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[Da_Blitz]

intresting things have been happening latley with freescale, in 30 days (i i remeber correctly) they get sold to new owners, what this means i dont really know as i havent looked at the proposed plans if any are even avalible

anyway there was a new product on the market that was simmilar to what i had in mind in terms of casing, its a pxa270 chip (xscale) but it has wifi, bluetooth, keyboard and more.

some notable features (read must have) are:
ethernet
128MB of ram
8 hour batter life
20GB drive
USB host (most likly full speed)

remeber i am mainly designing this as a portable office and have recently been eyeing the flybook and lifebook after seeing them in person however this device seems to fill 90% of what i was planning to chuck in there, the only things missing seem to be video out and a video card

anyway links:
http://www.slashgear.com/more-details-on-t...reen-201720.php
http://www.seamlessinternet.com/s-xgen/specs.html
http://www.slashgear.com/s-xgen-umpc-field...oard-141644.php

[Da_Blitz]

its funny i was looking into "bios" and what it means to people

basically on the x86 we call it a "bios" on everything else its "firmware". except on everything else its expected that the firmware is the final program that will be running and that it knows about the hardware

on the x86 however it also provides basic drivers and bootstrapping code to launch the next stage

so on this thing why not use linux as a bootloader to boot the next stage

nice and simple.

one of the funny things about the tpm is that its really designed to make up for the deficincies of a broken and untrusted OS. if the OS is in flash and its the only thing that boots then you dont need a tpm chip nearly as much.

from a security standpoint it does help and is a good idea however i have never understood why they dont use a sim crad instead as then you gain the benifit of it bieng removable and if the hardware needs to be upgraded your drm C$#@ dosent go out with it.

anyway back on topic (my mind drifts often) bootloader code isnt that hard at all, you just have to know the hardware and how to initilise it. (not always easy but not nearly as hard as one would think, the hard part is working inside of 1K of sram trying to start up the ram controller before you can bootstrap into that nice 32MB+ of ram in the system)