I just put the first entry in my new blog at Apress. I'll keep posting here on Perl-specific topics, but more general techno-babble will go there.
My first entry concerns my plans for a wireless X11 tablet:
http://blogs.apress.com/archives/000150.html
-sam
I had a "corridor" type conversionation with someone once about a tablet form device with a stripped down feature set optimised to displaying X over a wireless link once. Touch sensitive screen, nice graphics card, low-temperature CPU, lots of RAM, probably no disks, and OS and X software in flash RAM.
Re:I idea had crossed my mind too...
samtregar on 2004-06-18T19:52:35
I thought about the "no disks" option too, but it doesn't seem to be possible with cheap hardware. As far as I can tell there aren't any PCMCIA wireless cards that can do a netboot and flash RAM would require a custom device.-sam
Re:I idea had crossed my mind too...
ajt on 2004-06-18T20:13:50
Quite, but I was dreaming of a properly manufactured device, prupose built for the job, rather than a DIY affair. I'm sure some variant of an ARM, SPARC, or MIPS processor, RAM and a minimal OS would be sufficient. Most of the work would be in the X optimised GPU, and there would be pretty much little else going on, so battery life should be good. You could probably run two or three devices at a time from the same backend server, ideal for the wireless Unix user of the future. At a push you could probably run a VNC connection to one of those old Windows things too!
Re:I idea had crossed my mind too...
phillup on 2004-06-18T21:47:14
What about netbooting via ethernet... and then cutting the "umbilical cord"?
Hm...
Re:I idea had crossed my mind too...
samtregar on 2004-06-18T21:51:25
Again, no netboot PCMCIA support. That's as true for wired as for wireless, as far as I know.-sam
