News: 0001580166

  ARM Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day, but set fire to him and he's warm for the rest of his life (Terry Pratchett, Jingo)

Linux Laptop Vendor MALIBAL Attempting To Pursue Made-In-USA Laptops

([Hardware] 5 Hours Ago Made In America Laptops?)


Linux/Windows laptop vendor MALIBAL that caused quite a fuss last year when [1]suggesting against supporting Coreboot and in turn blocked shipping of products to states/countries where the involved developers were located is now pursuing an initiative of made-in-America laptops. But it's going to be a lengthy journey and first they are soliciting investments to first pursue American-made keyboards and touchpads.

MALIBAL announced today "Project Liberation" with their goal of American-made laptops with the first phase being " the first truly American-made laptop input devices—TMR (Tunneling Magnetoresistance) keyboards with maglev switches and precision haptic touchpads—as the foundation for eventually creating the first American-made laptop ever. "

For the American-made components they are seeking to partner with existing US manufacturers to modify production lines as needed. With their American-made input devices they will also come with "open-source firmware" and of a modular design for the hardware.

If they succeed at making US input devices, their second phase would be the display and battery being made domestically. That would be followed by the laptop motherboards as phase three and then phase four would be the complete laptop.

For the first phase of the US laptop input components they estimate it would take 24 months and need $3M in manufacturing, a $1M supply chain, $500K R&D and testing, and $500K for an initial production run. For that they are looking for individual investors to invest in MALIBAL with equity stakes in the company and investment perks of discounted laptop purchases the first year. No word was shared in their announcement how much they anticipate all four phases to cost or how long they expect it to take for this American-made laptop.

It will be interesting to see what comes of MALIBAL's efforts and senses like some of Purism's efforts. Linux PC vendor System76 has also been pursuing made-in-America manufacturing and so far have been successful at making their own in-house computer cases and keyboards.

Those curious around MALIBAL's Project Liberation can learn more via [2]the MALIBAL.com page .



[1] https://www.phoronix.com/news/Malibal-Suggests-No-Coreboot

[2] https://www.malibal.com/features/project-liberation/



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It BASICally Sucks

Older versions of MS-DOS came with bundled programming languages including
GW-BASIC and QBasic. Windows XP continues the Microsoft tradition of
ruining budding programmers with horrible programming tools by including
XPBasic, an interpreted language in which all of the customary BASIC
keywords have been replaced with advertising slogans.

Nike has paid a handsome amount to Microsoft for "keyword rights". Instead
of saying PRINT "HELLO WORLD", XPBasic programmers must now type JUST DO
IT "HELLO WORLD". Other common XPBasic statements include WHERE DO YOU
WANT TO GOTO 20 TODAY? and DIM ARRAY(1 TO 20) AS INTEGER BROUGHT TO YOU BY
VERIZON WIRELESS.

-- from Humorix's review of Windows XP (eXceptionally Pathetic)