As a shareholder in Netpliance I would like to see the company arrive at a business model that ensures profitability, and as a consumer I want to be able to use the hardware they sell *without* ISP service.
It is a testament to their engineers that they came up with a design that inspires so much interest in the, uhm, user community. People who have all kinds of hardware are spending (relatively) *large* amounts to have a low-end WinChip system. Two months ago you could *give away* a WinChip system, now you cant stock them fast enough. Even $40 S/H charges are not diminishing intrest too severely...
I would suggest that Netpliance realize that they have a good design, and that they consider offering a similar design but with an eye towards the thin client market. A model of the I-Opener (I-Wide-Opener?) that you could ship with a BIOS and OS install that would accomodate a Win2K ICA terminal server client, and maybe even a way to drop an X Term software package... The price could start at $500, and drop for volume (I would think), with volume increasing as your starting price approaches $200. As for small PCs (I-Openers with HD installed) I would suggest avoiding that market, unless you want to sell systems with built-in mass storage (you include the HD) or provide a simple after-market connection without requireing opening up the case (SCSI? USB?)
I think you should insist on *not* shipping and consumer OSs on the units (no Win-anything), as the cost will crush the value these units represent and the need for *another* Windows box is slight, at best.
You need to embrace and celebrate the differences in your offerings compared with YAWPC (Yet Another Windows PC) - don't compete with eMachines, compete with NCD and WebTV!
How, exactly, are satelittes "Open Source" - Do we really want access tot he blueprints/source code for the navigation computers? That is what Open Source would mean (AFAIK).
Now, if Iridium were to be "given" to someone, access would never be free, unless adequate ground crews could be gotten for free, electricity was free for the ground stations, and the phone calls from the ground stations to their ultimate destinations were all made free. Then, maybe.
Now, since there is this thought of sending data to the sattelite, where would it go? To "free" NAPs with great big pipes to connect to the internet backbone? And how would access be limited? Why wouldn't everyone want to access the satelites at the same time? They only have a certain, finite amount of capacity...
And how is the Iridium progect going to overcome the loss of their great big tax write-off for the investment? They can write off $100's of millions of dollars of taxes if they dispose of the equipment (remember the landfill full of Apple Lisas?)
If the network were given to a non-profit organization that could give them a deduction, that would be a good start. Then the non-profit could contract back to the Irridium project for day-to-day management and offer service at price that could ignore the original equipment costs, and instead was focused on meeting on-going costs.
The uplinks are slow, there are not alot of them, and the ground stations are expensive to man/run.
A 75 Gigabyte TiVo/Replay box would be sweet - if I could hand-upgrade a TiVo to 75 Gig storage I would consider getting one. I just have a real problem with the monthly fees.
Note to parents with young children - can you imagine how many childrens movies you could dump into a TiVo/Replay box and never have to worry about getting a peanut butter sandwich inside the VCR!?
Unix will always be around, you will not be able to get rid of it, and while some people will like it, most will ignore/have no real opinion.
Some will outright hate it.
But, when you say Unix, do you mean the command-line interface OS designed for use by programmers on 110 baud teletypes and VDT tubes? Or is it the OS with the marvelous scheduler and task manager? Or maybe it is the OS that has adopted the X11 interface as it's defacto standard?
Unix means many things to many people, you may want to clarify, so we can accurately explain why Unix will not die...
Look on the bag, plain as day - M&M Mars, a division of Mars, Incorporated.
Any other mysteries?
P.S. - there was one line Tim Robbins said that blew the whole movie for me, but I can't remember what it was - he was standing there arguing that they needed to rescue the stranded astronaut, and the line was just so lame!
It was nice eye-candy, but I have no reason to see it again...
These satilites are not "tasked" for any ham bands, and it is not likely that their operating freq. can be updated without hopping on a shuttle (at a minimum).
The Iridium satellites will be bought for pennies on the dollar, and the service will resurface at much lower cost (IMHO). Will it be competitive with cell phones across town, no - but for ships at sea, scientists in the brush, etc. it will be useful.
Now, what kind of deal will there be on these phones on eBay in a few months?;^)
These programs were allowed/able to be up to 240+ characters. The real perversions started when people started using "puctuation equivalents" for BASIC keywords and encoding assembler subroutines!
In my graduate web design class we were given the challenge to develop an interesting/useful web page in one file. Compared to that exercise, this seems easy. I made an ASCII art car that raced from side to side (in less than 512 bytes, IIRC)!
They wouldn't have saved *any* money by going with Linux instead of MS Windows.
Ford is outsourcing to PeoplePC (PeoplesPC?) and paying (I imagine) a monthly fee per user. The cost to PeoplePC to ramp up a seperate Linux support organization would have been reflected in the cost to Ford.
PeoplePC/HP are probably paying $75 for a Win98 license and some sort of MS Works-type software bundle. How much, in could they have saved? $75? Well, that is the up-front cost, but the support costs would have gone through the roof (where will they find a few hundred Linux support technicians? And what will they cost?
This offer builds on PeoplePC existing infrastructure, to adopt Linux would require them to nearly start from scratch!
Just wanted to inject some reality into the debate...
Why do you assume the low-power station would be unlicensed? Low power broadcast (in this case) means proportinately less paperwork for less radiated power.
I can't park my 10/100 watt transmitter on the freq. of an existing radio station, effectively "jamming" the signal from nearby receivers...
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It is a testament to their engineers that they came up with a design that inspires so much interest in the, uhm, user community. People who have all kinds of hardware are spending (relatively) *large* amounts to have a low-end WinChip system. Two months ago you could *give away* a WinChip system, now you cant stock them fast enough. Even $40 S/H charges are not diminishing intrest too severely...
I would suggest that Netpliance realize that they have a good design, and that they consider offering a similar design but with an eye towards the thin client market. A model of the I-Opener (I-Wide-Opener?) that you could ship with a BIOS and OS install that would accomodate a Win2K ICA terminal server client, and maybe even a way to drop an X Term software package... The price could start at $500, and drop for volume (I would think), with volume increasing as your starting price approaches $200. As for small PCs (I-Openers with HD installed) I would suggest avoiding that market, unless you want to sell systems with built-in mass storage (you include the HD) or provide a simple after-market connection without requireing opening up the case (SCSI? USB?)
I think you should insist on *not* shipping and consumer OSs on the units (no Win-anything), as the cost will crush the value these units represent and the need for *another* Windows box is slight, at best.
You need to embrace and celebrate the differences in your offerings compared with YAWPC (Yet Another Windows PC) - don't compete with eMachines, compete with NCD and WebTV!
Now, if Iridium were to be "given" to someone, access would never be free, unless adequate ground crews could be gotten for free, electricity was free for the ground stations, and the phone calls from the ground stations to their ultimate destinations were all made free. Then, maybe.
Now, since there is this thought of sending data to the sattelite, where would it go? To "free" NAPs with great big pipes to connect to the internet backbone? And how would access be limited? Why wouldn't everyone want to access the satelites at the same time? They only have a certain, finite amount of capacity...
And how is the Iridium progect going to overcome the loss of their great big tax write-off for the investment? They can write off $100's of millions of dollars of taxes if they dispose of the equipment (remember the landfill full of Apple Lisas?)
If the network were given to a non-profit organization that could give them a deduction, that would be a good start. Then the non-profit could contract back to the Irridium project for day-to-day management and offer service at price that could ignore the original equipment costs, and instead was focused on meeting on-going costs.
The uplinks are slow, there are not alot of them, and the ground stations are expensive to man/run.
But hey, it's Open Source - it's great!
Note to parents with young children - can you imagine how many childrens movies you could dump into a TiVo/Replay box and never have to worry about getting a peanut butter sandwich inside the VCR!?
Some will outright hate it.
But, when you say Unix, do you mean the command-line interface OS designed for use by programmers on 110 baud teletypes and VDT tubes? Or is it the OS with the marvelous scheduler and task manager? Or maybe it is the OS that has adopted the X11 interface as it's defacto standard?
Unix means many things to many people, you may want to clarify, so we can accurately explain why Unix will not die...
Any other mysteries?
P.S. - there was one line Tim Robbins said that blew the whole movie for me, but I can't remember what it was - he was standing there arguing that they needed to rescue the stranded astronaut, and the line was just so lame!
It was nice eye-candy, but I have no reason to see it again...
The Iridium satellites will be bought for pennies on the dollar, and the service will resurface at much lower cost (IMHO). Will it be competitive with cell phones across town, no - but for ships at sea, scientists in the brush, etc. it will be useful.
Now, what kind of deal will there be on these phones on eBay in a few months? ;^)
Note: The contest web page fits in 2940 bytes...
not bad.
Ken
This will be interesting to watch...
Bluetooth is designed for a very different purpose than these wireless LAN cards...
Ford is outsourcing to PeoplePC (PeoplesPC?) and paying (I imagine) a monthly fee per user. The cost to PeoplePC to ramp up a seperate Linux support organization would have been reflected in the cost to Ford.
PeoplePC/HP are probably paying $75 for a Win98 license and some sort of MS Works-type software bundle. How much, in could they have saved? $75? Well, that is the up-front cost, but the support costs would have gone through the roof (where will they find a few hundred Linux support technicians? And what will they cost?
This offer builds on PeoplePC existing infrastructure, to adopt Linux would require them to nearly start from scratch!
Just wanted to inject some reality into the debate...
I can't park my 10/100 watt transmitter on the freq. of an existing radio station, effectively "jamming" the signal from nearby receivers...
HTH