Re: [Rule-list] "Advance to the past" and FAQ

[Eugene Wong]

> From: Marco Fioretti <address@hidden>
>
> On Tue, Oct 22, 2002 21:28:37 at 09:28:37PM -0700, Geoff Burling wrote:
> > On the other hand, now that these older architectures have been 
> deprecated,
> > could there be a market for inexpensive, special-purpose devices based
> > on these technologies? Before all of you laugh off this suggestion,
> > remember that the Palm OS handheld devices used a processor from the
> > 68xxx family -- an architecture that Apple had abandoned several years
> > before.
> >
> > Even if there is small chance that some entrepreneur decides to
> > embrace this ``advance to the past", RULE will be useful again by 
> keeping
> > technological simplicity viable.
> >
>
> Geoff,
>
> there is nothing to laugh, I am fully convinced of this too: just look
> what I wrote when we started the project in FAQ #3...

I agree, in that there is nothing to laugh at. If I understand correctly, 
NASA is buying XT processors on ebay. Selling your processors is good way to 
support the space industry. Also, this reminds me of an idea that I wanted 
to suggest, but seemed too restrictive for the RULE project. I wanted to 
make a custom installation, where you had no choice of packages, and all 
binaries were stored on read-only partitions. This way, we could create an 
install program that partitioned the minimum amount needed for a text-based 
office suite, mutt, lynx, etc. It seemed kind of strange at first, but these 
days, people don't really like 386s so they try to throw them out. Meanwhile 
parents are concerned about the kids downloading and viewing porn, and the 
parents still want a computer that is powerful enough to do homework, email, 
browse, etc. Well, it's pretty hard to view porn with lynx, wouldn't you 
agree? With small partitions mounted as read-only, there won't be enough 
room for the kids to install graphic software and get away with it. Well, 
I'm sure that there is a way, but still, it would be harder. Also, having 
those partitions mounted as read-only will allow us to cumstomize scripts so 
that they won't have to run a full RH boot & shutdown process, and would 
avoid using fsck on the whole hard drive in the envent of a crash.

I don't know enough about the entire boot and shutdown process, but it is 
definitely something that I want to try out.

Part of the process of convincing people that this is good enough, is by 
asking teachers to endorse it, as well as giving a few sample documents that 
they can view to see the capabilities of the software.

Other things that we can add are: a good DIR_COLORS file that tries to make 
use of *every* color combination; a web portal especially geared for text 
browsers, and the text browsing community. If we charged a $5 yearly fee, 
then we could start making a bit of a profit, maybe. :^)

Thoughts?

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