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Home / I-Appliance BBS General / NEWS, Breaking NEWS ReRead the freshmeat article, original IO designer responds ReRead the freshmeat article, original IO designer responds

ReRead the freshmeat article, original IO designer responds (modified 0 times) SteveInNC I make no claims as the veracity of the author's identity, but someone claiming to be the original IO designer has posted a followup to the FreshMeat article, describing the history of the unit, and some of it's designed uses. There is a alot of FUD surrounding the IOpener. This could be more, but it has a certain ring of truth to it. Decide for yourself. Don't flame me, I'm just relaying the info. The URL is http://freshmeat.net/news/2000/04/08/955252740.html Look for the April 10 entry. 04-10-2000 12:31:33

RE:ReRead the freshmeat article, original IO designer responds (modified 0 times) Datoyminaytah May be true, I searched altavista for his name and found his netpliance email address on this page: http://www.freedows.org/english/contacts.html 04-10-2000 12:51:19

RE:ReRead the freshmeat article, original IO designer responds (modified 0 times) DSMDriver No way. A hoax. If this guy actually designed the box, he would know that "current email" isn't stored in the flash. It would burn the flash up too quickly. Second, since when does the I-opener have Word and Excel viewers? Since when can someone just go out and port RealAudio between OS'es w/o the source code? There is nothing in this article that someone following the I-opener discussions for a week wouldn't already know. There is also no way that one guy designed the hardware and software for this box in 3 months. Plus, by the end of the article he is refering to the design as a group- using words like "we." I thought he designed it all by his lonesome? Whatever. 04-10-2000 13:39:50

RE:ReRead the freshmeat article, original IO designer responds (modified 0 times) eleven Well he never actually says that they didn't have a team doing software by the end of the project, just that he did the original hardware/firmware design. He also doesn't say that the Word/Excel viewers are actually in the finished product, just that they would have been easy in Linux. So, still might be (likely is) a hoax, but: 1) Anyone confirm that the i-opener actually has RealAudio support? That would lend more support to the claim. (and there's no reason to believe that NP couldn't get permission from the RA folks to port their code) 2) Hoax or not, there's 16MB or so of stuff on that Sandisk. Might be worth going through it a bit more carefully. It certainly seems logical that NP would allow remote "upgrades" given that there's no capacity for the user to load new changes. 04-10-2000 13:56:14

RE:ReRead the freshmeat article, original IO designer responds (modified 0 times) Datoyminaytah OK, well, the name may be the name of a current or former Netpliance employee, but of course the post could have been written by an imposter. 04-10-2000 14:30:54

RE:ReRead the freshmeat article, original IO designer responds (modified 0 times) adric I know nothing about the freshmeat post in question. I can however confirm that the IO has a real audio player in the Sandisk fs. The tutorial voiceovers are in RA format. I think they are is /app (IO not handy :( ) Hope that helps, -adric 04-10-2000 15:31:22

RE:ReRead the freshmeat article, original IO designer responds (modified 0 times) WindyCity Yes, you can get Real Audio streams from the iOpener from the branded Real Audio player (logo included). They are predefined streams that are available from the "Audio" portion of their value added service and play relatively well. Email is retained and available offline on the iOpener. So I'm guessing that its stored on the SansDisk as well. 04-10-2000 15:54:41

RE:ReRead the freshmeat article, original IO designer responds (modified 0 times) CrazyBee Although to some of you 16MB doesnt seem like much.. it is.. Have you ever looked at the size of a saved email? A few k.. its just text. even if it was HTML encoded still wont be that much of a hog. And, obviously, there would have to be some managment.. say, after 100 emails, it notifies you and then kick them over to the server for more storage. Also, I believe the netpliance web page states that email can be viewed offline and replied to offline as well. It jus saves the email reply and when yoiu dial in sends it out. Even Outlook does this simple task. Ever have an account at a university? Mine gives me a whopping 5megs and I have yet to use all of that up with my school web page plus two pages filled with Bjork and Milla Jovovich pics.. :) 04-10-2000 21:30:37

RE:ReRead the freshmeat article, original IO designer responds (modified 0 times) 4chars I found the article really interesting and think the guy's for real. I'd be ####tin my pants if I were the guy tho' with all the snooping that NPLI is doing around here. Great resource. Dude, please tell us more - maybe go through the list admin or something. "A review of the OS Drive will find it. Once found, and disassembled, a simple program to initiate the download and "update" the codes could be done. Were one to look closely at the Flash drive structure you will see there is more there than you think, a good place to start unraveling this puzzle" is particularly mouth watering! A riddle to solve? 04-10-2000 21:53:41

RE:ReRead the freshmeat article, original IO designer responds (modified 0 times) dune I read the guy's post and could find nothing in it that seemed wrong. I met with Netpliance several months ago as we were trying to use their hardware for our company's easy-access-to-the-masses device for our portal website. We have plans for 100's of 1000's of units. They really weren't interested in selling hardware - they were concentrating on advertising partnerships, etc. We just wanted to buy the box, but they said they had contracts with sponsors (read: Pizza key, Shopping links) that prevented the outright sale of the units. Hmm. We're working on a Lineo/Mozilla set-top box now instead... 04-11-2000 08:41:47

RE:ReRead the freshmeat article, original IO designer responds (modified 0 times) tooloo Actually, email is stored in flash, as is all of Netpliance's push content (weather, news, sports, finance, etc). I'm using (or attempting to use) an unmodified I-opener (wow!), and can vouch from firsthand observation that it does do just this. Does it make me feel warm and fuzzy inside? No. But do I understand why? Yes. It takes the I-opener a few minutes to download all of this stuff; I suppose Netpliance didn't want to repeat the process everytime the thing loses power. Or maybe they're just lazy. Beats me. There is RA support, albeit not G2. And although the rest of Netpliance's software works rather well if you can just get it to frickin connect, the RealAudio 5.0 player is -REALLY- flaky... 04-11-2000 14:13:38

RE:ReRead the freshmeat article, original IO designer responds (modified 0 times) MrPeach Dune, I hope you folks have given a look to the set top work being done by ATI. They have a prototype available with the works. I can give you a contact name if you are interested. my email: mrpeach@dotexpress.com 04-14-2000 21:08:28

RE:ReRead the freshmeat article, original IO designer responds (modified 0 times) NPLI neighbor I check with my source within NPLI and yes, there was a John Rohner there. Another factor that was accurate that I can verify is that the cost that NPLI pays for the I-Opener is ~$400. If you're looking to buy these IA in quantity, you may be able to get them from merita. They already distribute the iBrow to other latge buyers. 04-14-2000 21:19:47

RE:ReRead the freshmeat article, original IO designer responds (modified 0 times) Tackhead tooloo: Nothing creepy about caching the content locally, it's good user interface design. It probably makes the advertiser-sponsored sites (i.e. sites that the IO is programmed to cache automagically) feel a lot faster to the end user. No waiting for graphics to download over the 56K modem, etc. 04-14-2000 22:28:01

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