UPS to Deploy Ultra-Connected Wireless Handhelds

Lyle E. Dodge writes "According to this article at Yahoo.com Symbol Technologies announced (on Tax Day of all days) that in 2004 UPS would deploy 70,000 handheld delivery computers based on Symbol's Fourth Generation hardware. Color screens, 128 megs of RAM, and uber-connected (GPS, GPRS, CDMA, WiFi, Bluetooth, Infrared, Analog modem), and, of course, the familiar barcode scanner. The obvious /. question is: Can we run Linux on Brown? Maybe UPS can fund an OSS startup, "BrownHat"? We'll see..."

UPS and OSS

[SiMac]

UPS does not like OSS. I can say that for certain.

A few months ago, I developed a package tracking application for Mac OS X. Since I had just done this in my free time, and I didn't really feel like selling it, I decided to make this application open source. My original plug-ins communicated to the package trackers via HTML, but it soon became apparent that the websites changed quickly enough to make this more difficult than I had first imagined.

Since this was an application, and not a package tracker, I couldn't use a regular e-commerce account. I emailed FedEx and they gave me the proper key and information necessary to use their XML service. UPS, however, was not so nice. I got an email that stated:

Our current license agreement does not support open source, and we are only able to authorize the use of the tools if the product cannot be altered in any way by subsequent users, including resellers.

So, UPS is certainly not a fan of open source. My current UPS plug-in breaks rather often, but there's not much I can do about it, given UPS's stance on this issue.

qwerty?

[natefanaro]

looks good. The only con (to me) about it is that the keyboard isn't qwerty. I'm sure getting used to the layout wouldn't take much time but for people that are really used to qwerty may have a tough time with it.

Re:UPS and OSS

[anonymous loser]

Did it occur to you that perhaps UPS didn't write their own software, and are limited by their license agreement with the vendor? That's what it sounds like to me.

Try shipping anything damageable through UPS

[Cecil]

Then see how you feel about them.

Wearable Computer Stuff - Test environment

[BlackListedCard]

UPS would be a great environment to test out the latest and greatest in Wearable Computer stuff. Feedback from the employees would help the development of the technology.