Truly horrible idea for a hack

[rlk at alum.mit.edu (Robert L Krawitz)]

A hallway discussion with an unnamed person (whose reputation I shan't
sully by associating him with this) who was curious about my brand new
Handspring Visor gave me a truly perverted idea.

We know that a Palm Pilot/Visor is a real computer, since it can boot
Linux.  I guess that's a reasonable definition of a real computer.  It
has as much memory as my first computer (8 MB), which had no trouble
running Linux, anyway.  So...

Said person pointed out that Linux isn't much fun to run w/o a
keyboard.  I agreed, but noted that presumably it's possible to remote
login.  If it can boot Linux, and has a network connection, it can run
IP, right?  Well, it can, 'cuz I sez so.  Either the cradle or the
IRDA connection will do.

But telnet is SO 90's (actually, it's SO 70's, but that doesn't sound
quite right).  It has to run a web server.  Maybe Apache's a bit too
big, but there are small web servers out there.  For that matter,
there's a kernel-based HTTP server in Linux already (the first step on
the road to oblivion).  It can serve static files.

So here's what we do.  We set up the biggest, honkingest machine we
can find, a Starfire or a mainframe, as a client.  Remember those?
Those are those little things that are supposed to be floating around.
We set up the Visor as a server.  Remember those?  Those are big,
honking machines that draw more power in a second than all the Visors
in the world will draw in the next 10 years.  And we run Netscape on
the Starfire, loading pages from the Visor.

Now you see why I won't name the other person...

-- 
Robert Krawitz <rlk at alum.mit.edu>      http://www.tiac.net/users/rlk/

Tall Clubs International  --  http://www.tall.org/ or 1-888-IM-TALL-2
Member of the League for Programming Freedom -- mail lpf at uunet.uu.net
Project lead for The Gimp Print --  http://gimp-print.sourceforge.net

"Linux doesn't dictate how I work, I dictate how Linux works."
--Eric Crampton
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