On Sun, Oct 28, 2007 at 10:31:31PM -0400, Nick Holland wrote:
 
quoted text
> It's a pretty simple concept, really.
> A few years ago, I was giving a talk at a local high school.  One of
> the students asked me why his computer crashed a lot, "why can't they
> build an operating system that doesn't crash?".  I told him they can,
> they do, but he doesn't want it because it doesn't have all the bells
> and whistles he expects.  And, it's bad because that's what he was
> willing to pay for.  This class seems to have understood, it doesn't
> matter what you say, it's what you buy.  Talk all you want, when you
> BUY or USE the product, you have said "This is what I want, and I
> want it more than I want the money (goal, standard, ideal, whatever)"
> in the only terms that matter.
> 
> It is a great honor to work with a group like OpenBSD that will not
> compromise its ideals for the sake of "convenience" or "expediency".
> It's a very rare thing to find...
> 

Right, so if I want to buy a computer (hardware) that is actually
designed and built well from the ground up, what then?  Most are i386
which, no matter how well built, being i386 is a pile of legacy crap.
Amd64 still has to be able to run i386 so still has the legacy crap.

HP's now are i386/amd64.  Sun is Sun; designed to meet market forces
competing against i386/amd64.  IBM has a whole slew of Power-based stuff
that costs an arm and a leg new (lots of old stuff available though)
that I'd like to try but you can't run OpenBSD on it.

So if nobody makes really good hardware then there's nobody to reward
for it, so you end up buying bad hardware and rewarding the maker for
it.

Doug.