[via John Robb] In his note K-Logs - The Next Generation Desktop John Robb makes the case for Radio (or other UserTalk based programs) running on cheap hardware as a tool for helping to connect workers in corporations in developing countries.

This is a great idea, and it doesn't really matter which language you use for this as long as you have decent network connectivity built-in. I use the Tcl/Tk language in this way, and it has the advantage of running under Windows, Linux, and MacOS.

I firmly believe that the closed (or at least hard to parse) proprietary document formats will eventually change to a more open standard. These open formats will be easily parsed by general purpose software that build on ideas we have developed in the past few years such as SOAP, XML, and CSS.

The dream of using Linux on old hardware is questionable though. Yes, the performance is acceptable on my old P266-MMX machine with 96 MB of RAM - and maybe that's enough. But Windows 98 is pretty fast on that old laptop, and that's the hardware generation that Windows 98 was designed for.

It's just too bad that Userland does not have a tool that runs on Linux! There was some noise a while back about running Radio under Wine. What about WineX? 7:49:17 PM