On Saturday 02 August 2003 23:12, Sameer D. Sahasrabuddhe wrote:
On Sat, Aug 02, 2003 at 07:38:43PM +0530, J. T. D'souza wrote:
On Friday 01 August 2003 15:31, ramesh thatha wrote:
i think sameer's requirement is different.... he wanted to have GUI (i.e. xwindows , browser) in his system....whitedwarflinux cannot help.... it don't have xwindows in it...
Looked at whitedwarf ... its meant for the server, when what we are looking is meant for clients, or actually terminals with limited RAM, Flash, and no hard disk.
Xwindows is gross overkill for such projects. Microwindows being developed for handheld and such others may be better. http://microwindows.censoft.com/
This sure does look promising ... if it can really beat
plain-vanilla
X, then we are definitely interested.
However one should have a very clear definition of the project
goal
else it will swiftly deteriorate into one more unusable tech toy.
Well, I am not myself working on the project, so can't give too many details. But I do know its meant for the terminals I described
above.
Something like "application specific" small computers, which do only
a
handful of things, but do it well.
Some people in IIT were working on this as well ... they achieved to put a lot of stuff into 16MB of Flash. We hope to get inputs from
them
as well ...
A general purpose client ends up as a bad compromise between portability, usability, power consumption and costs. A case in point is the simputer. At a retail price of Rs. 15K it is most certainly too much for too little.
Devices for field personnel end up with data entry problems. Try using a PDA - with its nano sized, pico illuminated, virtually vanishing keyboard - in a crowded kalbadevi wholesale shop. Voice input devices require too much processing power. A digital voice recorder which can download the stored .ogg file into a backend server for voice recognition and processing is a far cheaper and better alternative. Infact u already have them - cellphones.
Designing a general purpose reconfigurable cell phone may be a much better idea. It will have a huge market and be commercially viable. Most of them have some avtar of arm processor, about 2MB of flash and 2MB of ram. And do nothing (apart from draining the battery) when you are not yakking. Java phones hitting the market are such devices. Only problem is that they run some jerks version of os and software, and requires third rate SDKs to reinvent perfectly usable existing applications. A linux cellphone will put real people in command.
rgds jtdsouza@softhome.net