But, as Stewart said, no one can ever say "we'll just make it so reliable it won't need to be reset." And Palms can surely be crashed or locked up by software bugs. That's why there's a little hole in the back that you poke with a paperclip to cause an actual OS (and hardware) reboot. Your data is still there, but the state of the OS gets reset and you're off and running again.
As desktop computers get more reliable OSes, I expect they will work their way toward becoming "appliances" with persistent user sessions like the Palm and like Coyotos. This progression is the reason that modern OSes are offering "fast user switching" - people don't close all their programs and shut down the machine any more. They let it go to sleep so that they can hit a key and be right back where they left off. When someone else needs to use the computer, they don't have to interrupt the existing session - they can fast-user-switch over to their own session and do their work too.
I hope this trend continues and that one day we can relegate the reset button on our computers to a little hole that requires a paperclip to prod, and we won't care because because it's such an infrequent occurrence.
-- Joshua Penix http://www.binarytribe.com Binary Tribe Linux Integration Services & Network Consulting
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