Come up with a good idea, and the world will beat a path to your door
I was rather amused to see that it's still possible for the big sites to completely Slashdot themselves. That's what apparently happened this morning, after TechCrunchIT declared that they were getting into the hardware game -- the site was totally inaccessible for several hours, presumably because they got slammed with traffic.
Now that things are back up, I do recommend checking it out, especially if you're a cool-toys geek and double-especially if you might have something to contribute. The idea is pretty simple: they're planning on taking a fairly standard Linux stack, and focusing on building the web tablet so many of us want. Thin as a MacBook Air, teeny solid-state hard drive, thoroughly underpowered for anything *but* the Web (but not intended to be used for anything other than the web), easy to use and *cheap*. Open source from top to bottom, so that anybody who wants to produce a knockoff can do so.
It's damned interesting, and I suspect they could pull it off: pretty much all the necessary software pieces exist, so they just need to be put together into a commodity package. If they can manage it for the sub-$300 price they're targeting (and I don't see much reason why they couldn't), I'd buy one in a heartbeat: it fills the niche between full-powered laptop and smartphone quite nicely. Exactly how much I'd use it would depend on how good a touchpad keyboard they have, but even with a fairly crappy one I can think of a bunch of ways I'd use it...
Now that things are back up, I do recommend checking it out, especially if you're a cool-toys geek and double-especially if you might have something to contribute. The idea is pretty simple: they're planning on taking a fairly standard Linux stack, and focusing on building the web tablet so many of us want. Thin as a MacBook Air, teeny solid-state hard drive, thoroughly underpowered for anything *but* the Web (but not intended to be used for anything other than the web), easy to use and *cheap*. Open source from top to bottom, so that anybody who wants to produce a knockoff can do so.
It's damned interesting, and I suspect they could pull it off: pretty much all the necessary software pieces exist, so they just need to be put together into a commodity package. If they can manage it for the sub-$300 price they're targeting (and I don't see much reason why they couldn't), I'd buy one in a heartbeat: it fills the niche between full-powered laptop and smartphone quite nicely. Exactly how much I'd use it would depend on how good a touchpad keyboard they have, but even with a fairly crappy one I can think of a bunch of ways I'd use it...