On Sat, 4 Dec 1999, Ethan Bakshy wrote:

> > 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?

no, you'd have to buy a Type III PC Card 1.3" disk, like lots of us got
for free with our Tadpole's.  or, some kind of USB disk.  maybe a ZIP
would work? lots of people have those.  and (although ZIP SUCKS!) they'd
probably not mind buying one if we said they have to, since it would work
with their PeeCee and Macintosh, too.

a disk would be rather important, because with GNOME apps in 32MB you will
want some swapspace.  and this is 32MB on a RISC box, too, not a PeeCee. i
was able to run Communicator 4.5 at 1600x1280x24bpp on a Linux/i386 box
with 32MB and NFS-root (NO SWAP over NFS if you're using Linux--just
demand paging). 32MB is not a show-stopper, but it is obviously pretty
small.

The PS2 has those proprietary cards that you can use for saving your spot
in the large interactive fantasy games.  i think the biggest one is 8MB.
while even something small like this could be useful to lots of folks for
saving web bookmarks and quickcam pictures of pet cats and such, it would
require a separate MD driver from the essential USB/PC Card/Video stuff
and probably wouldn't work out for a hypothetical first release.

> The NetBSD CD/DVD-ROM's would have to be _very_ droolproof

the more droolproof the better, but i don't fully agree.  i think a first
release of _anything_ that (1) worked and (2) had a web browser in it,
would blow people's socks off.  in the sense that CD's are read-only, it's
somewhat foolproof because, unlike Office 2000, they are guaranteed that
it will work exactly the same the next time they switch on, no matter what
they do to it.

-- 
Miles Nordin / v:1-888-857-2723 fax:+1 530 579-8680
555 Bryant Street PMB 182 / Palo Alto, CA 94301-1700 / US