It needs to be milspec in order for the military to use it, especially in a combat situation. It will take you a long long time to get this device approved and assigned a milspec number. I mean, like, years. I really hope the war is over before then. But it looks like Bush will just start up another war, so you may be in luck.
Also, the military generally only does business with military contractors. This is starting to change, at least in principal. There has been a recent push for COTS (Commercial-Off-The-Shelf) purchases, to save money, but there is still a huge amount of paperwork and bureaucracy to deal with. They are going to have to take your robot and freeze it, bake it, irradiate it, EMP it, and maybe even shoot at it. All at great taxpayer expense.
I salute you and your idea, but you should be forewarned about the effort involved. Also, my experience with this is limited. My close friend designed a rebreather that was almost assigned a milspec number by the US Navy. After several years and millions of dollars in testing and a final report approving the rebreather, the navy decided to stick with it's current model. I suspect this had something to do with internal politics that I should not even speculate on. Basically, my friend had put two years of his life into this, had a better machine which outperformed and way underpriced the competition, was one signature away from a milspec number assignment, and suddenly he got the silent treatment.
So, basically, I'm saying Be prepared for a lot of red tape. Oh, and you may need to be ISO 9001 certified. Which is basically another form of red tape.
I have had some experience with military procurement. It is scary and has nothing to do with logic. The people who do the purchasing are not in the military. They are career civilians. The military officers who oversee them only spend a few years in that capacity before moving on to other posts. They have no real opportunity to institute reforms even they are the ones affected by the purchases. The civilian purchasers develop (I believe) unethical reletionships certain prefered vendors. I've also seen a tendency for government emplyees to avoid taking responsibility for anything. I assume that this has something to do with the way blame is passed around.
Furthermore (and possibly due to responsibility avoidance) the military generates a huge amount of rules that must be followed to the letter. This is done mindlessly. If at some point there was an incident involving a Delrin part, then Delrin might be banned from all future milspec parts. The amount of money that an item costs means nothing compared to the need to satisfy paperwork.
And speaking of paperwork I doubt that and Linux distributor can hold a candle to Microsoft when it comes to filling out the endless reams of paperwork required to contract with the military. It's just insane. And you have to know all of the bizzare customs they have.
So, in short, don't expect military procurement to make any sort of sense until such time as the entire system is overhauled.
Can't the patent "violator" counter-sue for damages? Isn't there a way for other patent lawyers to get rich by attacking the bogus patents? Maybe then they would be willing to take on cases with no advance fee.
It's not neccessarily as simple as porting the code. From what I've seen of the Linux dri drivers (for OpenGL) they are a bit lacking. The open source drivers often fallback to slow paths for complicated instructions. The closed drivers, such as nVidia's work well but seem to be missing some important extentions, like programable shaders. Additionally, the nVidia driver does a busywait while it is waiting for the GL queue to synchronize and that might affect the amount of work that the game can do while the card is processing data. Then again, I don't know how these games are threaded.
The MOMENT Microsoft switches to the PPC platform for desktop computers, they IMMEDIATLY face competing from Apple.
I don't see how they would be competing with Apple any more than they are now. Normal people aren't buying Windows vs. Mac because of the CPU. And it's not like Apple is going to start using PPC platforms intended for Windows. Apple is very strict about controlling exactly what hardware goes into one of their products. I don't see them allowing OSX to run on just any old PPC platform.
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It needs to be milspec in order for the military to use it, especially in a combat situation. It will take you a long long time to get this device approved and assigned a milspec number. I mean, like, years. I really hope the war is over before then. But it looks like Bush will just start up another war, so you may be in luck.
Also, the military generally only does business with military contractors. This is starting to change, at least in principal. There has been a recent push for COTS (Commercial-Off-The-Shelf) purchases, to save money, but there is still a huge amount of paperwork and bureaucracy to deal with. They are going to have to take your robot and freeze it, bake it, irradiate it, EMP it, and maybe even shoot at it. All at great taxpayer expense.
I salute you and your idea, but you should be forewarned about the effort involved. Also, my experience with this is limited. My close friend designed a rebreather that was almost assigned a milspec number by the US Navy. After several years and millions of dollars in testing and a final report approving the rebreather, the navy decided to stick with it's current model. I suspect this had something to do with internal politics that I should not even speculate on. Basically, my friend had put two years of his life into this, had a better machine which outperformed and way underpriced the competition, was one signature away from a milspec number assignment, and suddenly he got the silent treatment.
So, basically, I'm saying Be prepared for a lot of red tape. Oh, and you may need to be ISO 9001 certified. Which is basically another form of red tape.
I have had some experience with military procurement. It is scary and has nothing to do with logic. The people who do the purchasing are not in the military. They are career civilians. The military officers who oversee them only spend a few years in that capacity before moving on to other posts. They have no real opportunity to institute reforms even they are the ones affected by the purchases. The civilian purchasers develop (I believe) unethical reletionships certain prefered vendors. I've also seen a tendency for government emplyees to avoid taking responsibility for anything. I assume that this has something to do with the way blame is passed around. Furthermore (and possibly due to responsibility avoidance) the military generates a huge amount of rules that must be followed to the letter. This is done mindlessly. If at some point there was an incident involving a Delrin part, then Delrin might be banned from all future milspec parts. The amount of money that an item costs means nothing compared to the need to satisfy paperwork. And speaking of paperwork I doubt that and Linux distributor can hold a candle to Microsoft when it comes to filling out the endless reams of paperwork required to contract with the military. It's just insane. And you have to know all of the bizzare customs they have. So, in short, don't expect military procurement to make any sort of sense until such time as the entire system is overhauled.
Can't the patent "violator" counter-sue for damages? Isn't there a way for other patent lawyers to get rich by attacking the bogus patents? Maybe then they would be willing to take on cases with no advance fee.
To put this in perspective, the Xbox has a 733 MHx P3. It should do alright with Linux. I wouldn't want to run Windows XP on it.
It's not neccessarily as simple as porting the code. From what I've seen of the Linux dri drivers (for OpenGL) they are a bit lacking. The open source drivers often fallback to slow paths for complicated instructions. The closed drivers, such as nVidia's work well but seem to be missing some important extentions, like programable shaders. Additionally, the nVidia driver does a busywait while it is waiting for the GL queue to synchronize and that might affect the amount of work that the game can do while the card is processing data. Then again, I don't know how these games are threaded.
The MOMENT Microsoft switches to the PPC platform for desktop computers, they IMMEDIATLY face competing from Apple.
I don't see how they would be competing with Apple any more than they are now. Normal people aren't buying Windows vs. Mac because of the CPU. And it's not like Apple is going to start using PPC platforms intended for Windows. Apple is very strict about controlling exactly what hardware goes into one of their products. I don't see them allowing OSX to run on just any old PPC platform.