Yeah, that is good news. Dongles and other attempts to limit user freedom on free software, however, is not the greatest of news. One of the worst things that can happen to free software is for a bunch of commercial vendors to make one off dongled devices that don't have support down the road. The public, already confused about what free software and Linux is, will get a very bad impression from that. This bad impression will be balanced by Microsoft's moronic efforts. The phat box will work better than any WinCE device, but M$ can break the M$ client and then the phat-box will be screwed for all but Mac people. People will see that Microsoft is the source of their pain until phat-box goes under and they confuse the non-free dongle with free software.
Media devices have got to be one of the most dangerous areas to get into. Between big dumb publishers who want to sue for contributory infringement and reliance on M$ clients for DRM, it's a real mine field. Hopefully, foreign firms will thumb their nose at that and make reasonable devices. In the mean time, general purpose devices with free software like the Zaurs rock. I saw a bunch of Festival packages on some older Debian ARM lists. Don't know much about them. I'm making more space for my Debian mirror and will add ARM to it so that I can start playing around with it to see how it plays with OpenZaurus. I got a nice old 18 gig SCSI drive last week, $22 and shipping on ebay. Now I'm waiting for an 80 pin to 68 pin connector so I can stick it into my Athlon 650. Between my card's 40MB/s transfer rate and 100 ethernet, I'm going to see some good performance on that mirror. At 10,000 rpm, the box is going to sound like a jet airplane despite the sound deadening I've put in. I put in a nice big but quit fan up front. Time to find some ceiling tiles. On 2003.08.01 09:05 John Hebert wrote: > I never said I wanted to buy the PhatBox. I just wanted to share the fact > that VW is selling them, and that Linux is making headway in the embedded > space and WinCE (appropriate name) is not. ;) > > Concerning Zaurus as a media player: it works great! It has a combo > headphone/microphone jack so you have to be careful when you buy a > headphone. Storage is expensive though when considering CF cards, but daily > uploads help with that. > > What I really like to do is get Festival running on it then I could listen > to stored text on my daily commute. > > John Hebert >
