collver@softhome.net wrote:
> 
> 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. 

Yeah, NEC took it instead.  Have you looked at unit shipments of the Vr4300
vs. the entire Pentium family?  Last I looked -- about a year ago -- NEC
was shipping about 10x the volume of all Pentium chips combined.

> 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? 

In video games, of course.  Sheesh.  I just returned from CES, looking at
thousands of new non-computer computers and you ask a stupid question like
"where is the non-PC innovation and new investment?"  Look around you, it's
everywhere!

> Is it
> something that will benefit a person with a normal budget?

If you like video games, yes.  If you want to build boxes that are in some
way similar to video games, yes.  If you want to build large, hulking, ugly
beige boxes that run unreliable word processors and web browsers, it might
help drag DRAM prices down even further, but otherwise, no.

> > 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.

There will be flashing (at the factory) and there will be updating.  The
user interface for the first doesn't matter so long as it works, and the
user interface for the latter had BETTER be an "update" button followed
by an "it worked just fine, continuing to serve you" message.

> 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.

There are some who design BSD-based boxes that require little or no system
administration.  It's not easy, but few things worth accomplishing are.

Try visiting one of the big consumer electronics shows sometime, and count
the number of non-computer computers you see.  Just sit in your home or your
car and count the number of computers around you sometime.  PCs haven't been
the center of the computing universe EVER, but they are even less so now than
they were 10 years ago.

-- 
            "Where am I, and what am I doing in this handbasket?"

Wes Peters <wes@dobox.com>                                     System Architect
http://www.dobox.com/                                                DoBox Inc.