Rosen Motors( a US car designer now closed ) made a hybrid car back in the mid 1990's but Detroit didn't want it. For a brief period late last year Detroit wanted hybrids when the press was doing a good job of showing off the Toyota and Honda hybrids just released for sale in the US that year. Then they quickly stopped the hybrid talk and started pushing this FUTURE fuelcell idea....
Sounds like the same GM to me but now they have a president that'll fund them too. At the expense of funding for other designes of course.
BTW, my Toyota hybrid is averaging 47.8 MPG over 25,000 miles. That's about 500 miles on one tank of gasoline and it's available today.
Sorry but that all sounds too much like the PR crap we got from Microsoft for 4 years and resulted in Windows 95. All hype and only used to stall the competition.
It would make more sense to be designing home fuelcell systems and hybrid gasoline/electric cars today. Did I say TODAY? Then, migrate the hybrid toward more electric and charged via the home fuelcell before building a car run by fuelcell 8-10 years from now( maybe ). If they did this then I might believe this is less than hype.
if it looks like a dead fish, smells like a dead fish, and feels like a dead fish... it's most likely a dead fish.
This is the Chrysler K-car concept but with fuelcells. Not new really and atleast the K-Car was real. This is fantasy and mostly hype to stall attempts to reduce oil consumption by using existing technology. IMHO.
BINGO! The current hybrid technology would really piss of the oil industry because of the higher MPG. There was tons of "chatter" about hybrids late last year when it was shown how well the Toyota Hybrid-Prius was doing. That all stopped, along with government funding for hybrids, and all the attention was turned to fuel cells. Oh, and did I mention they keep saying it'll be 8-10 years before we see this on the road?
If anything, the oil industry wants to make sure they have time to adjust and control the next fuel system that comes available. George Dubya is VERY willing to make sure that happens. His inheritance is at stake. IMHO.
Don't get me wrong, fuel cell research is a good idea but not at the expense of promoting currently available systems. Hybrids already have 80% or so of the technology needed for fuelcell cars. Batteries, energy recapturing, drive-by-wire systems, power management electronics, electric motors, etc, etc. Just not a fuelcell to provide the majority of the power. Hybrids had a very efficient ICE to do that....
Like doublem implied, the fuelcell hype looks pretty fishy to say the least.
This concept is what pulled Chrysler out of the hole. It's not a new concept IMHO but I don't think GM can pull it off. Think about it, instead of producing fuel efficient hybrid( gasoline/electric ) cars( Toyota Prius, Honda Civic ) with some of these technologies( Prius uses most brake-by-wire and has electrical-power steering ) they are shooting for the moon.....
It's all a ploy to do nothing now and to spend federal grant money so it looks like something is happening.
The money and oil keep flowing as usual. And the public is buying it.:(
did you know the oil industry owns the patent on NiMH battery technology? That might have had something to do with it. Toyota and Panasonic were/are being sued because they didn't use "D" cell NiMH batteries in the Prius like the ones in the Honda Insight.
BTW, The US government gave the US auto industry billions of dollars for the advancement of battery technology and they came up with nothing. All the while they told CARB that people wouldn't pay for an electric car and that you'd need to pay them $17,000 and give them the car. They hired experts to present this "case" to CARB. Just like the US auto industry turned away the Rosen Motors hybrid design, they will keep turning away anything which cost THEM money. They all jumped on the HYBRID bandwagon when it was shown how well Toyota was doing with the Prius but as soon as there was a way out( fuel cells ) they dropped the hybrid projects and started holding up the fuel cell banner. Only hybrids are here TODAY and fuel cells are just a "hopeful" technology.
And the result is no current change in fuel consumption for the foreseeable future. And if you thought Microsoft was bad, I'll bet the US auto industry is full of corruption at any cost.
The sync software has never made my Z hang but I will tell you that the 1.6beta works much better than the 1.5 version. What's strange is that you have the ethernet-USB stuff working enough for ftp and that's what the sync software uses, ftp.
I'd look at the IP address settings in the qtopiadesktop( sync software ) and then delete the $HOME/.palmtopcenter directory and try again. You could have a corupted config file.
I'll bet "the law" is not going to go after you if you are attempting to make money... If you write a virus( I mean replicating email attachment ) that pop's up advertisements twice a day. You could have it get the ad material from your server and sell the ad space.
As soon as profit is involved, the rules change. At least here in the US.
BTW, There was proof that GW Bush knew of the impending doom for Harken Oil BEFORE he sold his shares. Why have we not heard anything more? Was it a rule change????
There's something really messed up with Windows when it takes over a year to migrate from NT to W2K. I read in on of the forums on CNN that some guy/admin wasn't even thinking of a WXP migration because they were still working on migrating from NT to W2K. A bunch of software needed upgrading and testing.
Maybe THAT's why so many NT and W2K sites are just moving to Linux. If it's gonna hurt so much, best end up with something less painful in the long run.
yeah, yeah, nano tubes, micro spheres, etc etc. What it mean is that because there are other "acceptable" means of extracting energy, fuel cells will either by very expensive or provide power for very small devices.
I guess the question is going to be if fuel cells will be able to replace batteries and if so, will they be able to provide enough energy to be cost effective. Heck, today, if you're willing to stay away from the i86 instruction set, PowerPC gets you way more bang for the buck in a portable system.....
It looks like that if you want more than a spoon full of energy from hydrogen, you need a VERY interesting way to obtain/store it. IE, it's not "the cat's meow" that the Bush administration and Detriot is saying it is.
Put it into a standard AAA or AA format and let the market decide. Put it into a proprietary format and kiss your investment good bye. IMHO.
It's very problematic doing anything with automobiles if not for the engineering but also because of the lawyers who love blaming things like 'clients running into light poles while drunk and sueing the light pole manufacturer and installation crew for negligence'.
BUT, why not use some of these new ideas in safer places? Like putting flywheels in subway stations to help stop incoming trains AND starting them off. The flywheel is stationary and there's always energy to put into it and very soon a need for that energy. And it could be purely mechanical or mechanical on braking and use as electrical energy on starting by adding shunting into the existing elecrical system.
Modern electronics can now control secondary braking systems if the flywheel system isn't effective or fails.
they( solid fuel rockets ) were only the "match" which first burned thru the liquid oxigen tank and ignited it. I'm not sure yet what "exploded" but it's probably in this thread somewhere...
Excellent comments. I too saw that PBS show and have told it many times to amazed listeners. Just think of where we would be in hydrogen production if it was known early on what really happened. I think we'd still have blimps all over the place also.
I think the real problem with hydrogen fuelcells is that amount of hydrogen needed. It'll probably have to be compressed into liquid form to get enough hydrogen gas for significant power generation and THAT is dangerous. Gasoline is liquid at room temperature but hydrogen isn't liquid until it compressed to.... well just read THIS: http://www.fuelcellstore.com/information/hy drogen_ storage.html
# Compressed Hydrogen Hydrogen can be compressed into high-pressure tanks. This process requires energy to accomplish and the space that the compressed gas occupies is usually quite large resulting in a lower energy density when compared to a traditional gasoline tank. A hydrogen gas tank that contained a store of energy equivalent to a gasoline tank would be more than 3,000 times bigger than the gasoline tank.
Compressing or liquefying the gas is expensive. Hydrogen can be compressed into high-pressure tanks where each additional cubic foot compressed into the same space requires another atmosphere of pressure of 14.7 psi. High-pressure tanks achieve 6,000 psi, and therefore must be periodically tested and inspected to ensure their safety.
I think they used unleaded fuel because it was readily available and showed how you could still use the existing infrastructure. I like your idea of a multi-fuel system though. Mainly because of the competitive nature of it.
Capstone is still in business and if you are REALLY interested, you might still find someone there willing to work with you on it.
Also, I recall reading up on how they built the flywheel and it really looked like most of the R&D time/effort went into the flywheel. With shock absorbsion, floating bearings, explosion capturing, etc.
I'm still of the mind that fuelcells and flywheels belong in the home power system FIRST and not in automobiles. I think the competition in the auto industry makes it more "approachable". Kinda like in the computer industry where you have to see if there is even a snow balls chance in hell that Microsoft would be interested in your product. If they are, there's no/little future for YOU to make a profit. Other than purely selling out for less than what it's worth.
Didn't the oil industry purchase the patent on NiMH batteries????? I thought I remember hearing Toyota and Panasonic were being sued over the SHAPE of the NiMH batteries in the Prius.... Ah, progress.;/
There once was a US company who built a hybrid car which used a shoe-box sized turbine engine and a small flywheel. They designed both components from scratch and debugged it to the point where they drove the car across country. I don't even think it broke down once (unlike that fuelcell car that just made it's trip x-country and broke down many times).
there were more links a couple of years ago but now many are no longer posted. There used to be a good one with illustrations and pictures. Anyway, none of the Big Three would buy into their design so they closed shop. Capstone still makes compact turbine engines though.....
Could be a good time to auction off the car on ebay?
ahhhh, to push WMA. Nah, they wouldn't do something like that. Especially since more people like/use MP3 than WMA. Wait, didn't they do that with IE vs Netscape? And they wouldn't do something like preload a low-end MP3 encoder and push their higher bitrate WMA encoder as the default...
Think of the VW commercials (before TIVO days) where they said, "There are drivers and there are passengers", "Drivers wanted".
That is why companies like Microsoft prevail. Most of the population can be classified as "passengers". Spineless, chicken, lemmings, etc are also used. 8>
LoB BTW, great sig by the parent of this thread. Quote from BladeRunner.
What a bunch of idiots, IMHO. Can't they figure out a way to use a system similar to what people have used for YEARS and just remove the issue of hanging chads, etc?
Now they want Granny and the other old farts to deal with touch screens and the likes. What happens when they touch two places at the same time or leave a hand on one part of the screen?
One step at a time folks. At least lets change this with the older generations in mind. Aren't they the ones who started this when a modified ballot style was used?
I mean really. Insert a digitized pad with LED's or something. If you push a button the LED will show you that you pushed it correctly and track your vote. When you're done, there's one last selection( done / not done ) and your personalized iButton won't eject til you select DONE. You won't be able to exit the polling place til you hand over the iButton.
Now who is behind all this new fangled voting system anyway? Some business is surely pushing it....
If you can hear the difference then you will use either higher encoding bits or analog recordings but most of the listening public can't hear/notice the difference.
Like the auto industry where you can buy a porche, ferrari, etc or a toyota, ford, etc depending on your driving needs, the same applies to the audio industry. Heck, BetaMax is still used today because of the quality it presents....
HP might just be going "Back to the garage"( literally ) with how the company is now being run. CEO and management get huge bonus's for buying Compaq, they kill Jornada for iPaq, killing other higher quality products for Compaq products and somewhere I heard there's quite an HP / Microsoft "partnership" forming...... hummm
It's like everyone who gets "touched" by Microsoft gets really stupid. The infection started with Microsoft "infecting" DEC. DEC "infected" Compaq and not Compaq is "infecting" HP. Microsoft almost got HP about 5 years ago when they started pushing NT over HP-UX but HP was smart enough to pull back on that. Kinda like they had some initial immunity to the "infection".;)
They are really acting "stupid" again so this "infection" might be fatal... Let's see, they'll first spin off the printer business for $$$$ and then Dell will purchase HP. If they don't smarten up, I give them 5-6 years before it's obvious they're looking for a buyer.
And what is all this crap about Intels Titanicium? You'd think that after HP bought Apollow and got their chip and software people that they could come up with something better than the Titanicium processor.... IBM and Sun are running circles around HP in the high end server space and HP teams up with Intel.... HP makes/made great hardware but their getting pretty "stupid" these days. IMHO.
BTW, the HP unit was really nice but way over priced for the market.
don't forget that if someone does put such a system together and is willing to share, a bootable CD with all this on it (ala DemoLinux) THEN you'd have something for the masses.
1) Get that old Pentium 120 out of the trash, add soundcard X or Y, a 50G HD, CD-R drive, NIC, IrDA(ttyS0), and LCD(ttyS1). 1a) cut power to PS fan and add low RPM/noise fan 2) insert bootable CDROM of GnuPAS(GNU Personal Audio System) and boot. 3) remove bootable CDROM and start feeding your own CD's and/or feed it MP3's via NIC.
You'd still have an ugly box though. If only I had the funding....
not to mention a friendlier UI and database storage/retreival system. Like the Anonymous Coward mentioned, there's probably lower/no system noise and a high end audio card. And a remote.
This is for the masses and not geekdom but geeks can like it too. Maybe it's hackable.... Ogg anyone?
Slashdot Mirror
Rosen Motors( a US car designer now closed ) made a hybrid car back in the mid 1990's but Detroit didn't want it. For a brief period late last year Detroit wanted hybrids when the press was doing a good job of showing off the Toyota and Honda hybrids just released for sale in the US that year. Then they quickly stopped the hybrid talk and started pushing this FUTURE fuelcell idea....
Sounds like the same GM to me but now they have a president that'll fund them too. At the expense of funding for other designes of course.
BTW, my Toyota hybrid is averaging 47.8 MPG over 25,000 miles. That's about 500 miles on one tank of gasoline and it's available today.
LoB
Sorry but that all sounds too much like the PR crap we got from Microsoft for 4 years and resulted in Windows 95. All hype and only used to stall the competition.
It would make more sense to be designing home fuelcell systems and hybrid gasoline/electric cars today. Did I say TODAY? Then, migrate the hybrid toward more electric and charged via the home fuelcell before building a car run by fuelcell 8-10 years from now( maybe ). If they did this then I might believe this is less than hype.
if it looks like a dead fish, smells like a dead fish, and feels like a dead fish... it's most likely a dead fish.
IMHO.
LoB
This is the Chrysler K-car concept but with fuelcells. Not new really and atleast the K-Car was real. This is fantasy and mostly hype to stall attempts to reduce oil consumption by using existing technology. IMHO.
LoB
BINGO! The current hybrid technology would really piss of the oil industry because of the higher MPG. There was tons of "chatter" about hybrids late last year when it was shown how well the Toyota Hybrid-Prius was doing. That all stopped, along with government funding for hybrids, and all the attention was turned to fuel cells. Oh, and did I mention they keep saying it'll be 8-10 years before we see this on the road?
If anything, the oil industry wants to make sure they have time to adjust and control the next fuel system that comes available. George Dubya is VERY willing to make sure that happens. His inheritance is at stake. IMHO.
Don't get me wrong, fuel cell research is a good idea but not at the expense of promoting currently available systems. Hybrids already have 80% or so of the technology needed for fuelcell cars. Batteries, energy recapturing, drive-by-wire systems, power management electronics, electric motors, etc, etc. Just not a fuelcell to provide the majority of the power. Hybrids had a very efficient ICE to do that....
Like doublem implied, the fuelcell hype looks pretty fishy to say the least.
LoB
This concept is what pulled Chrysler out of the hole. It's not a new concept IMHO but I don't think GM can pull it off. Think about it, instead of producing fuel efficient hybrid( gasoline/electric ) cars( Toyota Prius, Honda Civic ) with some of these technologies( Prius uses most brake-by-wire and has electrical-power steering ) they are shooting for the moon.....
:(
It's all a ploy to do nothing now and to spend federal grant money so it looks like something is happening.
The money and oil keep flowing as usual. And the public is buying it.
LoB
did you know the oil industry owns the patent on NiMH battery technology? That might have had something to do with it. Toyota and Panasonic were/are being sued because they didn't use "D" cell NiMH batteries in the Prius like the ones in the Honda Insight.
BTW, The US government gave the US auto industry billions of dollars for the advancement of battery technology and they came up with nothing. All the while they told CARB that people wouldn't pay for an electric car and that you'd need to pay them $17,000 and give them the car. They hired experts to present this "case" to CARB. Just like the US auto industry turned away the Rosen Motors hybrid design, they will keep turning away anything which cost THEM money. They all jumped on the HYBRID bandwagon when it was shown how well Toyota was doing with the Prius but as soon as there was a way out( fuel cells ) they dropped the hybrid projects and started holding up the fuel cell banner. Only hybrids are here TODAY and fuel cells are just a "hopeful" technology.
And the result is no current change in fuel consumption for the foreseeable future. And if you thought Microsoft was bad, I'll bet the US auto industry is full of corruption at any cost.
IMHO
LoB
The sync software has never made my Z hang but I will tell you that the 1.6beta works much better than the 1.5 version. What's strange is that you have the ethernet-USB stuff working enough for ftp and that's what the sync software uses, ftp.
I'd look at the IP address settings in the qtopiadesktop( sync software ) and then delete the $HOME/.palmtopcenter directory and try again. You could have a corupted config file.
LoB
Defending from a bully requires BECOMING a bully.
It's that the defenders tend to have control of when to apply pressure. Bullies don't.
This is still a dumb topic. IMHO.
I'll bet "the law" is not going to go after you if you are attempting to make money... If you write a virus( I mean replicating email attachment ) that pop's up advertisements twice a day. You could have it get the ad material from your server and sell the ad space.
As soon as profit is involved, the rules change. At least here in the US.
BTW, There was proof that GW Bush knew of the impending doom for Harken Oil BEFORE he sold his shares. Why have we not heard anything more? Was it a rule change????
LoB
There's something really messed up with Windows when it takes over a year to migrate from NT to W2K. I read in on of the forums on CNN that some guy/admin wasn't even thinking of a WXP migration because they were still working on migrating from NT to W2K. A bunch of software needed upgrading and testing.
Maybe THAT's why so many NT and W2K sites are just moving to Linux. If it's gonna hurt so much, best end up with something less painful in the long run.
IMHO,
LoB
yeah, yeah, nano tubes, micro spheres, etc etc. What it mean is that because there are other "acceptable" means of extracting energy, fuel cells will either by very expensive or provide power for very small devices.
I guess the question is going to be if fuel cells will be able to replace batteries and if so, will they be able to provide enough energy to be cost effective. Heck, today, if you're willing to stay away from the i86 instruction set, PowerPC gets you way more bang for the buck in a portable system.....
It looks like that if you want more than a spoon full of energy from hydrogen, you need a VERY interesting way to obtain/store it. IE, it's not "the cat's meow" that the Bush administration and Detriot is saying it is.
Put it into a standard AAA or AA format and let the market decide. Put it into a proprietary format and kiss your investment good bye. IMHO.
LoB
It's very problematic doing anything with automobiles if not for the engineering but also because of the lawyers who love blaming things like 'clients running into light poles while drunk and sueing the light pole manufacturer and installation crew for negligence'.
BUT, why not use some of these new ideas in safer places? Like putting flywheels in subway stations to help stop incoming trains AND starting them off. The flywheel is stationary and there's always energy to put into it and very soon a need for that energy. And it could be purely mechanical or mechanical on braking and use as electrical energy on starting by adding shunting into the existing elecrical system.
Modern electronics can now control secondary braking systems if the flywheel system isn't effective or fails.
LoB
they( solid fuel rockets ) were only the "match" which first burned thru the liquid oxigen tank and ignited it. I'm not sure yet what "exploded" but it's probably in this thread somewhere...
in short, they only lit the fuse.
LoB
Excellent comments. I too saw that PBS show and have told it many times to amazed listeners. Just think of where we would be in hydrogen production if it was known early on what really happened. I think we'd still have blimps all over the place also.
y drogen_ storage.html
I think the real problem with hydrogen fuelcells is that amount of hydrogen needed. It'll probably have to be compressed into liquid form to get enough hydrogen gas for significant power generation and THAT is dangerous. Gasoline is liquid at room temperature but hydrogen isn't liquid until it compressed to.... well just read THIS:
http://www.fuelcellstore.com/information/h
# Compressed Hydrogen
Hydrogen can be compressed into high-pressure tanks. This process requires energy to accomplish and the space that the compressed gas occupies is usually quite large resulting in a lower energy density when compared to a traditional gasoline tank. A hydrogen gas tank that contained a store of energy equivalent to a gasoline tank would be more than 3,000 times bigger than the gasoline tank.
Compressing or liquefying the gas is expensive. Hydrogen can be compressed into high-pressure tanks where each additional cubic foot compressed into the same space requires another atmosphere of pressure of 14.7 psi. High-pressure tanks achieve 6,000 psi, and therefore must be periodically tested and inspected to ensure their safety.
LoB
I think they used unleaded fuel because it was readily available and showed how you could still use the existing infrastructure. I like your idea of a multi-fuel system though. Mainly because of the competitive nature of it.
;/
Capstone is still in business and if you are REALLY interested, you might still find someone there willing to work with you on it.
Also, I recall reading up on how they built the flywheel and it really looked like most of the R&D time/effort went into the flywheel. With shock absorbsion, floating bearings, explosion capturing, etc.
I'm still of the mind that fuelcells and flywheels belong in the home power system FIRST and not in automobiles. I think the competition in the auto industry makes it more "approachable". Kinda like in the computer industry where you have to see if there is even a snow balls chance in hell that Microsoft would be interested in your product. If they are, there's no/little future for YOU to make a profit. Other than purely selling out for less than what it's worth.
Didn't the oil industry purchase the patent on NiMH batteries????? I thought I remember hearing Toyota and Panasonic were being sued over the SHAPE of the NiMH batteries in the Prius.... Ah, progress.
LoB
There once was a US company who built a hybrid car which used a shoe-box sized turbine engine and a small flywheel. They designed both components from scratch and debugged it to the point where they drove the car across country. I don't even think it broke down once (unlike that fuelcell car that just made it's trip x-country and broke down many times).
r dw are.htmi ne/fall97 /9_25/Benrosen.html
http://www.awl.com/englishpages/tech_talking_ha
http://www.columbia.edu/cu/business/botl
there were more links a couple of years ago but now many are no longer posted. There used to be a good one with illustrations and pictures. Anyway, none of the Big Three would buy into their design so they closed shop. Capstone still makes compact turbine engines though.....
Could be a good time to auction off the car on ebay?
LoB
ahhhh, to push WMA. Nah, they wouldn't do something like that. Especially since more people like/use MP3 than WMA. Wait, didn't they do that with IE vs Netscape? And they wouldn't do something like preload a low-end MP3 encoder and push their higher bitrate WMA encoder as the default...
No, not the inventer of all computing. Microsoft.
LoB
This would be a good place for MS to now enable their DRM system to stop unlicensed MP3 DEcoders from running..
Will they take this "opportunity" to try out their new EUL? It would be a very 'Microsoft' thing to do. IMHO.
LoB
Think of the VW commercials (before TIVO days) where they said, "There are drivers and there are passengers", "Drivers wanted".
That is why companies like Microsoft prevail. Most of the population can be classified as "passengers". Spineless, chicken, lemmings, etc are also used. 8>
LoB
BTW, great sig by the parent of this thread. Quote from BladeRunner.
What a bunch of idiots, IMHO. Can't they figure out a way to use a system similar to what people have used for YEARS and just remove the issue of hanging chads, etc?
Now they want Granny and the other old farts to deal with touch screens and the likes. What happens when they touch two places at the same time or leave a hand on one part of the screen?
One step at a time folks. At least lets change this with the older generations in mind. Aren't they the ones who started this when a modified ballot style was used?
I mean really. Insert a digitized pad with LED's or something. If you push a button the LED will show you that you pushed it correctly and track your vote. When you're done, there's one last selection( done / not done ) and your personalized iButton won't eject til you select DONE. You won't be able to exit the polling place til you hand over the iButton.
Now who is behind all this new fangled voting system anyway? Some business is surely pushing it....
LoB
If you can hear the difference then you will use either higher encoding bits or analog recordings but most of the listening public can't hear/notice the difference.
Like the auto industry where you can buy a porche, ferrari, etc or a toyota, ford, etc depending on your driving needs, the same applies to the audio industry. Heck, BetaMax is still used today because of the quality it presents....
LoB
Good point and true. 25GB is the most I've put onto an old P120 and I had to partition it with 5GB per. Still not a problem IMHO.
LoB
HP might just be going "Back to the garage"( literally ) with how the company is now being run. CEO and management get huge bonus's for buying Compaq, they kill Jornada for iPaq, killing other higher quality products for Compaq products and somewhere I heard there's quite an HP / Microsoft "partnership" forming...... hummm
;)
It's like everyone who gets "touched" by Microsoft gets really stupid. The infection started with Microsoft "infecting" DEC. DEC "infected" Compaq and not Compaq is "infecting" HP. Microsoft almost got HP about 5 years ago when they started pushing NT over HP-UX but HP was smart enough to pull back on that. Kinda like they had some initial immunity to the "infection".
They are really acting "stupid" again so this "infection" might be fatal... Let's see, they'll first spin off the printer business for $$$$ and then Dell will purchase HP. If they don't smarten up, I give them 5-6 years before it's obvious they're looking for a buyer.
And what is all this crap about Intels Titanicium?
You'd think that after HP bought Apollow and got their chip and software people that they could come up with something better than the Titanicium processor.... IBM and Sun are running circles around HP in the high end server space and HP teams up with Intel.... HP makes/made great hardware but their getting pretty "stupid" these days. IMHO.
BTW, the HP unit was really nice but way over priced for the market.
LoB
don't forget that if someone does put such a system together and is willing to share, a bootable CD with all this on it (ala DemoLinux) THEN you'd have something for the masses.
1) Get that old Pentium 120 out of the trash, add soundcard X or Y, a 50G HD, CD-R drive, NIC, IrDA(ttyS0), and LCD(ttyS1).
1a) cut power to PS fan and add low RPM/noise fan
2) insert bootable CDROM of GnuPAS(GNU Personal Audio System) and boot.
3) remove bootable CDROM and start feeding your own CD's and/or feed it MP3's via NIC.
You'd still have an ugly box though. If only I had the funding....
LoB
not to mention a friendlier UI and database storage/retreival system. Like the Anonymous Coward mentioned, there's probably lower/no system noise and a high end audio card. And a remote.
This is for the masses and not geekdom but geeks can like it too. Maybe it's hackable.... Ogg anyone?
LoB