hmmm...cannot think of anything live-action off the top of my head. Can we consider Anime? If so I vote for Ninja Scroll. Oh crud, Samuraii Showdown was based on that, not the other way around.
I think that the real reason that video games generally don't work well as movies is that the ones with plot ussually have about 50+ hours of plot, and the ones without plot really don't have plot. Take a look at Final Fantasy X. It is a great game with a great story (and probably has more units shipped than the XBox) but is way too long for a movie. At the other end of the spectrum, Gran Torisimo 3 is also a great game, but doesn't really have any plot (at all). Neither would make a good movie, because FFX would be so butchered to fit in 90 minutes it would be nonseinsical. GT3 would consist entirely of car races with some cheap ass love triangle thrown in by Hollywood.
Now that I think about it, there might be a couple of video games that would work, but these are all of the same line as Tomb Raider and Resident Evil. Basically the games which are over just when you start getting into them. While I'ld love to see Devil May Cry as a movie, I think I'ld be very upset by how lame the special effects would be compaired to the game.
Why put the storage in the camera? With all the talk about how fast and cheap wireless data transfers are becoming (Centreno anyone?), why not use 80(whatever) to transfer the images from the camera (which could be in a bad location) to a hard disk/DVD burner/whatever in a safer and possibly more bulky location?
The biggest problem for recording to anything is the speed with which you can write. Relatively rugged/lower power consumption hard drives (notebook-type) max out at about 4000 rpms and about 1/20th of a terrabyte (desktop drives max out at about 10000 rpms and about 1/3 of a terrabyte). Flash memory seems to max out around 2 Gigabytes (at about $750+ a gig) and is much, much slower than hard disks, it also sucks juice when you write to it. While relatively small data transfers can be buffered by much faster RAM, neither of these is a really good option for high resolution, continuous acquasition, but the hard disk is much better. The solid state storage must be something different than Flash memory.
The shelf life for magnetic tape is pretty much determined by the shelf life of whatever sticks the bits of metal to the plastic tape. Having used kinda recent magentic tapes, the shelf life seems to be somewhere around 10-15 years depending on use and storage (can be
much
shorter).
The principle reason not to use magnetic tape is the cost of the drives, not the shelf life of an alternative medium. Reasonable capacity tape drives are still easily $4000+ with yearly maintainace costs pretty close to a sixth their purchase price. However, the tapes themselves are dirt cheap (but less so relative to hard drives every year). Basically, if you have enough data to actually use the tapes on a weekly basis (as oposed to having enough data so you could back up to a CDROM or a DVDROM) it is worth having one, if you don't it isn't.
However, when reliability of backups for Optical/Tape/RAID is compaired, they are all really high. The biggest problem for any of these backup systems is the destruction of the physical location for the data, like a fire.
Generalizations about gender, ethenticity, or race and the abilities of particular individuals are absurd. There are enough humans of every group so that the individual variation within a group far exceeds the variations between groups.
That said, the "women need bigger screens" study strikes me as very much akin to the "blacks are genetically better athletes but worse thinkers" type studies. In the past these studies were used as a justification for forcing African-descended people into low-pay manual labor jobs. Perhaps a better study would be "do women perfer bigger screens than men?" The results of such a study wouldn't be sexist, and would be applicable to marketing.
Now for the off-topic part. I think that because they were basically resitricted from getting good educations and kept out of well paying jobs athletics was one of the few open avenues for African-American males to suceed. Consequently, more of them tried really hard to become athletes leading to the dominance of black athletes in most professional sports. This is a very similar mechanism to why so many Jews became successful bankers in mideval Europe. They were restircted from accumulating wealth in any form but money, and consequently had money to lend (plus their religion didn't prohibit them from charging interest).
Having grown up in Florida, which was a Slave state, now populated by Northerners, I think that I've gotten a fiarly good education on both sides of the topic. While the US Civil war was not entirely about slavery, slavery was certainly the motivating factor. As the west was settled there was an agreement made to admit one slave and one free state each time any state was created, thus maintaining a balance in the Senate and preventing either side from mandating or abolishing slavery. Shortly before Lincoln was elected it began to become clear that the number of "free" states was going to out pace the number of slave states so the slave states wanted to pass legislation changing the location of the Masson-Dixon line (the line above which the US was "free" and below which it was "slave"). To do this they needed their canadate to be elected (Jefferson Davis). He was not elected despite the 3/5ths of the unrepersented slave population of the south counting towards its electoral tally (which was an even older source of bad-blood). The south then tried to break off and form its own country. From 150 years later (almost) this looks like the south was simply a sore looser. At the time this was a violation of everything that Lincoln beleived in (basically he was a true patriot, very much beleiving in the USofA) and Lincoln acted to prevent the disentigration of the Union. Thus the civil war. In short, the American civil war wasn't about slavery for the North, but it was for the South.
Looking back at it, the military "victories" the South won were phiric. In no battle was there a clear winner in terms of causualties, and from the beginning it was clear that the North's greater population (why Lincoln won to begin with) and industrialization (the South couldn't even manufacture the bullets for many of the Northern guns they captured) was going to eventually lead to its victory. The Southern politicians assumed that since the cotton for the world's textile mills came from their states that France and/or Britian would come to their aide. This was bad reasoning since Egypt was already producing higher grade cotton and European and Industrial warehouses were full at the beginning of the war. Of course we all know that the war turned at Gettysberg where Lee (despite what you may have gotten from the Ken Burns specials) basically killed 15000 of his own men by ordering Picket's charge over the strong objections of the other southern generals (Longstreet included).
Also, remember that the American Civil war was much more costly for the South than for the North. A greater portion of their 18-40 year old men were killed, what industry the south had was destroyed by Sherman, and the way the social and economic elites lived was fundamentally altered. No Southerner should attempt to glorify the civil war. What the Confederacy stood for, and the war planning of its politicians is an embarassment to all true Americans.
SpecTCL was developed for use at the National Superconducting Cyclotron Laboratory. It is apparently avalible through sourceforge. While I'm not intimately familiar with it it (I wrote my own code from scratch, but it is hardly general purpose), SpecTCL allows objects (1D & 2D histograms, gates, etc) and procedures to be defined using the TCL scripting languate or C++ while providing a consistant display.
The high energy folks also have a similar set of packages (as other nuclear labs probably do).
I'm using a EIPA-M with a 600 Mhz Eden processor. There is a fair amount of information over at mini-itx.com including a review of that board/processor combo. From the reviews of the EPIA with the 400 Mhz and 500 Mhz processors over at Tom's Hardware I'ld have to say that these are not sufficient for anything past mp3 service. The main difference between the two setups seems to be the amount of processing which has been moved onto the other parts of the motherboard on the EPIA-M as opposed to the EPIA. If you do descide to go with the EPIA-M/Eden combo I'ld suggest getting a TV encoder card with onboard compression, such as the Hauptpage PVR line since that will off-load the processing involved with the compression.
If you use the EPIA-M you might want to consider the ALSA sound drivers. Oh, that's the other problem. If you want to use 5.1 sound, you lose your line-in and mic inputs.
Cavitation comes from turbulence and is dangerous because the bubbles are unstable. The bubbles form because of the very uneven distribution of energy in turbulent flow (like around a propeller and less so an impeller). They then colapse again (causing damage) when the energy is re-distributed.
From looking at the article, I don't think that there is any cavitation in these pumps.
DIVX died because it was an incompatiable format which looked very much like DVDs. The reason why movie studios can sell both VHS tapes and DVD disks (and laserdisks) side by side is because they are obviously different. The typical consumer can tell them appart. However, if there are two formats which have the same physical form factor, the typical consumer will not be able to tell them appart and will start bringing the incompatable ones back to the store, where they will be told that they cannot be returned since they are software and have been opened. This will piss off the consumers and the stores will stop carrying whichever one is less common. This is the reason that DVD's come in those big ugly rubber cases instead of jewel cases. So that consumers can tell DVD's and CD's appart. How pissed would you be if you thought you were buying a movie and got the soundtrack instead? I guess if MS wanted to sell something with the same form factor as a DVD with a proprietary format, they could just paste all sorts of warnings on it. That might prevent someone for buying one by accident (or at all).
DVD Rot is a special technology which has yet to reach the main stream. I own 30+ Anime DVDs (Trigun, Cowboy Bebop, Neon Genisis, Bubblegum Crisis...) and none of them have had problems. I have a similar collection of VHS tapes. They have lost quality (definitely color contrast) through a mechanism which is well understood. Magnetic tapes are basically peices of plastic with little peices of rust glued onto them. Over time and use that glue wears out (just from sitting around). If you play an old VHS tape, 8mm data tape, or a really really old reel-to-reel tape you won't get back what you put on it, and you are likely to ruin the player (since all that rust will collect on the drive head). From an Archival point of view the difference between VHS and DVD is the same as the difference between audio tapes and CDs.
Even if MS bundles this with the XBox2, they will have problems getting producers to adopt it. Movie producers and retailers will be very hesitant to put two different and mututally exclusive copies of the same movie on the shelf at the same time, in nearly the same packaging. There will simply be too many customer complaints as the customer with player X will pick up the disk for player Y 50%( minus the % of smart customers/2) of the time.
While DVDs are effectively the "mature" version of the laserdisk technology, they did offer consumers a substantial benefit over the VHS tapes which they replaced. Namely, you got all the DVD extras for not too much more money than the VHS tape. They also offered substantially better quality than VHS tapes, and longer shelf lives, and smaller storage areas, etc. While Laserdisks offered many of the same content extras as DVDs, they were prohibitively expensive and aquard to store and use. DVDs also came out at a time when the main use of the VCR was to watch prerecorded movies from the rental store. Laserdisks came out when the main use of the VCR was to record and watch television (early time-shifting).
That said, whatever is going to replace DVDs is going to have a couple of fairly high hurdles. First, there is already a huge base of DVD players out there, many of which aren't compatable with DVD-R,DVD-RW,DVD+R, and DVD+RW (one of the things holding off widespread acceptance of DVD-burning drives). It will have to be backwards compatable with existing technology, or offer substantially greater value so that everyone replaces their DVD players. I don't think that simply offering higher resolution without additional changes will be enough to get everyone to go out and buy a new DVD player. Maybe it would if everyone had televisions which displayed pictures in greater detail than DVDs support, and routinely watched broadcasts in said higher resolution.
If there is sufficient RAM on a computer setup as a server (file or web, or whatever), it is generally a great idea to keep the file allocation tables (or your disk format's equivalent) in RAM. This really cuts down on the number of times the disk is accessed for simple commands like cd and ls and even speeds up moving lots of small files (which can be painful).
Enabling very large amounts of RAM in BSD makes BSD more useful as a server OS.
What am I missing? Peltier devices can either heat or cool depending on which way the current is running. Wouldn't it be simpler to have a combination refridgerator/oven/toaster oven? The only problem would be coming up with a high temp insulator. Oh...wait...fiberglass.
This would also make more sense as a product since microwaves cook things quickly and ovens do not (but give much better flavor and texture). Since this thing doesn't come with a robot arm to prepare the food (or maybe that is why it costs $2000), it doesn't save you on preparation time, which ussually isn't a factor in microwave food, but is for oven food. The ability to prep a small roast, refridgerate it all day, and have the baking start so it is ready when you get home would be much better. Than, say, refridgerating a lean quisine all day and then microwaving it when you get home (if you started before you left work, it would be cold by the time you got home).
I think that the law preventing hte criticism of the president in print during Washington's presidency was actually part of the power struggle between Adams and Jefferson (Jefferson owned a newspaper).
I would also like to point out that the United States is the oldest Constitutional Democracy bar none. I think that one of the major stabilizing factors of the US governement and our democracy is our pride in our constitution. Our soldiers and polititicians swear to uphold the constitution first and foremost. This means that fundamental changes to our government are increadibly slow and that ussually makes them well thought out (ok, that prohibition thing, but we repealed that, hence all the bars named "21rst amendment"). Stupid and unconstitutional laws may be passed by our congress and signed by our president, but they ussually don't last very long because of our supreme court. We are afterall a nation of laws, not men.
Unlike our secretary of deffence, I think that France and Germany are young countries. Both are (2003 - 1945) 58 years old, about a quarter of the United State's age. Russia is younger than I am, and China is less than 100. Culturally, of course they are all much much older, but that just means they are even worse at government. You don't take marriage advice from someone on their fifth marriage. You take it from someone who is still on their first years later.
Didn't wired have a short article on this a while ago. I think it featured a graphic telling you how to reboot your blender. Although I do like the idea of wiping my A** with a roll of MS Toilet paper.
My favorite idea for the replacement for the PC in the home would be something along the lines of networking-plus. There would be a bunch of modules connected by . One module would be for data storage. One for data archiving. One for audio/video output. One for video recording. One for video game playing. And possibly normal computer tacked on for general use (oh yeah, one more module for web-browsing). Kinda like a component TiVo that could syncronize all your radios and televisions. I think Sony is working on this already. Probably some other people are as well.
For the office, I think the tablet PC or alternatively, flat-screens with built in interface devices linked to stationary computers via wireless, would be the mid-to-near future. This way a single device could be carried around from station to station instead of having multiple devices, instead of requiring multiple stationary PCs. And they can display much more than pocket PCs.
In both markets I don't think that WinCE will dominate since it will cost money for the developer. Instead, manufacturers (especially those who MS cannot extort) will opt for a lower cost alternative (GNU/Linux).
I think that appart from stuff getting into drives and screwing them up, the most common peice of hardware to fail is the powersupply, which of course can bring down the entire system.
What are the applications which these computers are being used for? If they are used for mission critical systems I'm very supprised that they arn't redundant and that backup systems arn't in place. If they are general use computers, why not just carry a distribution of GNU/Linux. Generally, GNU/Linux distribution such as Redhat and Mandrake are very good at handling old hardware, but not always so good at handing new hardware and since you said they were old systems....
Seriously for general use computers I'ld consider GNU/Linux as a better restore tool than Windows 3.x/95/98/ME. Frequently, special drivers are required for hardware, and if the people you are helping don't have the windows disks, what are the odds they have the driver disks. If you are in the middle of nowhere you probably don't have internet access (probably). Most distributions of GNU/Linux are now pretty big and come with drivers for just about all common hardware from a year ago.
OSS is double-deadly to MS. Not only does GNU/Linux and OpenOffice erode their userbase (and ability to enforce bizare closed file formats), but it also strengthens itself as more people use it. As more corporations switch to OSS solutions, more money and time is spent developing it, and the better it gets. On top of the growth of people who are developing OSS alternatives to their products, the OSS developers are ussually specialists in their particular fields, so the OSS software ussually does a better job of fulfilling needs.
At the same time OSS is a double-benefit for a corporation which incorporates it. Not only do they not have to spend the money on the very high fees MS charges, but the money they do spend is directly on training and development of their local staff (instead of it being shipped off to Redmond, where it may or may not be used to develop a product which the corporation in question may use). This will help keep staff loyal because they will feel apprciated, and gaurantees that development is being done on applications that the corporation actually uses.
Dang, and I thought I was ahead of the curve with my homebrew PVR. The main use of it right now isn't actually for television viewing, but for music. We have put our entire CD collection onto it and actually listen to the music much more than we did before hand. We might make more use of the video recording functions if there was more to watch. As things stand now, there are about 10 hours of television that I'm interested in (if nothing is in re-runs) each week. It is great fun to put the whole CD collection on random and try to be the first to identify the song.
NPR has a blurb about this too. IMO (nothing humble about it) both Yahoo and MS have a really big hurdle to get over. Google was the first really effective search engine, with enforceable patents on their methods. Both Yahoo and MS will have to either pay Google for its patents or come up with a completely different but equally effective technology. And any new technology will likely be tested against Google so if it comes up with different results it will be judged not as good. Yahoo and MS won't suceed in ousting Google, but they will suceed in developing new technologies so competition is still good.
Just remember, google is now a noun and a verb, not just a number. Of course, I havn't purchased Band-Aid brand adhesive strips in a while, but I do have a five year old vat of Vasaline brand petrolium jelly (got married just under five years ago).
Ooops. I implied that the software with the GNU public license didn't have copyright. Such software does have copyright, it is just fine to copy (at least the source code) as long as the original author(s) retain credit.
I actually think the GNU plubic license is a very strong agreement since it allows the end user to do things they would not ordinarially be allowed to do if and only if they agree to it. On the other hand, most closed source EULAs prevent the customer from doing things they would ordinarially be alowed to do if they didn't agree to it, and are therefore much weaker.
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All fiction is based on mythology. To qualify for the movie based on a video game (for me anyway), the video game simply has to come before the movie.
but it might be in your car/backpack/bag.
I think that the real reason that video games generally don't work well as movies is that the ones with plot ussually have about 50+ hours of plot, and the ones without plot really don't have plot. Take a look at Final Fantasy X. It is a great game with a great story (and probably has more units shipped than the XBox) but is way too long for a movie. At the other end of the spectrum, Gran Torisimo 3 is also a great game, but doesn't really have any plot (at all). Neither would make a good movie, because FFX would be so butchered to fit in 90 minutes it would be nonseinsical. GT3 would consist entirely of car races with some cheap ass love triangle thrown in by Hollywood.
Now that I think about it, there might be a couple of video games that would work, but these are all of the same line as Tomb Raider and Resident Evil. Basically the games which are over just when you start getting into them. While I'ld love to see Devil May Cry as a movie, I think I'ld be very upset by how lame the special effects would be compaired to the game.
Why put the storage in the camera? With all the talk about how fast and cheap wireless data transfers are becoming (Centreno anyone?), why not use 80(whatever) to transfer the images from the camera (which could be in a bad location) to a hard disk/DVD burner/whatever in a safer and possibly more bulky location?
The biggest problem for recording to anything is the speed with which you can write. Relatively rugged/lower power consumption hard drives (notebook-type) max out at about 4000 rpms and about 1/20th of a terrabyte (desktop drives max out at about 10000 rpms and about 1/3 of a terrabyte). Flash memory seems to max out around 2 Gigabytes (at about $750+ a gig) and is much, much slower than hard disks, it also sucks juice when you write to it. While relatively small data transfers can be buffered by much faster RAM, neither of these is a really good option for high resolution, continuous acquasition, but the hard disk is much better. The solid state storage must be something different than Flash memory.
- much
shorter).The principle reason not to use magnetic tape is the cost of the drives, not the shelf life of an alternative medium. Reasonable capacity tape drives are still easily $4000+ with yearly maintainace costs pretty close to a sixth their purchase price. However, the tapes themselves are dirt cheap (but less so relative to hard drives every year). Basically, if you have enough data to actually use the tapes on a weekly basis (as oposed to having enough data so you could back up to a CDROM or a DVDROM) it is worth having one, if you don't it isn't.
However, when reliability of backups for Optical/Tape/RAID is compaired, they are all really high. The biggest problem for any of these backup systems is the destruction of the physical location for the data, like a fire.
That said, the "women need bigger screens" study strikes me as very much akin to the "blacks are genetically better athletes but worse thinkers" type studies. In the past these studies were used as a justification for forcing African-descended people into low-pay manual labor jobs. Perhaps a better study would be "do women perfer bigger screens than men?" The results of such a study wouldn't be sexist, and would be applicable to marketing.
Now for the off-topic part. I think that because they were basically resitricted from getting good educations and kept out of well paying jobs athletics was one of the few open avenues for African-American males to suceed. Consequently, more of them tried really hard to become athletes leading to the dominance of black athletes in most professional sports. This is a very similar mechanism to why so many Jews became successful bankers in mideval Europe. They were restircted from accumulating wealth in any form but money, and consequently had money to lend (plus their religion didn't prohibit them from charging interest).
Looking back at it, the military "victories" the South won were phiric. In no battle was there a clear winner in terms of causualties, and from the beginning it was clear that the North's greater population (why Lincoln won to begin with) and industrialization (the South couldn't even manufacture the bullets for many of the Northern guns they captured) was going to eventually lead to its victory. The Southern politicians assumed that since the cotton for the world's textile mills came from their states that France and/or Britian would come to their aide. This was bad reasoning since Egypt was already producing higher grade cotton and European and Industrial warehouses were full at the beginning of the war. Of course we all know that the war turned at Gettysberg where Lee (despite what you may have gotten from the Ken Burns specials) basically killed 15000 of his own men by ordering Picket's charge over the strong objections of the other southern generals (Longstreet included).
Also, remember that the American Civil war was much more costly for the South than for the North. A greater portion of their 18-40 year old men were killed, what industry the south had was destroyed by Sherman, and the way the social and economic elites lived was fundamentally altered. No Southerner should attempt to glorify the civil war. What the Confederacy stood for, and the war planning of its politicians is an embarassment to all true Americans.
The high energy folks also have a similar set of packages (as other nuclear labs probably do).
If you use the EPIA-M you might want to consider the ALSA sound drivers. Oh, that's the other problem. If you want to use 5.1 sound, you lose your line-in and mic inputs.
From looking at the article, I don't think that there is any cavitation in these pumps.
DIVX died because it was an incompatiable format which looked very much like DVDs. The reason why movie studios can sell both VHS tapes and DVD disks (and laserdisks) side by side is because they are obviously different. The typical consumer can tell them appart. However, if there are two formats which have the same physical form factor, the typical consumer will not be able to tell them appart and will start bringing the incompatable ones back to the store, where they will be told that they cannot be returned since they are software and have been opened. This will piss off the consumers and the stores will stop carrying whichever one is less common. This is the reason that DVD's come in those big ugly rubber cases instead of jewel cases. So that consumers can tell DVD's and CD's appart. How pissed would you be if you thought you were buying a movie and got the soundtrack instead? I guess if MS wanted to sell something with the same form factor as a DVD with a proprietary format, they could just paste all sorts of warnings on it. That might prevent someone for buying one by accident (or at all).
DVD Rot is a special technology which has yet to reach the main stream. I own 30+ Anime DVDs (Trigun, Cowboy Bebop, Neon Genisis, Bubblegum Crisis...) and none of them have had problems. I have a similar collection of VHS tapes. They have lost quality (definitely color contrast) through a mechanism which is well understood. Magnetic tapes are basically peices of plastic with little peices of rust glued onto them. Over time and use that glue wears out (just from sitting around). If you play an old VHS tape, 8mm data tape, or a really really old reel-to-reel tape you won't get back what you put on it, and you are likely to ruin the player (since all that rust will collect on the drive head). From an Archival point of view the difference between VHS and DVD is the same as the difference between audio tapes and CDs.
Even if MS bundles this with the XBox2, they will have problems getting producers to adopt it. Movie producers and retailers will be very hesitant to put two different and mututally exclusive copies of the same movie on the shelf at the same time, in nearly the same packaging. There will simply be too many customer complaints as the customer with player X will pick up the disk for player Y 50%( minus the % of smart customers/2) of the time.
That said, whatever is going to replace DVDs is going to have a couple of fairly high hurdles. First, there is already a huge base of DVD players out there, many of which aren't compatable with DVD-R,DVD-RW,DVD+R, and DVD+RW (one of the things holding off widespread acceptance of DVD-burning drives). It will have to be backwards compatable with existing technology, or offer substantially greater value so that everyone replaces their DVD players. I don't think that simply offering higher resolution without additional changes will be enough to get everyone to go out and buy a new DVD player. Maybe it would if everyone had televisions which displayed pictures in greater detail than DVDs support, and routinely watched broadcasts in said higher resolution.
Enabling very large amounts of RAM in BSD makes BSD more useful as a server OS.
This would also make more sense as a product since microwaves cook things quickly and ovens do not (but give much better flavor and texture). Since this thing doesn't come with a robot arm to prepare the food (or maybe that is why it costs $2000), it doesn't save you on preparation time, which ussually isn't a factor in microwave food, but is for oven food. The ability to prep a small roast, refridgerate it all day, and have the baking start so it is ready when you get home would be much better. Than, say, refridgerating a lean quisine all day and then microwaving it when you get home (if you started before you left work, it would be cold by the time you got home).
I would also like to point out that the United States is the oldest Constitutional Democracy bar none. I think that one of the major stabilizing factors of the US governement and our democracy is our pride in our constitution. Our soldiers and polititicians swear to uphold the constitution first and foremost. This means that fundamental changes to our government are increadibly slow and that ussually makes them well thought out (ok, that prohibition thing, but we repealed that, hence all the bars named "21rst amendment"). Stupid and unconstitutional laws may be passed by our congress and signed by our president, but they ussually don't last very long because of our supreme court. We are afterall a nation of laws, not men.
Unlike our secretary of deffence, I think that France and Germany are young countries. Both are (2003 - 1945) 58 years old, about a quarter of the United State's age. Russia is younger than I am, and China is less than 100. Culturally, of course they are all much much older, but that just means they are even worse at government. You don't take marriage advice from someone on their fifth marriage. You take it from someone who is still on their first years later.
My favorite idea for the replacement for the PC in the home would be something along the lines of networking-plus. There would be a bunch of modules connected by . One module would be for data storage. One for data archiving. One for audio/video output. One for video recording. One for video game playing. And possibly normal computer tacked on for general use (oh yeah, one more module for web-browsing). Kinda like a component TiVo that could syncronize all your radios and televisions. I think Sony is working on this already. Probably some other people are as well.
For the office, I think the tablet PC or alternatively, flat-screens with built in interface devices linked to stationary computers via wireless, would be the mid-to-near future. This way a single device could be carried around from station to station instead of having multiple devices, instead of requiring multiple stationary PCs. And they can display much more than pocket PCs.
In both markets I don't think that WinCE will dominate since it will cost money for the developer. Instead, manufacturers (especially those who MS cannot extort) will opt for a lower cost alternative (GNU/Linux).
What are the applications which these computers are being used for? If they are used for mission critical systems I'm very supprised that they arn't redundant and that backup systems arn't in place. If they are general use computers, why not just carry a distribution of GNU/Linux. Generally, GNU/Linux distribution such as Redhat and Mandrake are very good at handling old hardware, but not always so good at handing new hardware and since you said they were old systems. ...
Seriously for general use computers I'ld consider GNU/Linux as a better restore tool than Windows 3.x/95/98/ME. Frequently, special drivers are required for hardware, and if the people you are helping don't have the windows disks, what are the odds they have the driver disks. If you are in the middle of nowhere you probably don't have internet access (probably). Most distributions of GNU/Linux are now pretty big and come with drivers for just about all common hardware from a year ago.
On the other hand, you do have a step 2.
At the same time OSS is a double-benefit for a corporation which incorporates it. Not only do they not have to spend the money on the very high fees MS charges, but the money they do spend is directly on training and development of their local staff (instead of it being shipped off to Redmond, where it may or may not be used to develop a product which the corporation in question may use). This will help keep staff loyal because they will feel apprciated, and gaurantees that development is being done on applications that the corporation actually uses.
Dang, and I thought I was ahead of the curve with my homebrew PVR. The main use of it right now isn't actually for television viewing, but for music. We have put our entire CD collection onto it and actually listen to the music much more than we did before hand. We might make more use of the video recording functions if there was more to watch. As things stand now, there are about 10 hours of television that I'm interested in (if nothing is in re-runs) each week. It is great fun to put the whole CD collection on random and try to be the first to identify the song.
Just remember, google is now a noun and a verb, not just a number. Of course, I havn't purchased Band-Aid brand adhesive strips in a while, but I do have a five year old vat of Vasaline brand petrolium jelly (got married just under five years ago).
I actually think the GNU plubic license is a very strong agreement since it allows the end user to do things they would not ordinarially be allowed to do if and only if they agree to it. On the other hand, most closed source EULAs prevent the customer from doing things they would ordinarially be alowed to do if they didn't agree to it, and are therefore much weaker.