Some years ago, a friend of mine mentioned that he was using NetBSD 
for an embedded consumer device. I thought he was nuts, and asked, 
"Why a full blown OS instead of some smaller real-time thing?"

He replied, "because a megabyte of RAM only costs $1."

His point was that NetBSD (aside from being cheap itself) doesn't use 
all that many resources on a price per resource basis in the modern 
world, and it gives you the full flexibility of a complete UNIX 
system kernel for your device. Naturally, his device was using flash 
so that they could upgrade functionality in the field.

It's good to want your software to be as small and efficient as 
possible. Most good software engineers want that. However, you should 
never forget that in business, there is a diminishing return to that 
effort, and there will be a point beyond which the businessman will 
simply say, "You're taking too long to shrink that/make it 
faster/more efficient/etc. Let's just throw hardware at the problem 
to make it go away."

	a datapoint,

	Erik <fair@clock.org>