[vox] shuttle mini pc's [was The Mystery of the Dying Laptop]

[R. Douglas Barbieri]

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On Sat, 2003-12-06 at 15:10, Bill Kendrick wrote:
> 'course, printers turned out to be an issue.  Every printer had different
> magic codes.  But, I hate printers in general, too... no matter HOW easy
> they are to plug in.

I agree.=20

Okay, I'm going pose a rhetorical question:  why do we have to have a
different driver for every piece of equipment?  I want to know why we
can't have a standard that hardware manufactures follow such that any
software can use any peripheral or expansion card, no special drivers or
software needed. For example, all printers should have a standard
protocol they should follow, no matter if they are parallel, serial or
usb, postscript or not. Another example--all NIC's work the same--you
open a standard port or whatever, and can send and recieve.  USB devices
should have a set of standards they follow depending on what they are
(USB mass storage drive--this would apply to digital cameras and mp3
players).

Presently, you don't need to have special drivers to handle IDE and SCSI
drives, right?  Why can't other devices work the same way?  Are these
reasons more political than anything else? Is it just about controlling
who uses the hardware on what platform via platform dependent drivers
(such as Win32 only)?  Am I being naive or would it be a realistic
expectation for vendors to adhere to a common standard which works
cross-platform?

I am imagining a drastically stripped down Linux kernel which has common
drivers to handle common types of devices, and no longer having a need
for individual chip set drivers.

Should I go take a cold shower? :-)

>=20
> -bill!
> _______________________________________________
> vox mailing list
> vox@lists.lugod.org
> http://lists.lugod.org/mailman/listinfo/vox
--=20
R. Douglas Barbieri
doug@dooglio.net
http://www.dooglio.net

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