That is also the case for the Playstation 3, and you can not deny it has pixel shader support.

I saw it in late nineties (circa 1998), American Megatrends (AMI) BIOS for Socket 7 Pentium-compatible processors. It was text mode, but used VGA character programming for simulating a graphic cursor with "arrow" shape typical from other GUI (it was noticed it was text mode and not full-fledge graphic mode because of 8th and 9th row in character bounding box were duplicated, if I recall correctly).

Trying it is not enough. It's 2010, and AMD bought ATI almost 4 years ago (1), so there are no excuses. I would be glad of buying AMD+ATI integrated graphics instead of Intel, but it is a no-no until drivers for Linux reach its Windows counterparts performance-wise, and of course, I will not buy anything from AMD+ATI until then, not before. I buy products based on facts, not promises (I already made a mistake 3 years ago buying a AMD/ATI integrated graphics, still today without proper driver for Linux WTF!!!).

... told you

Probably it is not ASCII nor EBCDIC (both dating from 1963). After searching a bit, it seems that uses its own character encoding: GOST 10859-64.

Really?

If Google, because etics, is willing to lose such market as China, could get a huge credibility and respect increase (kudos, Google). Unfortunately, I'm skeptical about it.

This solution is simple transcoding, using a lot of CPU. They are probably picking the framebuffer from the display driver, providing it to a userland application that does the encoding and sending.

I expected a true lossless wifi link to the DVI/HDMI connector, this is a vendor-specific dirty hack.

Already done, see the Sega Dreamcast discs: GD-ROM.

Exactly.

I forgot to mention the path for installing applications, which are usually instaled at /home/opt (being /home the 2GB partition), using very litte or none space at the root partition (/).

Yes, it looks great (640x480 NTSC, 720x576 PAL -both interlaced-), as good as a composite video signal can be.

It is 2GB. The other 30GB is dynamically mounted/umounted when syncing to a external USB host (/home/user/MyDocs) if you choose it to act as a mass-storage device when pluged via USB. That means if you want to use the 30GB for applications, it is possible, but you can not use the applications installed in the 30GB area while connected to the PC. Anyway, 2GB for applications is plenty space, I just used about 11% (208MB) after installing every for weeks every interesting application. As example, you can install the MAME emulator, and have the games in the 30GB partition.

Just in case you're interested, here is a bit more info (32GB built-in plus 4GB in a micro-SDHC card, for avoiding trashing too much the internal flash and as backup for personal data):

mount:

rootfs on / type rootfs (rw)
ubi0:rootfs on / type ubifs (rw,bulk_read,no_chk_data_crc)
proc on /proc type proc (rw)
sysfs on /sys type sysfs (rw)
tmpfs on /tmp type tmpfs (rw,noatime,size=1024k)
tmpfs on /var/run type tmpfs (rw,nosuid,noatime,size=256k,mode=755)
none on /dev type tmpfs (rw,noatime,size=10240k,mode=755)
devpts on /dev/pts type devpts (rw,gid=5,mode=620)
tmpfs on /dev/shm type tmpfs (rw,nosuid,nodev,noatime,size=65536k)
/dev/mmcblk0p2 on /home type ext3 (rw,noatime,errors=continue,commit=1,data=writeback)
/dev/mmcblk0p1 on /home/user/MyDocs type vfat (rw,noauto,nodev,noexec,nosuid,noatime,nodiratime,utf8,uid=29999,shortname=mixed,dmask=000,fmask=0133,rodir)
/dev/mmcblk1p1 on /media/mmc1 type vfat (rw,noauto,nodev,noexec,nosuid,noatime,nodiratime,utf8,uid=29999,shortname=mixed,dmask=000,fmask=0133,rodir)

df:

Filesystem 1k-blocks Used Available Use% Mounted on
rootfs 233344 199240 29824 87% /
ubi0:rootfs 233344 199240 29824 87% /
tmpfs 1024 96 928 9% /tmp
tmpfs 256 68 188 27% /var/run
none 10240 80 10160 1% /dev
tmpfs 65536 4 65532 0% /dev/shm
/dev/mmcblk0p2 2064208 208368 1750984 11% /home
/dev/mmcblk0p1 28312128 9802944 18509184 35% /home/user/MyDocs
/dev/mmcblk1p1 3864064 2258880 1605184 58% /media/mmc1

It has started with the Nokia N900, targets almost everything (the only "mistake" is using a TV-out instead of a HDMI output).

The N900 is a lovable device, because of (1):

- Built-in physical keyboard, and external full-size standard bluetooth keyboard.
- It is the first { Linux + X11 + 3G phone + wifi } that works nicely (OpenMoko was a poor attempt), and it's Debian based! (Maemo).
- As music player: impressive.
- As video player: impressive for h264 (hardware accelerated), not bad for mpeg4-baseline.
- As photocamera: quite good (5MP + two-LED flash, quite sharp for a mobile camera, and much better than my previous standalone 3MP Canon Powershot 4 year old camera).
- As agenda: very good.
- For notes: I love the default notes application provided by Nokia. You can use Conboy too, which is also OK.
- Multitasking: very good, the best I've seen in smartphones, because of using Linux plus plenty RAM (256MB + 768MB for swap) is years-light ahead from Symbian, iPhone, and Windows Mobile devices.
- User interface: uses desktop composition, but with the vertical sync disabled (it is possible to enable it, but I will not enable it until some other does it and confirm that it is safe). That makes it less smooth than the one from the iPhone or from Android devices.
- Geekness: Linux, X11, 256MB RAM + 768MB of swap, 2-way in-order supescalar ARM CPU (ARM Cortex A8 @600MHz, 1200MIPS, 2.4-4.8GFLOPs (4.8 GFLOPs when using the VMLA -FMAC, floating point multiply and accumulate- [arm.com])), ssh, sshd, xterm, dosbox, game console emulation, perl, python, clisp, ml, airodump/aircrack, etc. With the exception of the C++ compiler, which haven't manage to install into the device yet (I'm using a cross compiler in my main PC, provided with the SDK [nokia.com]), because I'm afread of broken the shared library links (I'll do it when I'm sure I'll don't break anything), the device runs most Linux applications!
- Presentations/slideshows/portable video player/etc: TV-out (composite NTSC/PAL plus stereo sound, via 3 RCA connectors).
- Storage: 32GB built-in (write speed is about 10 MB/s), expandable up to to 48GB with an additional 16GB micro-SDHC card.

... I don't care about Gods, but this is a weird thing, trepassing the censorship line (in my opinion).

So: Fuck that Irish law and fuck that Irish fucking God (I apologize for the inconvenience, I'm just Breaking the Law ).