And for today's really short feedback (a new record)!

Computers get faster quite regularly, whereas people don't increase
their sensory abilities at the same rate. So, what's the rate of
growth of raw monitor bandwidths and how does this relate to networks?
looked it up, and it seems that cable lengths for Gigabit Ethernet
over copper wire (as opposed to fiber optic cable) are on the order of
100 meters. Right now, I found gigabit ethernet adaptors for $65 each,
which is cheap compared to a high-end computer and a high-end monitor.
In contrast, a 25-foot KVM (keyboard, video, mouse) cable costs $83
and may negatively affect your picture quality. 

Moral of the story: Since you've got to have a networking connection
on a computer anyway, why not put it in one corner of the house and
just run network cable to an ethernet-equipped monitor? I expect
someone's going to offer this in the near future for homes rather than
just "thin client" machines (like the Sun Ray machines we have) for
offices.



One of the problems with pre-OS X Macs were all of those extensions
that would load up on the system start. Were those parts of the
kernel?

If I had to guess, I'd say yes, but it's been a while since I've done
any Mac programming. If they're not there on OS-X, it may be because
some development model for them has changed, and it's just lagging.



What is non-orthogonality?

Well, I was searching for a good word indicating that a departure from
the "cookie cutter" approach. So, read/write work on file descriptors
whether the file descriptor represents a disk file or a network
socket. In contrast, there are some things that don't fit into the
read/write model, and you have to introduce special-purpose interfaces
to handle those, like sendto/sendmsg/recvfrom/recvmsg.