> also note my comment about AlphaBIOS.  The full story is, I had to use 
> a failsafe jumper to flash srm firmware onto my Alpha because AlphaBIOS's 
> fancy white-on-blue line-drawing interface wouldn't work on any physical 
> terminal, xterm, or rxvt I could find.

That's no fun.  I guess my PC BIOS won't either ;)

> > I've been hearing that rhetoric for many years now.  Sales don't pronounce
> > the PC dead yet!
> 
> I really have no idea what the figures are, sales or otherwise.  However, 
> I think it's clear that most of the innovation and new investment is 
> happening in other areas.  I believe innovation, investment, and consumer 
> satisfaction are better pedictors of the future market than current sales.  
> I'm fairly confident that further research would show most of the 
> businessmen who control the future agree with me.  

It will be interesting to see if you are right.  I heard of one guy saying
that the PowerPC would take over the mass market in a matter of months and
it didn't happen.  People like to say that appliance-type devices are
taking over the mass market, and I think it's safe to say that hasn't
happened.  Where is the non-PC innovation and new investment?  Is it
something that will benefit a person with a normal budget?

> This is why it is a Very Good Thing that NetBSD is so well-suited to 
> embedded and notPeeCee applications, thanks to its clean design, 
> unified code tree and build architecture, and BSD license---as well as 
> the specific features I mentioned in my earlier post.  The review we 
> are discussing is completely tangential to these issues, which are what 
> will really matter in the future.  Blue-and-white installer screens will 
> not matter in the future (if they ever mattered at all), because in the 
> future there will be no installing.

I have heard others say that in the future there will be no operating
system to speak of, and that hardware would be used through well-defined
object interfaces.  If that eliminates the need for system administration,
bring it on!  I'm not smart enough to see where BSD fits into this, other
than being well established and inherently flexible.

Ben
-- 
Code softly and carry a big debugger.