On Sat, Dec 04, 1999 at 12:40:27AM -0700, Miles Nordin wrote:
> yeah, i s'pose so.  i don't see anything impossible about both artistic
> and mathematical elegance.  but i don't see many examples of it, either.  
> kind of discouraging.
still doesn't mean we shouldn't try :) thats why we _should_ be able to
do it. we're not a bunch of dumb artists. we're computer scientists,
engineers, mathemeticians, etc. --more than just a bunch of 
college-drop out web designers. (no offense to any web designers out
there :)

> but, reverse engineering is a lot of work, and i'm not proposing to do it
> myself.  i'm not sure how interesting this project would be, given that we
> are likely to see a lot of smaller companies willingly cooperate with
> NetBSD for set-top stuff in the immediate future (unless the corporate
> world really is full of complete morons).
Yeah, corporate morons would love to here the word 'Set-top box,' 'open
source,' 'dvd-enabled,' and 'sony playstation' all in the same sentence.
Although I'd imagine they'd want to support a Linux port before BSD, no
offense to the BSD community or anything, but Linux is more hyped-
people actually sort of know what it is.

> I didn't
> think the most dramatic benefit to the project lies along this path.  
> rather, running browsers and GNOME apps and USB toys on the thing.
Sounds like a good application. But will the playstation have the
capability to store significant amounts of data? The NetBSD
CD/DVD-ROM's would have to be _very_ droolproof if we want to target it
towards the general community, so we would have to work first on making
a 'NetBSD Set-top box' preconfigured installation or something. Which
would really be quite cool, considering we could port it to every other
platform that we support, so maybe we can get some other people besides
Sony to more seriously consider NetBSD as an OS for 'the internet
appliance age'. Don't you just love corprate technology hype? ;)

-- 
-----ethan.bakshy---------------
ethan@enteract.com
http://www.enteract.com/~ethan
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