Actually not true. In fact, your statement is the opposite of true because other vehicles / pedestrians / bicycles involved in a collision with a Model X have a better chance of survival than they would with an alternative vehicle, not worse. Unlike most SUVs the Model X does not achieve improved results from high mass or high body rigidity that can overwhelm another vehicle or obstacle but rather because it has larger and better designed crumple zones which allow longer and smoother deceleration in a collision. This is possible because the entire drive train is down below the collision height. For pedestrian and cyclist collisions the front hood additionally is designed to crush under impact and soften the blow. They can do this with the X better than most ICE vehicles because there's no rigid engine under the front hood.
These are the same guys that predicted, in 2015, that there would be an installed base of 1000 electric vehicles with over 200 mile range in 2040. In 2015 there were already over 100,000.
Basically, you can just ignore anything that comes out of the EIA. They aren't even trying to make their lies make sense any more.
Its easy to answer that, in terms of Gbps/Km/$ that fiber occupies a very special niche and that given certain assumptions it's very hard to beat. Other posters have already made that point, and it's a good one. However there's also the point that what actually "wins" in the long run probably needs to break some of those assumptions that fiber requires. So in the long run it's unlikely that most links go to fiber. Wireless today serves a lot more people than fiber does, and that balance is likely to shift more in favor of wireless over time. Fiber's achilles heel is that you have to run a fiber to every individual location where you want access, and digging trenches is really slow, expensive, and complex. The thus connected devices also need to have physical link attached to them. There are some places where it makes sense to do that, and over time that list of places will grow, but it will always be a small subset of all the places that people want to have access. In the meantime wireless will continue to improve by leaps and bounds because the interface to the overwhelming majority of leaf devices is wireless and it's going to stay that way. Fiber is a niche technology serving a small subset of all connected devices - and it's going to stay that way. The reasons for that are both technological and financial.
The theoretical data carrying capacity of an optical fiber is ridiculously high, but largely inaccessible to near future technologies. The nonlinearity of direct modulated lasers, when combined with the signaling rate make modulation schemes beyond NRZ prohibitive in the near term. Getting to higher data rates per fiber requires increasing the high frequency corner (very expensive) or going to multiple colors (even more expensive). And for building to building distribution you still have to dig that trench (really, really, really expensive). Nothing on the roadmap today is going to change any of these variables in the next 20 years. In principle things can be done about this, but nobody is spending significant amounts of money on those technologies. Wireless, OTOH, is seeing a lot of investment.
The theoretical bandwidth of a point to point directed RF link constrained to several GHz of spectrum is quite a bit smaller than what fiber offers, but still vastly in excess of what we use today and it's full potential is much more accessible to near future technologies. If we were really up against the limits of RF capacity today then, yeah, fiber would be a good bet. But we're not - wireless speeds and network capacities can and will grow by orders of magnitude before we start to bump up against the theoretical limitations. It's cost effective, from a network architecture standpoint, to get in-home wireless links that are much faster than the available ISP speeds almost everywhere today, though the business models of cell companies are not yet aligned with that service model. LTE can get up to 1Gbps for fixed links and routinely hits 100Mbps for mobile links and 5G is likely to be 100x faster on both fronts. Increasing capacity in those networks is a capital expenditure decision, it is not being limited in any meaningful way by physics. Wireless companies in the U.S. are trying hard to keep their (extremely) high margin business, so their capital outlays are not aligned with providing lots of cheap bits. But providers in other parts of the world show that the economics of being a wireless pipe service are not actually all that bad.
Fiber does and will continue to own long haul, back haul, core networks, data centers, and a lot of fixed point services. And it will grow. But wireless is going to grow much faster both in terms of capability and in terms of device connections.
Kerry doesn't seem to have noticed that our government, particularly his boss's administration, is not giving prizes to leakers but rather jailing them. In particular Snowden's prize did not come from the U.S. government, but the mad scramble to capture and punish him certainly did.
I think you're grossly off on this analysis. Mischaracterizing a single element of a long argument, and then refuting that one misperception it a weak way of refuting the whole argument. On a small enough scale all progress is discontinuous. Just because the fastest Pentium today is the same speed as the fastest Pentium was yesterday doesn't mean Moore's law is over. In his book, Kurzweil looks at an enormous amount of data in many contexts and generally provides fairly conservative analysis of what is fundamentally very non-intuitive stuff. Then he has the guts to say that the data is right, and human intuition is wrong. I have a lot of respect for anyone who is willing to stand up there and take the shots that come out of making provably wrong predictions.
Look, if you want to be an empiricist go back and look at the hard predictions he made in his earlier work in the 80's and 90's. His track record to date is quite good.
Right up until it was demonstrated, the scientific consensus was that heavier than air flight was impossible. A lot of scholarly work purported to 'prove' this statement. Those who promoted the notion of human flight were generally seen as crackpots, and a lot of them were crackpots. But in the end, we did achieve flight, and in a sense, the crackpots were right.
You can have any opinion you want, but if you don't follow the data, and you don't employ real analysis, its going to be a pretty lame opinion.
Well, now I'm convinced that Microsoft has really seen the light. There's nothing like a serious discussion between different points of view to settle an issue.
What a relief. I guess MS isn't completely full of crap after all.
Your most recent set of novels is based largely on historical events, but you also take liberties with the history. Did you choose a set of guidelines on when and where you would deviate from historical fact? If so what were the guidelines?
Take a step back and put it in perspective. Urgency is an illusion. The consequences of failure are minor. No one will die. You won't get fired. You won't lose the contract. And even if you do; so what.
Use the snowball as a visualization aid. The snowball is what the earth will be in ten billion years, when we're all dead, life on earth is long gone, and the human race is a lost footnote in the unwritten encyclopedia of galactic history. In the mind numbingly vast halls of space and the inconceivable depths of time none of this daily crap matters at all, not the tiniest bit.
So relax and enjoy your life. In the end, no one will be around to remember, or to care. Do your best because you enjoy the challenge, because you want to live, and learn, and explore. Do it because you feel like it. Or don't.
Here's another vote for the Fujitsu P-2000 series. I had similar requirements and ended up with this device. The clincher for me was the battery life - put a couple of high capacity batteries in this puppy and you can go all day on a charge (10+ hours in my experience). Its also fairly cheap, really small, and quite linux compatible (everything but the winmodem). RH8 installs directly from the built in CD in 30 minutes with no hassles.
BTW - if you want to discourage hardware vendors from hitting you with the windows tax; one strategy is to go through the motions of getting the refund. Get a headset and park on their 800 line until you work through their whole service department. Maybe you'll get the refund, maybe you won't. The vendor won't hang up on you because the EULA clearly entitles you to return the product for refund. If they do kick you off just call back and start over with anothe operator. Don't mention the first call. Do it while web surfing some weekday. Sure it takes some time, but its entertaining and it makes the statement that you want sent. Its not as fun as picketing, but its more effective because it costs them money to deal with you - especially if you get escalated to a service center manager. If everyone who wanted the refund did this then vendors would pretty quickly put the machinery in place to enable refunds because it would be cheaper for them than the alternative of spending service center personnel resources.
Read the EULA before you try this so you know what you are talking about. I xerox it and highlight the parts I want to quote back to them. And don't give up easily - they'll try to get you off the phone. Remember the point of the exercise is to make it expensive and painful to the most senior people that you can get on the line. Be calm and reasonable and relentless. And have fun!
In hybrid fiber/copper systems the central office transmits on fiber to a field box located in the local neighborhood. Equipment in that field box pulls data off of the fiber and puts in onto copper for local distribution. All the DSL concentrators on the market are designed for installation in a central office. Because the environmental and service needs of field equipment are different, so this stuff can't be deployed in the field boxes. Your infrastructure is great - in fact, its the right way to do this stuff. But most of the rest of the world is wired another way (copper all the way to the CO) so nobody is making hardware to service your setup right now. Considering the current downturn in the fortunes of DSL providers, the new equipment for hybrid setups could be a long time coming. Or maybe it'll be out next week;).
After my last startup hit the wall I went looking for another place for my whole team to go as a group. I was interested in working in SV, but the whole team lived in LA. I stumbled upon a great little company in the fiber optics business that had a founder who was actually interested in finding ways to tap remote labor resources. The market in SV is, of course, very tight for tech types so this is a significant advantage for the company.
Well, we all signed up and I set about creating a VPN infrastructure to support this (linux, linux, everywhere). One year later it seems to be working very well. We have about five remote offices within about 400 miles of SV - some are just a long commute away (like San Francisco).
In our basic setup we use people who can come into the office at least one day a week. The company covers their transport costs if they fly. The other days they work from home or a remote office that we set up near their home. We are pretty much a no-paper outfit and we use email and instant messaging as our core communications mechanism, so being at home is not really much different from being in a cube. Don't get me wrong - it takes motivation and you have to become communications proactive - but it's a great lifestyle. Coming into the office every week really helps keep you in touch with the team and alleviates the cabin fever. You get the flexibility of being an offsite consultant without the headaches that go with running your own business. I'll never go back to the "old fashioned" way of work if I can avoid it.
BTW (here comes the plug) - we're growing and hiring like mad. Check us out at www.finisar.com, or you could email me at jdouma@NOSPAM.finisar.com if you want more details on how we do remote work.
Speaking as someone who hires (and manages) electrical engineers in small, high tech companies (and who has been one for fifteen years):
I have personally never seen a EE job that had PE as a requirement. I have never seen a resume that had a PE on it (and thus have never hired such an engineer). I believe that PE's are pretty rare for EE's and very few outfits look for them. Just for reference: I've looked at many hundreds of EE resumes over the years and hired people for dozens of jobs.
In any case, the only place that it might be useful would be coming out of college into your first job. After that prospective employers will judge you primarily on the skills and experience aquired in your previous positions. Hell, I don't even have a degree, but I worked at startup companies for the first 5 years I was out of school and got a lot of really good experience. Consequently I have never failed to get an offer for any job that I applied for. Frankly, the market for EE's is so hot right now that most places will give you the benefit of the doubt if you can just get to the interview.
One thing that is very useful to keep in mind is that if you apply for a job by sending a resume to the HR department you should know that the people who vet the resumes don't know much about the jobs, they just check a resume for keywords like BS degree, VHDL, and Unix. The specific list of keywords you will be compared to will come from a brief description of the job requirements supplied by the requesting manager - the guy who you would end up working for. Believe it or not this is usually the biggest hurdle - 90% of resumes for a job usually get cut at this stage. If you have all the keywords he asked for you'll usually get a call.
The bottom line is this: if you get to the interview and you come across as smart, hard working, easygoing, and with the right basic skills and some relevant experience you're golden. It also helps to be a handicapped minority woman, but what can you do?
I've been working on this problem pretty intensively for the last 2 years for a company that makes automobile navigation systems. We're using Linux (currently 2.0.34) for our next gen version (out later this year). As a lot of people have noted, storage is probably the biggest issue. Its not too hard to meet automotive environmental specs with silicon, but commonly available rotating media are a different story. I'd love to be able to use solid state storage, but both maps (for navigation) and MP3's take up so much space that solid state will not allow us to build an product with an attractive featureset within our target price of less than $1000 (hopefully, a lot less). CD's are more sensitive than hard drives all around, but the failure modes on hard drives are more catastrophic so you need to be extra careful with them. Shock mounting handles this problem nicely and inexpensively in all cases, although building the unit so that your typical auto installer can't kill it by dropping it is still difficult. The bigger problem in the real world is temp. In principle its not hard to make inexpensive DVD's, CD's, or hard drives work over large temp ranges, but nobody does because the volume market is all in office equipment. The stuff that is built for cars is very optimized and not adaptable to other applications by and large (like a data device) - I know, I've done it both ways. In the end, if you want to make something inexpensive you either have to compromise on some things (mainly temp range) or spend a LOT of money tooling up your own storage device.
Our device uses a very fast MIPS processor, has audio on board (the user interface is speech recoginition/synthesis) will come in hard drive and DVD versions, is spec'd to work from 5C to 55C (portable use or car interior, not trunk) and is about the size of a fat walkman. If you are serious about developing software for such a platform contact me, maybe we can work something out.
I had a very similar experience with GTE/Linux (Could you spell UNIX please? said the operator). After 20 calls to GTE I found out that ordering service through an affiliated ISP was quicker and easier, and allowed a much broader range of service plans (with static IP's and no filtering for a start). The ISP I settled on is a Linux house, they understand what I want to do, they hate Windows, and they give good support. Plus there was no hassling with morons at GTE, the ISP handled all that stuff gratis.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually not true. In fact, your statement is the opposite of true because other vehicles / pedestrians / bicycles involved in a collision with a Model X have a better chance of survival than they would with an alternative vehicle, not worse. Unlike most SUVs the Model X does not achieve improved results from high mass or high body rigidity that can overwhelm another vehicle or obstacle but rather because it has larger and better designed crumple zones which allow longer and smoother deceleration in a collision. This is possible because the entire drive train is down below the collision height. For pedestrian and cyclist collisions the front hood additionally is designed to crush under impact and soften the blow. They can do this with the X better than most ICE vehicles because there's no rigid engine under the front hood.
Linking articles from credulous, retweet "journalists" and energy/auto industry sock puppets? Nice to know Slashdot has no problem with fake news.
These are the same guys that predicted, in 2015, that there would be an installed base of 1000 electric vehicles with over 200 mile range in 2040. In 2015 there were already over 100,000.
Basically, you can just ignore anything that comes out of the EIA. They aren't even trying to make their lies make sense any more.
Its easy to answer that, in terms of Gbps/Km/$ that fiber occupies a very special niche and that given certain assumptions it's very hard to beat. Other posters have already made that point, and it's a good one. However there's also the point that what actually "wins" in the long run probably needs to break some of those assumptions that fiber requires. So in the long run it's unlikely that most links go to fiber. Wireless today serves a lot more people than fiber does, and that balance is likely to shift more in favor of wireless over time. Fiber's achilles heel is that you have to run a fiber to every individual location where you want access, and digging trenches is really slow, expensive, and complex. The thus connected devices also need to have physical link attached to them. There are some places where it makes sense to do that, and over time that list of places will grow, but it will always be a small subset of all the places that people want to have access. In the meantime wireless will continue to improve by leaps and bounds because the interface to the overwhelming majority of leaf devices is wireless and it's going to stay that way. Fiber is a niche technology serving a small subset of all connected devices - and it's going to stay that way. The reasons for that are both technological and financial.
The theoretical data carrying capacity of an optical fiber is ridiculously high, but largely inaccessible to near future technologies. The nonlinearity of direct modulated lasers, when combined with the signaling rate make modulation schemes beyond NRZ prohibitive in the near term. Getting to higher data rates per fiber requires increasing the high frequency corner (very expensive) or going to multiple colors (even more expensive). And for building to building distribution you still have to dig that trench (really, really, really expensive). Nothing on the roadmap today is going to change any of these variables in the next 20 years. In principle things can be done about this, but nobody is spending significant amounts of money on those technologies. Wireless, OTOH, is seeing a lot of investment.
The theoretical bandwidth of a point to point directed RF link constrained to several GHz of spectrum is quite a bit smaller than what fiber offers, but still vastly in excess of what we use today and it's full potential is much more accessible to near future technologies. If we were really up against the limits of RF capacity today then, yeah, fiber would be a good bet. But we're not - wireless speeds and network capacities can and will grow by orders of magnitude before we start to bump up against the theoretical limitations. It's cost effective, from a network architecture standpoint, to get in-home wireless links that are much faster than the available ISP speeds almost everywhere today, though the business models of cell companies are not yet aligned with that service model. LTE can get up to 1Gbps for fixed links and routinely hits 100Mbps for mobile links and 5G is likely to be 100x faster on both fronts. Increasing capacity in those networks is a capital expenditure decision, it is not being limited in any meaningful way by physics. Wireless companies in the U.S. are trying hard to keep their (extremely) high margin business, so their capital outlays are not aligned with providing lots of cheap bits. But providers in other parts of the world show that the economics of being a wireless pipe service are not actually all that bad.
Fiber does and will continue to own long haul, back haul, core networks, data centers, and a lot of fixed point services. And it will grow. But wireless is going to grow much faster both in terms of capability and in terms of device connections.
"go to jail rather than win prizes"
Kerry doesn't seem to have noticed that our government, particularly his boss's administration, is not giving prizes to leakers but rather jailing them. In particular Snowden's prize did not come from the U.S. government, but the mad scramble to capture and punish him certainly did.
Nice of them to offer to fund 25,000 police salaries with the money they'll make when pirating is snuffed out.
You must be mistaken. I can't believe they'd mislead us like that.
What's your best guess as to how long it will take to get a full suite of SENS therapies working in a mouse?
What's your best guess as to how much money it will take to get a full suite of SENS therapies working in a mouse?
How many barn swallows can fly at 40,000 ft? Just what are you comparing?
I think you're grossly off on this analysis. Mischaracterizing a single element of a long argument, and then refuting that one misperception it a weak way of refuting the whole argument. On a small enough scale all progress is discontinuous. Just because the fastest Pentium today is the same speed as the fastest Pentium was yesterday doesn't mean Moore's law is over. In his book, Kurzweil looks at an enormous amount of data in many contexts and generally provides fairly conservative analysis of what is fundamentally very non-intuitive stuff. Then he has the guts to say that the data is right, and human intuition is wrong. I have a lot of respect for anyone who is willing to stand up there and take the shots that come out of making provably wrong predictions.
Look, if you want to be an empiricist go back and look at the hard predictions he made in his earlier work in the 80's and 90's. His track record to date is quite good.
Right up until it was demonstrated, the scientific consensus was that heavier than air flight was impossible. A lot of scholarly work purported to 'prove' this statement. Those who promoted the notion of human flight were generally seen as crackpots, and a lot of them were crackpots. But in the end, we did achieve flight, and in a sense, the crackpots were right.
You can have any opinion you want, but if you don't follow the data, and you don't employ real analysis, its going to be a pretty lame opinion.
Well, now I'm convinced that Microsoft has really seen the light. There's nothing like a serious discussion between different points of view to settle an issue.
What a relief. I guess MS isn't completely full of crap after all.
Your most recent set of novels is based largely on historical events, but you also take liberties with the history. Did you choose a set of guidelines on when and where you would deviate from historical fact? If so what were the guidelines?
Take a step back and put it in perspective. Urgency is an illusion. The consequences of failure are minor. No one will die. You won't get fired. You won't lose the contract. And even if you do; so what.
Use the snowball as a visualization aid. The snowball is what the earth will be in ten billion years, when we're all dead, life on earth is long gone, and the human race is a lost footnote in the unwritten encyclopedia of galactic history. In the mind numbingly vast halls of space and the inconceivable depths of time none of this daily crap matters at all, not the tiniest bit.
So relax and enjoy your life. In the end, no one will be around to remember, or to care. Do your best because you enjoy the challenge, because you want to live, and learn, and explore. Do it because you feel like it. Or don't.
The president of India probably gets to meet a lot of nutty religious leaders.
So what technologies are pursued today and almost certainly doable, and are widely derided or ignored by people who should know better?
Machine phase chemistry (The real stuff - Drexler)
Cryonics
Space Elevator
I wonder if he would qualify for protection under the new whistleblower laws?
Here's another vote for the Fujitsu P-2000 series. I had similar requirements and ended up with this device. The clincher for me was the battery life - put a couple of high capacity batteries in this puppy and you can go all day on a charge (10+ hours in my experience). Its also fairly cheap, really small, and quite linux compatible (everything but the winmodem). RH8 installs directly from the built in CD in 30 minutes with no hassles.
BTW - if you want to discourage hardware vendors from hitting you with the windows tax; one strategy is to go through the motions of getting the refund. Get a headset and park on their 800 line until you work through their whole service department. Maybe you'll get the refund, maybe you won't. The vendor won't hang up on you because the EULA clearly entitles you to return the product for refund. If they do kick you off just call back and start over with anothe operator. Don't mention the first call. Do it while web surfing some weekday. Sure it takes some time, but its entertaining and it makes the statement that you want sent. Its not as fun as picketing, but its more effective because it costs them money to deal with you - especially if you get escalated to a service center manager. If everyone who wanted the refund did this then vendors would pretty quickly put the machinery in place to enable refunds because it would be cheaper for them than the alternative of spending service center personnel resources.
Read the EULA before you try this so you know what you are talking about. I xerox it and highlight the parts I want to quote back to them. And don't give up easily - they'll try to get you off the phone. Remember the point of the exercise is to make it expensive and painful to the most senior people that you can get on the line. Be calm and reasonable and relentless. And have fun!
In hybrid fiber/copper systems the central office transmits on fiber to a field box located in the local neighborhood. Equipment in that field box pulls data off of the fiber and puts in onto copper for local distribution. All the DSL concentrators on the market are designed for installation in a central office. Because the environmental and service needs of field equipment are different, so this stuff can't be deployed in the field boxes. Your infrastructure is great - in fact, its the right way to do this stuff. But most of the rest of the world is wired another way (copper all the way to the CO) so nobody is making hardware to service your setup right now. Considering the current downturn in the fortunes of DSL providers, the new equipment for hybrid setups could be a long time coming. Or maybe it'll be out next week ;).
After my last startup hit the wall I went looking for another place for my whole team to go as a group. I was interested in working in SV, but the whole team lived in LA. I stumbled upon a great little company in the fiber optics business that had a founder who was actually interested in finding ways to tap remote labor resources. The market in SV is, of course, very tight for tech types so this is a significant advantage for the company.
Well, we all signed up and I set about creating a VPN infrastructure to support this (linux, linux, everywhere). One year later it seems to be working very well. We have about five remote offices within about 400 miles of SV - some are just a long commute away (like San Francisco).
In our basic setup we use people who can come into the office at least one day a week. The company covers their transport costs if they fly. The other days they work from home or a remote office that we set up near their home. We are pretty much a no-paper outfit and we use email and instant messaging as our core communications mechanism, so being at home is not really much different from being in a cube. Don't get me wrong - it takes motivation and you have to become communications proactive - but it's a great lifestyle. Coming into the office every week really helps keep you in touch with the team and alleviates the cabin fever. You get the flexibility of being an offsite consultant without the headaches that go with running your own business. I'll never go back to the "old fashioned" way of work if I can avoid it.
BTW (here comes the plug) - we're growing and hiring like mad. Check us out at www.finisar.com, or you could email me at jdouma@NOSPAM.finisar.com if you want more details on how we do remote work.
I have personally never seen a EE job that had PE as a requirement. I have never seen a resume that had a PE on it (and thus have never hired such an engineer). I believe that PE's are pretty rare for EE's and very few outfits look for them. Just for reference: I've looked at many hundreds of EE resumes over the years and hired people for dozens of jobs.
In any case, the only place that it might be useful would be coming out of college into your first job. After that prospective employers will judge you primarily on the skills and experience aquired in your previous positions. Hell, I don't even have a degree, but I worked at startup companies for the first 5 years I was out of school and got a lot of really good experience. Consequently I have never failed to get an offer for any job that I applied for. Frankly, the market for EE's is so hot right now that most places will give you the benefit of the doubt if you can just get to the interview.
One thing that is very useful to keep in mind is that if you apply for a job by sending a resume to the HR department you should know that the people who vet the resumes don't know much about the jobs, they just check a resume for keywords like BS degree, VHDL, and Unix. The specific list of keywords you will be compared to will come from a brief description of the job requirements supplied by the requesting manager - the guy who you would end up working for. Believe it or not this is usually the biggest hurdle - 90% of resumes for a job usually get cut at this stage. If you have all the keywords he asked for you'll usually get a call.
The bottom line is this: if you get to the interview and you come across as smart, hard working, easygoing, and with the right basic skills and some relevant experience you're golden. It also helps to be a handicapped minority woman, but what can you do?
I've been working on this problem pretty intensively for the last 2 years for a company that makes automobile navigation systems. We're using Linux (currently 2.0.34) for our next gen version (out later this year). As a lot of people have noted, storage is probably the biggest issue. Its not too hard to meet automotive environmental specs with silicon, but commonly available rotating media are a different story. I'd love to be able to use solid state storage, but both maps (for navigation) and MP3's take up so much space that solid state will not allow us to build an product with an attractive featureset within our target price of less than $1000 (hopefully, a lot less). CD's are more sensitive than hard drives all around, but the failure modes on hard drives are more catastrophic so you need to be extra careful with them. Shock mounting handles this problem nicely and inexpensively in all cases, although building the unit so that your typical auto installer can't kill it by dropping it is still difficult. The bigger problem in the real world is temp. In principle its not hard to make inexpensive DVD's, CD's, or hard drives work over large temp ranges, but nobody does because the volume market is all in office equipment. The stuff that is built for cars is very optimized and not adaptable to other applications by and large (like a data device) - I know, I've done it both ways. In the end, if you want to make something inexpensive you either have to compromise on some things (mainly temp range) or spend a LOT of money tooling up your own storage device.
Our device uses a very fast MIPS processor, has audio on board (the user interface is speech recoginition/synthesis) will come in hard drive and DVD versions, is spec'd to work from 5C to 55C (portable use or car interior, not trunk) and is about the size of a fat walkman. If you are serious about developing software for such a platform contact me, maybe we can work something out.
I had a very similar experience with GTE/Linux (Could you spell UNIX please? said the operator). After 20 calls to GTE I found out that ordering service through an affiliated ISP was quicker and easier, and allowed a much broader range of service plans (with static IP's and no filtering for a start). The ISP I settled on is a Linux house, they understand what I want to do, they hate Windows, and they give good support. Plus there was no hassling with morons at GTE, the ISP handled all that stuff gratis.