Re: GENERAL porting advice

[Brian Buhrow <buhrow%nfbcal.org@localhost>]

	Hello Don.  since you've been a user of NetBSD as long as I have, you are doubtless
familiar with the various user-level facilities available for driving external hardware and,
you are also aware of the relative ease of making loadable kernel modules which let you add
driver functionality to a working system without changing the core distribution at all.

	The description you provide for analyzing a phone call's audio in real time seems very
doable using NetBSD, with a variety of mechanisms available to you for allowing your different
user level processes to talk with each other.

	Your description of the home alarm telling its users which windows and doors are insecure
is a very soluble problem, it just requires one to realize there are differences between the
presentation layer of information and the information itself.  The challenge is getting
developers and software designers, who, for the most part, think visually, to really think
about what they're trying to present to the user and to give up any notions of how non-visual
users process information and to talk with the users themselves.

	All of this is to say that most of the issues you're discussing are OS agnostic and would
be relevant whether we were discussing NetBSD, FreeBSD, Linux, Windows, Solaris or something
else.

-Brian