Why get your hands dirty with that sort of thing when there are so many contractors in the world?

True, I was assuming a copy of Visual Studio and the various other windows dev trimmings included in "exactly as MS would have recommended". You can make do with less than that; but it won't make your life any easier. In any event, doing an OS-level port is going to be somewhere between brutal and impossible, so either going native with your win32 skills, or going 'native' by using the device as an SSH/VNC display mechanism is the option of preference.

Is this the local-chamber-of-commerce estimate for 'job creation', to be totted out when whoring for subsidies, or the actually shows up in the 'help wanted' section number?

I have nothing against SpaceX in particular; but it is not exactly a secret that "Will create(or, sometimes, if you are a horrible human being 'grow') eleventy-zillion jobs!!!" is the earliest and most ubiquitous claim for any and all plans looking for tax breaks and zoning variances. Hell, when assorted professional sports teams are demanding that taxpayers build their stadiums because, um, reasons, they invariably manage to produce numbers alleging that a few janitorial and hot-dog seller positions will somehow be god's gift to the local economy, and totally worth the several hundred million dollars.

Unfortunately, while such devices are undeniably cool(and I don't covet several or anything), they are a minority among 'Pocket PC' devices. The questioner mentions Windows Mobile 5/6, which (while they do support x86, see HP's thin client lines among numerous other embedded uses) are late enough that ARM and the occasional other non-x86 had pretty much entirely annihilated the DOS/x86-based minature PCs.

Now, a 3-600MHz ARM might be as fast, if a DOSbox port is available, as the HP you mention; but that style of 'Pocket PC' died some years before what TFA is about. Sadly.

Oh, I'd be the last to argue for Putin being a nice guy, or not having KGB-filled visions of a rebuilt Soviet Empire; my point was just about the economic/intelligence strategy at play, though.

As best I can see, the treatment of foreign web companies is a somewhat less polished version of the Chinese one(and, given how closely tied the economy and state budget are to oil prices, probably something they'd be wise to turn into a more polished version of the Chinese model sooner rather than later).

In military terms, Russia is more saber and less rattle than China(China does have some questionably-acquired territories and disputed islands and things; but all are either old enough that only idealistic college students still talk about them, or new; but haven't gone hot), with a greater willingness to actively invade nearbye former soviet republics; but somewhat less enthusiasm for tech demos of mysteriously-similar-but-cheaper-and-possibly-actually-on-time next-gen weapons systems.

He's just lucky that he's on this side of the pond. That kind of disloyalty to The Company might cause you to commit an unfortunate suicide over at Foxconn...

Man, a Micro Drive. Cheap flash has made those irrelevant; but I still admire their sheer beauty. All the 'I can't believe this possibly works, especially when they let it out of a lab and let an idiot like me bump it around' value of a mechanical HDD with a head floating on a cushion of air so thin that a speck of dust could ruin it; but on the scale of a nice mechanical watch movement, all crammed into a power envelope that a device expecting an normal CF card wouldn't choke on.

I'd be hard pressed to find a use for one these days; but damn, those things are impressive.

Pocket PCs happen to be a fairly bad case; but some old gear actually ages quite well, for certain purposes. I absolutely loved my Visor Edge with Weasel Reader and I can't even count how many books I read on that thing before Kindles were available, and back when they still cost a small fortune. Nice and portable, too.

Also, you can have my '92 Model M when you pry it from my cold, dead, hands, assuming you brought enough backup to keep me from bludgeoning you to death with it.

The situation is really pretty dire. Even back when PocketPC devices were in their 'best case' period for hobbyist tinkering(ie. fairly current, available either new or nice and cheap used), the Linux ports were rough.

The onboard flash was usually eccentric enough that you could only run Linux from CF or SD, some devices you still had to boot to WinCE every time and use a program that did some clever memory twiddling to kick the device over to Linux(something like the DOS Linux loaders that had their uses back in the day, though I'm not nearly qualified to discuss the details; but the concept and use were similar).

Peripheral support(especially graphics) was also generally atrocious, makes today's proprietary-blobs-for-one-antique-android-version mobile GPU situation look like some kind of Stallman Valhalla. With the right witchcraft, some models could at least display stuff on screen, some 'ran linux' in the sense that a linux kernel running on the device could be made to chat over the USB dock or a serial header; but not much else.

Since that time, the sites, documentation, writeups, tools, and projects have substantially rotted. With the hardware supply dwindling and Android devices cheap and common(or expensive and fairly classy, if you prefer) virtually all the developer, tinkerer, power-user, and other useful people have moved on. At best, you might still be able to dig up copies of files and docs that aren't just broken links; but that's about it.

WinCE software (while that has its own limitations, like being WinCE software) is actually likely to be markedly less painful. It's not exactly still on the market; but the value of used/new-old-stock/not-yet-linkrotted/etc. WinCE software is close to zero, so you can probably score some with sufficient scrounging. Plus, while MS certainly doesn't give a damn about supporting you anymore, 2005-2007 wasn't all that long ago, so you can probably get a full WinCE dev environment, exactly as MS would have recommended, with nothing more than a bit of piracy and an XP VM with USB passthrough.

Lest this all seem doom-and-gloom; I do have one useful recommendation: Pocket Putty. Exactly what it sounds like. Everyone's favorite Windows SSH client; but for Pocket PC. There's also a VNC Viewer. Never could find any X11.

At this point, pretty close to useless as standalone devices(and yes, the batteries are probably shot in any case, Li-ion is born to die); but between Putty and VNC you might actually be able to get some nice little 'dashboard' style display screens tethered to a more capable computer(possibly even use them as 'heads' for the routers, NASes, etc. that run Linux properly and have USB ports; but don't have graphics output: even something with no physical graphics hardware can, if it has the RAM, run xvnc, which would allow you to use a pocket PC with VNC client as a 'monitor'. Not something you'd want to do video playback on; but a nice little bandwidth graph, or some alerts or something? Sounds fun.

(Also, you mentioned SIRFStar III GPS units: you didn't say if those were built in, CF/SDIO expansion, or some proprietary 'cradle' thing: in any case those are very, very, well supported by practically everything, common, reasonably well regarded, spit NEMA strings over something that looks like a serial port, sometimes 3.3v, sometimes 5v, sometimes actual RS-232, sometimes USBTTY. Assuming that you can crack them out of their packaging and get the pinout right before you fry something, you should be able to use SIRFStar IIIs with damned near anything, with at most a serial level converter or suitable USB/serial adapter. Even if you have to junk the Pocket PCs, those might be handy to have.)

This is the Harper regime we are talking about. Did you need any additional hints?

You don't...exactly...strike me as somebody who would use marxist economic formulations; but a considerable majority of CS workers are kidding themselves if they think that they map to anything other than 'proletariat' or 'petite bourgeoisie' in a marxist economic formulation.

Obviously, if you reject such a thing entirely that doesn't much matter; but the point remains in that context.

If anything, we've gotten worse on standardization over time.

Back in ye olden days, it was actually reasonably likely that the entertainment system was a DIN-mount box with some obnoxious-but-more-or-less-functional bundle of wiring harness that connected it to to the vehicle. Less so today, and(even when that's still physically the case) more likely that it isn't just power and analog audio; but a whole bunch of actively hostile and undocumented CAN chatter that disables a bunch of random cabin systems if you aren't using a suitably blessed device.

What I find puzzling is that (unless somebody needs to be fired yesterday, and hard) the 'Ford Sync' component isn't really something that a good realtime OS would be an obvious choice for. It's the infotainment/navigation/non-essential cabin control widget; and had better not be scribbling all over the ECU over CAN.

That doesn't make QNX wrong, you can put a GUI on top of it just fine; but it makes it a lot less obvious why MS got the boot. WinCE is kind of old and nasty; but the NT kernel is respectable enough, and all reports are that (thanks to the fact that your phone is now more powerful than the workstations it ran on in 1993) it actually delivers fairly peppy performance on the distinctly midrange hardware that most WP8 devices ship with.

Apparently MS and Ford had some sort of togetherness problem, and one or both of them screwed up such that the resulting product isn't good enough; but I'm guessing that the problem wasn't "We need a better real time OS". This 'Ford Sync' is a consumer electronics UI problem.

How about tattooing 'Dirty Cop' on their foreheads(Snow Crash style) and then introducing them to the general prison population?

The janitor will need a nice bonus and a hell of a stiff drink; but the problem will likely be solved.

I'm definitely no Russia wonk; but their activity with respect to the internet looks fairly similar to the Chinese playbook: a mixture of making domestic surveillance easier(mass surveillance is much more practical if you can just subpoena the results, rather than tap the endpoints, so having Russians using American services hosted in places where getting the good stuff is either impossible or at least impossible to do silently isn't desirable for the local authorities) and quasi-mercantilist support for (Putin-friendly) local businesses. American internet companies(though not ISPs) have some very potent offerings compared to many of their international competitors(lest you accuse me of flag-waving jingoism, those offerings are often built with good old American know-how provided by talented foreigners that we attract or buy out; but the products are still good and still owned by American companies), if you wish to support local businesses(for a mixture of economic reasons, cultural considerations, and surveillance purposes); basically any dicking-with-foreigners that you can get away with is to your advantage.

In relatively minor ways, even mostly-friendly European states do it(eg. mandates and subsidies to preserve local, local-language film production vs. Hollywood, various 'Google Tax' initiatives designed to give cover to incumbent publishers with pitiful or nonexistent internet presence). The Chinese are more aggressive and more experienced(the various mandatory 'joint ventures' that end up being tech transfers, using the Great Firewall to mess with external services and make internal services more reliable by comparison, etc.)

The Russians will likely have a harder time of it because they aren't populous enough, and on an economic upswing, to be treated as an 'absolutely must expand into this market, even if the terms are blatantly unfair!'; but their strategy looks fairly similar: mess with the foreigners enough to improve the prospects of local companies, move more Russian internet activity onto servers in Russia that can easily be subpoenaed or equivalent, add a variety of obnoxious measures that can then be used as 'carrots' in diplomacy (we'll totally remove the restrictions on some of your major internet companies that we just pass if you overlook our activities in X!".

It's not exactly nice, and Putin isn't dumb, so I wouldn't just dismiss it; but it looks like a fairly familiar playbook.