versus work...) if they got a salary and _supported_ OpenSSH proper. If it doesn't need much work, that's fine, they still get the salary and support- because they were there when they're really needed.
Sure, donating to OpenBSD's analogous- but with all the off pronouncements from Theo over time has soured that idea in many people's minds, myself included. It's a tough sell right now.
And Theo's current screed that we're discussing makes it just that much harder- the companies he's commenting about are perfectly within their rights per the license the stuff's under and all. Sun's just taken the team's offer up and privitized the codebase- per the license they chose to put the codebase under. Sorry, can't feel sorry about any of the team in that regard. Same goes for anything else, including IBM sending people their way for support (They didn't write it, the OpenBSD team did...)- they could have said, "Hey, want priority support from us? Donate to the project...", but apparently it occurs to Theo that complaining about it all and doing nothing about it himself directly will get better results.
Honestly. Change the tone and tune and you might be surprised. I'm sure Theo would get better traction for things if he wasn't QUITE so abrasive. Stallman's almost as bad as Theo in this regard. Both of them would get better results if they weren't QUITE so adversarial about things.
I can point to stuff that as long as the Kernel hooks stayed the same and the glibc hooks stayed the same (which is the case for up to 10 years back...) that the code would run. Didn't mean it was a good idea, mind, but there are ways to accomplish running 10 year old binaries out of the box on a modern machine.
Actually NO. Patents allow for an individual to implement the patented device for their own purposes- and to use the same. Therefore, your assertion about Patents is, quite frankly wrong.
A Patent is a right to control the production of a specific implementation of an idea in a device. The key word there is "production"- devices once produced can continue to be used, if you work around the Patent restriction it can be produced again, and you can't demand royalties from someone who merely uses the device as they're not the ones who infringed upon it.
And, don't tell me that I don't know what the system is. I've got one Patent pending and about 5 more about to be filed.
It's tempting to insert an Okie joke (or more specifically a Tuttle joke), but since I grew up all of about 10-12 miles from Tuttle, I'll refrain from doing so.
This is naught but embarassing- Oklahoma's been trying to shed that ass-backwards image for years.
Computer literate, my backside. This man's not got a clue as to what he's running or his hosting provider's running- and then goes about accusing the software vendor of hacking his misconfigured site.
Jerry, do all the Okies in the state and all the ones who've left the state a BIG favor, shut the hell up and apologize for your being an idiot.
...I don't listen to the radio much any more, nor do I watch TV all that often. I DO listen to things like RenRadio, which is populated by performers that don't give a flying flip about what drivel the bulk of your ilk produce. You know what, I've been listening to real music for about 2-3 years now and I'm not very likely to be turning back any time soon- mostly because the media companies have been strip-mining culture for a couple decades now and it's almost all rubbish these days.
Go ahead, take a year off. Other people will gladly step up that don't have contracts that seem to love what they do and are actually GOOD and produce something worth listening to/watching for a change.
Go to any Verizon Wireless store. You'll see the Treo 750 in the smartphone portions of the store. Pick it up, you'll find a Windows Mobile device in your hand. I was keen on having one of them before I found this out because it wasn't 100% certain they were going to do that- and the phone was a vast improvement over the 600 and 650. I'll use a Windows Mobile device if I have to. I won't go out of my way to purchase one- I was used to PalmOS and I'm philisophically against the company that makes Windows Mobile.
But to be worrying about 60% of the code in a one year timeframe, in light of the 10's of millions of lines of code...
If they're actually doing this (I've my doubts...), then Vista won't be out when they say it will be- it'll be delayed by another 2 or so years like Windows 95 ended up being (95 was started approximately 4 years earlier and was only supposed to take a year, year and a half to do- the delays were so bad that the press was making all blow and no go jokes with respect to the codename for the product, "Chicago".).
There's certain contexts that you'll run afoul of other laws...
For example, if you put an onerous clause(s) in your employment agreement and they say they can't sign it in that form, that they're willing to discuss it and ammend it so it's acceptable to both parties- you can't dismiss for that reason unless there's a good deal of negotiations if you didn't disclose the agreement as part of the offer letter. To do so will be an unfair employment practice per Federal law and you can end up in that sort of lawsuit.
Another one would be "laying off" someone, citing financial reasons, and they're the only one laid off. Again, that's problematic for the same reasoning.
Same goes for saying "we no longer need your services", only to hire someone else shortly afterward. If you didn't do anything wrong job performance-wise or didn't do anything insubordinate, you can't just be let go in that manner. The only reasoning you are allowed for this one is if the job posting in question was actually removed- you no longer need their services for what they were doing because you're not doing it anymore.
Most people don't pursue the last two because it's difficult to prove and doesn't usally get anything useful done- but it DOES get tried from time to time and typically when the employer really screws things up. I know, I've been there...
This is not to say that you can't fire people for dismissable things- but there's a lot more to employment law, right to work and at-will employment not withstanding. You CAN get into a bind for dismissing people in the wrong way or under the wrong circumstances- but people do it all the time because people don't get the resources at their disposal to pursue the matter in question.
I think you are. But, you can't call it MechCommander2 or anything with MechCommander in it's name- that'd be trademark infringement and that'd get you in trouble as they explicitly didn't give you that grant of rights on the game.
There's pieces of critical infrastructure being ran with Windows XP on the machines impacting it. Just because the electric utility won't kill somene outright if the power fails, it's still going to mess up a bunch of things if it gets fubared by a virus or viral DRM- even to the point of messing up the air traffic control setup when it runs out of power.
Could it happen? Yes. It very much can. Would it happen? I don't want to find out the hard way.
I'd have to concur on your observations- with one caveat...
Any time I see "brutal honesty that leaves out the free software philosophy." I typically expect to find no honesty present- if it's that brutally honest, it doesn't need to point this out.
...though that'd tipped people off that there were things to listen to to solve the game. Not a bad thing mind, because I could have had them chasing their tails with fake sound cues, etc. and gave some sort of subtle visual ones to boot for the deaf to be able to solve the game. But then, what about the blind, hm? Heck, the blind would have difficulty playing poker or blackjack without some seeing eye help (No easy way to make braille playing cards- esp. ones that wouldn't make reading your opponent's hand easy.).
In all honesty, games is an odd case- on one hand, they rely so much on being able to see, touch, and hear right at the moment that it's somewhat difficult to be catering to the disabled to that extent. That's not to say that they shouldn't be trying all the same- it's just that it's much, much more difficult to make games this way than it is to make something like OpenOffice or MS Office work for the disabled.
he has not found "a distribution that boots" and detects "Italian speech synthesizers, or Braille terminals with the brltty driver."
Considering that Windows largely doesn't support that sort of thing out of the box (i.e. You need to have someone install device drivers in the first place) that while I DO feel for the man, I can't exactly call this a problem of FOSS. Anyone that does is selling something.
To be bluntly honest, statements like
"Variety is bad, we don't want to have to change." Even if Office 12 will force them to change anyway, the disabled representatives request that, as a minimum, "all ODF applications have common functionality and [...] the same keyboard shortcuts".
Considering that Office 12 will most probably break their tools to use the system, the above statement is pretty damn pushy when you get right down to brass tacks. It's not that I don't want to help the disabled- if they're going to frame things in nigh impossible terms (i.e. "We don't want to have to change", but you're going to have to change anyhow- but your changes are a problem, never mind that they actually have a real potential of making things way better than you had previously...) how can there be any dialog or any meeting of the minds? There can't be. And, honestly, I don't think the Blind hold this position as their own. (I sure as hell wouldn't- I'd be raising hell right about now upon hearing this BS they put this forth as the position...)
KinderStart is kind of like Yahoo!, but intended for Children's use. If you'd went to their little site, you'd see this. Since this is being the case, they're trying to claim Google is an overglorified DNS layer. Sorry, since the term "KinderStart" is in your domain name, I don't see plugging in KinderStart and not coming up with a Google hit as being as much of a problem since it's nothing for someone to put "www.kinderstart.com" into their browser- and since Google doesn't filter the link returns like you do, it's no less safe for someone to find it via Google over just plugging in a domain name at random. Better yet, if you plug in "kid safe search engines" in Google, MSN, Yahoo!, etc. you don't GET KinderStart in the list of potentials- even though that's what they really are.
The claims they're making just doesn't work. 70% drop in revenues because of this? Could it be that they're not as good as they think they are, or aren't advertising like they ought to be instead?
I suspect they're going to get the same thing told to them that SearchKing got told- for the reasons I give above.
You can put MPEG-2 into a transport- it's not QUITE as good as MPEG4, but it's better than MPEG-1. And better yet, MPEG4 decoders are VERY prevalent...
Funny that, seems like we HAVE encoders/decoders out there for all the main platforms- and under almost all conditions, many of the mainline DVD players now have MPEG4 decode support (and EPIA motherboards, and...).
Oh, and about h.264...
Well, perhaps that's not prevalent yet (YET...), but there seems to be at least one FOSS implementation usable on all the main platforms:
Hm... Seems to me you missed the point that I was trying to make- there's no good reason for someone to have pushed out a video of a Linux event's speaking session in a format that isn't fully supported on at least Liunx. Technically, WMV isn't one of those sorts of things- MPEG-1, MPEG-2, MPEG-4, MPEG-4/AVC are supported in at least a AVI transport wrapper- and it's supported pretty much everywhere else to boot.
While I have issues with AVI files as well (mostly because it's an inferior format...), MPEG4/h.264 encoded AVI's are tolerable- it's supported pretty much everywhere, even on many of the newer DVD players.
WMV's are silly for a Linux event's video coverage- it's not really 100% supported and it's just as easy as not to GET video into the MPEG4 AVI file format even if you used a Windows machine to capture the video.
The problem with the negative PR comment you just made is one of the fact that it wasn't just "geekland" that they got the negative PR over DRM- it was pretty much common news to the point that the governments were chastising them and taking them to court over it.
With this in mind, it's a little amazing that they're so damn worried about DRM (which got them in trouble, costs for which are yet to be fully determined...) to majorly delay one of their MAIN product offerings to the point that they may well cede their top market position to their other two competitors (Which WILL cost them quite a bit...).
It's not sound business, really. I'd sure as hell not be doing it- DRM's really not that important and from the rumblings of companies like Intel with their media offerings they've got competitors that will gladly cut Sony's throat over that worry as they belive that the best management of "rights" is to make it economically unfeasable in the large part to pirate in the first place.
...it's still not really classes and pretty stilted to code for in the first place. Just because a "winning" environment uses something, it does not go to be that it's good and usable for anything other than that application- and you just don't know how problematic development for VS might be.
Think in terms of something that would have ALL the service manuals for a company's products- a field engineer's tool. Think in terms of a device for rescue operations- a GPS tied into a central database, etc. with a VoIP comm net.
For these, while having a pocket based device is acceptable, a ruggedized wrist based device would probably* be better.
To be sure, some will want one (Hell, I'd like to have one of them- it's a flippin' gadget after all...:-), but you or I isn't really the markets they're envisioning this for- but the tech, etc. could probably be re-purposed for a hand-held unit that can be put in a pocket.
------ * I say that because I couldn't say for 100% certainty that they would be better or that something where it's an eye-tap HUD based interface wouldn't be superior to that.
Considering that there's really not been any real consistency throughout MS' product offerings or anything else about Windows' operating environment:
- Printing that doesn't work the same from Windows 95/98/Me to NT/2000/XP because of different driver rules at the GDI layer.
- API's that change from one ruleset to the next without warning (the move from 16-bit to 32-bit generated at least several API calls that produced nasty results because they used zero as the default but in the 32-bit version they used a string for that parameter and they didn't account for this in the API...)
- Consumer WinCE devices being allowed out the door with missing functionalities (i.e. The Uniden UniPro 100 PDA was missing the Finder and a few other things- for no good reasons other than they were short on firmware memory because of the added recording functionalities- and instead of increasing the BOM costs slightly for more ROM capacity, they opted to omit some of the functionalities that make it consistent with the other WinCE devices.)
- Apps don't have any consistent install/uninstall interface. (While Linux IS better in this regard, it's got many of the same problems...).
- Apps often install their own DLLs to prevent being hosed by other apps and Microsoft when they do updates.
There's tons more. "Windows" only seems consistent because the end-user community sees something that "works like Windows" and is therefore familiar- since it's familiar, they whitewash over all the issues about consistency and it "being easier to use". Issues that plague them day in, day out.
Microsoft may talk the talk, but when the rubber meets the pavement, they're not walking the walk- not even close.
This is the same model *I* have. As I alluded to, you'll have to use the ndiswrapper hack to get the on-board WiFi to work (Again, blame Broadcom for that one- it still works with snagging their 64-bit driver and running ndiswrapper...), you'll have to forego the onboard flash reader (Blame TI for that one...), and you'll need to turn on the UMA memory use in the BIOS to allow you to install anything other than Mandriva or Gentoo and to be able to have 3D support from the ATI provided binary only drivers.
Windows doesn't really do any better- if you just took an XP disc, you'd still have to get the Broadcom drivers for the on-board WiFi, TI's provided drivers for the flash reader, and ATI's 3D drivers for the card. You just get a "better" experience out of the box since they did all that work for you before you ever bought the machine. If they did the same thing for you under Linux, you'd have the same experience. It's not the distributions' fault for that any more than it's MS' fault for the same conditions if you don't have the help from the vendor that you're getting.
This isn't an issue of a "common base" like Michael Dell is talking to- this is DRIVERS. In my case, Mandriva and Gentoo work 100% stably and go on that way. With a little jiggery-pokey, all due to the ATI display adapter in the X200 display chipset doing things unexpected and causing problems on install, etc., you can get all of the distributions working. The driver support for the commonly used integrated WiFi card is Broadcom's doing since they won't come up with drivers like NVidia and ATI does, and won't release driver source and technical details like Intersil and others have. The integrated flash reader not working is due to TI threatening to sue the developer who reverse engineered the "encryption" that TI uses to push the firmware to the device.
In all the above cases, this has absolutely nothing to do the distributions and everything to do with the hardware vendors and the kernel team not being on the same page- mostly in the laps of the hardware vendors, since it's their doing.
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I wouldn't bill per hour on this- in reality, I'd contribute to an OpenSSH project (Never mind that they work on OpenBSD as well- what they do so long as they support OpenSSH is none of my business...kind of like my GPL/LGPL based projects versus work...) if they got a salary and _supported_ OpenSSH proper. If it doesn't need much work, that's fine, they still get the salary and support- because they were there when they're really needed.
Sure, donating to OpenBSD's analogous- but with all the off pronouncements from Theo over time has soured that idea in many people's minds, myself included. It's a tough sell right now.
And Theo's current screed that we're discussing makes it just that much harder- the companies he's commenting about are perfectly within their rights per the license the stuff's under and all. Sun's just taken the team's offer up and privitized the codebase- per the license they chose to put the codebase under. Sorry, can't feel sorry about any of the team in that regard. Same goes for anything else, including IBM sending people their way for support (They didn't write it, the OpenBSD team did...)- they could have said, "Hey, want priority support from us? Donate to the project...", but apparently it occurs to Theo that complaining about it all and doing nothing about it himself directly will get better results.
Honestly. Change the tone and tune and you might be surprised. I'm sure Theo would get better traction for things if he wasn't QUITE so abrasive. Stallman's almost as bad as Theo in this regard. Both of them would get better results if they weren't QUITE so adversarial about things.
I can point to stuff that as long as the Kernel hooks stayed the same and the glibc hooks stayed the same (which is the case for up to 10 years back...) that the code would run. Didn't mean it was a good idea, mind, but there are ways to accomplish running 10 year old binaries out of the box on a modern machine.
Actually NO. Patents allow for an individual to implement the patented device for their own purposes- and to use the same. Therefore, your assertion about Patents is, quite frankly wrong.
A Patent is a right to control the production of a specific implementation of an idea in a device.
The key word there is "production"- devices once produced can continue to be used, if you work around the Patent restriction it can be produced again, and you can't demand royalties from someone who merely uses the device as they're not the ones who infringed upon it.
And, don't tell me that I don't know what the system is. I've got one Patent pending and about 5 more about to be filed.
Oh no, they also recycled the code right along with the hype...
It's tempting to insert an Okie joke (or more specifically a Tuttle joke), but since I grew up all of about 10-12 miles from Tuttle, I'll refrain from doing so.
This is naught but embarassing- Oklahoma's been trying to shed that ass-backwards image for years.
Computer literate, my backside. This man's not got a clue as to what he's running or his hosting
provider's running- and then goes about accusing the software vendor of hacking his misconfigured site.
Jerry, do all the Okies in the state and all the ones who've left the state a BIG favor, shut the hell up
and apologize for your being an idiot.
...I don't listen to the radio much any more, nor do I watch TV all that often. I DO listen to things like RenRadio, which is populated by performers that don't give a flying flip about what drivel the bulk of your ilk produce. You know what, I've been listening to real music for about 2-3 years now and I'm not very likely to be turning back any time soon- mostly because the media companies have been strip-mining culture for a couple decades now and it's almost all rubbish these days.
Go ahead, take a year off. Other people will gladly step up that don't have contracts that seem to love what they do and are actually GOOD and produce something worth listening to/watching for a change.
Go to any Verizon Wireless store. You'll see the Treo 750 in the smartphone portions of the store. Pick it up, you'll find a Windows Mobile device in your hand. I was keen on having one of them before I found this out because it wasn't 100% certain they were going to do that- and the phone was a vast improvement over the 600 and 650. I'll use a Windows Mobile device if I have to. I won't go out of my way to purchase one- I was used to PalmOS and I'm philisophically against the company that makes Windows Mobile.
But to be worrying about 60% of the code in a one year timeframe, in light of the 10's of millions of lines of code...
If they're actually doing this (I've my doubts...), then Vista won't be out when they say it will be- it'll be delayed by another 2 or so years like Windows 95 ended up being (95 was started approximately 4 years earlier and was only supposed to take a year, year and a half to do- the delays were so bad that the press was making all blow and no go jokes with respect to the codename for the product, "Chicago".).
There's certain contexts that you'll run afoul of other laws...
For example, if you put an onerous clause(s) in your employment agreement and they say they can't sign it in that form, that they're willing to discuss it and ammend it so it's acceptable to both parties- you can't dismiss for that reason unless there's a good deal of negotiations if you didn't disclose the agreement as part of the offer letter. To do so will be an unfair employment practice per Federal law and you can end up in that sort of lawsuit.
Another one would be "laying off" someone, citing financial reasons, and they're the only one laid off. Again, that's problematic for the same reasoning.
Same goes for saying "we no longer need your services", only to hire someone else shortly afterward. If you didn't do anything wrong job performance-wise or didn't do anything insubordinate, you can't just be let go in that manner. The only reasoning you are allowed for this one is if the job posting in question was actually removed- you no longer need their services for what they were doing because you're not doing it anymore.
Most people don't pursue the last two because it's difficult to prove and doesn't usally get anything useful done- but it DOES get tried from time to time and typically when the employer really screws things up. I know, I've been there...
This is not to say that you can't fire people for dismissable things- but there's a lot more to employment law, right to work and at-will employment not withstanding. You CAN get into a bind for dismissing people in the wrong way or under the wrong circumstances- but people do it all the time because people don't get the resources at their disposal to pursue the matter in question.
I think you are. But, you can't call it MechCommander2 or anything with MechCommander in it's name- that'd be trademark infringement and that'd get you in trouble as they explicitly didn't give you that grant of rights on the game.
But then, I'm not a lawyer.
There's pieces of critical infrastructure being ran with Windows XP on the machines impacting it. Just because the electric utility won't kill somene outright if the power fails, it's still going to mess up a bunch of things if it gets fubared by a virus or viral DRM- even to the point of messing up the air traffic control setup when it runs out of power.
Could it happen? Yes. It very much can.
Would it happen? I don't want to find out the hard way.
I'd have to concur on your observations- with one caveat...
Any time I see "brutal honesty that leaves out the free software philosophy." I typically expect to find no honesty present- if it's that brutally honest, it doesn't need to point this out.
...though that'd tipped people off that there were things to listen to to solve the game. Not a bad thing mind, because I could have had them chasing their tails with fake sound cues, etc. and gave some sort of subtle visual ones to boot for the deaf to be able to solve the game. But then, what about the blind, hm? Heck, the blind would have difficulty playing poker or blackjack without some seeing eye help (No easy way to make braille playing cards- esp. ones that wouldn't make reading your opponent's hand easy.).
In all honesty, games is an odd case- on one hand, they rely so much on being able to see, touch, and hear right at the moment that it's somewhat difficult to be catering to the disabled to that extent. That's not to say that they shouldn't be trying all the same- it's just that it's much, much more difficult to make games this way than it is to make something like OpenOffice or MS Office work for the disabled.
Considering that Windows largely doesn't support that sort of thing out of the box (i.e. You need to have someone install device drivers in the first place) that while I DO feel for the man, I can't exactly call this a problem of FOSS. Anyone that does is selling something.
To be bluntly honest, statements like
Considering that Office 12 will most probably break their tools to use the system, the above statement is pretty damn pushy when you get right down to brass tacks. It's not that I don't want to help the disabled- if they're going to frame things in nigh impossible terms (i.e. "We don't want to have to change", but you're going to have to change anyhow- but your changes are a problem, never mind that they actually have a real potential of making things way better than you had previously...) how can there be any dialog or any meeting of the minds? There can't be. And, honestly, I don't think the Blind hold this position as their own. (I sure as hell wouldn't- I'd be raising hell right about now upon hearing this BS they put this forth as the position...)
KinderStart is kind of like Yahoo!, but intended for Children's use. If you'd went to their little site, you'd see this.
Since this is being the case, they're trying to claim Google is an overglorified DNS layer. Sorry, since the term
"KinderStart" is in your domain name, I don't see plugging in KinderStart and not coming up with a Google hit as being as much of a problem since it's nothing for someone to put "www.kinderstart.com" into their browser- and since Google doesn't filter the link returns like you do, it's no less safe for someone to find it via Google over just plugging in a domain name at random. Better yet, if you plug in "kid safe search engines" in Google, MSN, Yahoo!, etc. you don't GET KinderStart in the list of potentials- even though that's what they really are.
The claims they're making just doesn't work. 70% drop in revenues because of this? Could it be that they're not as good as they think they are, or aren't advertising like they ought to be instead?
I suspect they're going to get the same thing told to them that SearchKing got told- for the reasons I give above.
You can put MPEG-2 into a transport- it's not QUITE as good as MPEG4, but it's better than MPEG-1. And better yet, MPEG4 decoders are VERY prevalent...
http://www.divx.com/
http://www.xvid.org/
http://www.3ivx.com/
Funny that, seems like we HAVE encoders/decoders out there for all the main platforms- and under almost all conditions, many of the mainline DVD players now have MPEG4 decode support (and EPIA motherboards, and...).
Oh, and about h.264...
Well, perhaps that's not prevalent yet (YET...), but there seems to be at least one FOSS implementation usable on all the main platforms:
http://developers.videolan.org/x264.html
Hm... Seems to me you missed the point that I was trying to make- there's no good reason for someone to have
pushed out a video of a Linux event's speaking session in a format that isn't fully supported on at least Liunx.
Technically, WMV isn't one of those sorts of things- MPEG-1, MPEG-2, MPEG-4, MPEG-4/AVC are supported in at least a AVI transport wrapper- and it's supported pretty much everywhere else to boot.
Give that man a cigar!
While I have issues with AVI files as well (mostly because it's an inferior format...), MPEG4/h.264 encoded AVI's are tolerable- it's supported pretty much everywhere, even on many of the newer DVD players.
WMV's are silly for a Linux event's video coverage- it's not really 100% supported and it's just as easy as not to GET video into the MPEG4 AVI file format even if you used a Windows machine to capture the video.
The problem with the negative PR comment you just made is one of the fact that it wasn't
just "geekland" that they got the negative PR over DRM- it was pretty much
common news to the point that the governments were chastising them and taking them to
court over it.
With this in mind, it's a little amazing that they're so damn worried about DRM (which
got them in trouble, costs for which are yet to be fully determined...) to majorly delay
one of their MAIN product offerings to the point that they may well
cede their top market position to their other two competitors (Which WILL cost them quite
a bit...).
It's not sound business, really. I'd sure as hell not be doing it- DRM's really not
that important and from the rumblings of companies like Intel with their media offerings
they've got competitors that will gladly cut Sony's throat over that worry as they
belive that the best management of "rights" is to make it economically unfeasable
in the large part to pirate in the first place.
...it's still not really classes and pretty stilted to code for in the first place. Just because a "winning" environment uses something, it does not go to be that it's good and usable for anything other than that application- and you just don't know how problematic development for VS might be.
...not mostly old stuff... But hey, that's marketing for you.
Stop thinking in terms of YOUR using it.
:-), but you or I isn't really the markets they're envisioning this for- but the tech, etc. could probably be re-purposed for a hand-held unit that can be put in a pocket.
Think in terms of something that would have ALL the service manuals for a company's products- a field engineer's tool.
Think in terms of a device for rescue operations- a GPS tied into a central database, etc. with a VoIP comm net.
For these, while having a pocket based device is acceptable, a ruggedized wrist based device would probably* be better.
To be sure, some will want one (Hell, I'd like to have one of them- it's a flippin' gadget after all...
------
* I say that because I couldn't say for 100% certainty that they would be better or that something where it's an eye-tap HUD based interface wouldn't be superior to that.
Considering that there's really not been any real consistency throughout MS' product offerings or
anything else about Windows' operating environment:
- Printing that doesn't work the same from Windows 95/98/Me to NT/2000/XP because of different
driver rules at the GDI layer.
- API's that change from one ruleset to the next without warning (the move from 16-bit to 32-bit
generated at least several API calls that produced nasty results because they used zero as the
default but in the 32-bit version they used a string for that parameter and they didn't account
for this in the API...)
- Consumer WinCE devices being allowed out the door with missing functionalities (i.e. The Uniden
UniPro 100 PDA was missing the Finder and a few other things- for no good reasons other than they
were short on firmware memory because of the added recording functionalities- and instead of
increasing the BOM costs slightly for more ROM capacity, they opted to omit some of the functionalities
that make it consistent with the other WinCE devices.)
- Apps don't have any consistent install/uninstall interface. (While Linux IS better in this regard,
it's got many of the same problems...).
- Apps often install their own DLLs to prevent being hosed by other apps and Microsoft when they do
updates.
There's tons more. "Windows" only seems consistent because the end-user community sees something that
"works like Windows" and is therefore familiar- since it's familiar, they whitewash over all the
issues about consistency and it "being easier to use". Issues that plague them day in, day out.
Microsoft may talk the talk, but when the rubber meets the pavement, they're not walking the walk- not even close.
Here's at least ONE laptop you can buy that you can reasonably expect to work:
5 69862-7259129?v=glance&n=541966
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B000AAPY8S/104-7
This is the same model *I* have. As I alluded to, you'll have to use the ndiswrapper hack to get the
on-board WiFi to work (Again, blame Broadcom for that one- it still works with snagging their 64-bit driver and running ndiswrapper...), you'll have to forego the onboard flash reader (Blame TI for that one...), and you'll need to turn on the UMA memory use in the BIOS to allow you to install anything other than Mandriva or Gentoo and to be able to have 3D support from the ATI provided binary only drivers.
Windows doesn't really do any better- if you just took an XP disc, you'd still have to get the Broadcom drivers for the on-board WiFi, TI's provided drivers for the flash reader, and ATI's 3D drivers for the card. You just get a "better" experience out of the box since they did all that work for you before you ever bought the machine. If they did the same thing for you under Linux, you'd have the same experience. It's not the distributions' fault for that any more than it's MS' fault for the same conditions if you don't have the help from the vendor that you're getting.
This isn't an issue of a "common base" like Michael Dell is talking to- this is DRIVERS . In my case, Mandriva and Gentoo work 100% stably and go on that way. With a little jiggery-pokey, all due to the ATI display adapter in the X200 display chipset doing things unexpected and causing problems on install, etc., you can get all of the distributions working. The driver support for the commonly used integrated WiFi card is Broadcom's doing since they won't come up with drivers like NVidia and ATI does, and won't release driver source and technical details like Intersil and others have. The integrated flash reader not working is due to TI threatening to sue the developer who reverse engineered the "encryption" that TI uses to push the firmware to the device.
In all the above cases, this has absolutely nothing to do the distributions and everything to do with the hardware vendors and the kernel team not being on the same page- mostly in the laps of the hardware vendors, since it's their doing.
Why do people insist on using THAT format? There's actually BETTER formats out there that are supported
officially on more than just Windows.
Ah well, that's a different argument, and I'll keep working that one elsewhere...