use Perl

• I idea had crossed my mind too... (Score:2)

  by ajt (2546)

  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.

  --
  -- "It's not magic, it's work..."
  • Re:I idea had crossed my mind too... (Score:2)

    by samtregar (2699)

    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... (Score:2)

      by ajt (2546)

      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 r

      --
      -- "It's not magic, it's work..."
    • Re:I idea had crossed my mind too... (Score:1)

      by phillup (4419)

      What about netbooting via ethernet... and then cutting the "umbilical cord"?
      
      Hm...
      
      
      • Re:I idea had crossed my mind too... (Score:2)

        by samtregar (2699)

        Again, no netboot PCMCIA support. That's as true for wired as for wireless, as far as I know.

        -sam