What about consumer electronics (washing machines, microwaves, smartphones, routers, AP's) or critical industrial systems
where I would image RTOS to be necessary (VxWorks, QNX) ? I can't imagine Windows CE dominating in those spaces.

You seem to be missing something here.

We're not talking about the target. We're talking anout the platform on which the program for the target is built.

This is where the editors, version control system, compilers, linkers, profilers, prom burners, in-circuit emulators, etc. are running. The operating system here has no more to do with the operating system on the target (other than supporting the tools that build it) than the operating system on the mainframe where Gates and Allen developed Altair BASIC had to do with the BASIC language or the guts of their interpreter.

Macosx has its applets but on a desktop. The taskbar and start is there with applets running on a real desktop. Unplug keyboard and start stretches into full screen for tablets. DONE

I want aero back is my last complaint but that is soooo skeumorphism sigh. I think win 8 is anti skeumorphism taken to extremes.

What if they are like the IOS applets in MacOSX where the emphasis is on the desktop?

As long as things do not go all full screen closed door syndrome I do not see it as a problem

Not at all. I'm talking about a lit lamp illuminating the seating area creating a "floating island", not just a dark room with no lights.

Imagine the surreal experience of opening a door to a room painted floor to ceiling with vantablack and only a small area rug serving as an "island" with a wing chair, ottoman and side table with table lamp floating in space, I can only wonder if you'd get a floating sensation while sitting in the chair.

Another, more cynical part of me suspects that our Government's Intelligence community is already planning on creating such rooms to "enhance" interrogation or make solitary confinement more solitary.

But you see you are in the Windows CE embedded niche. Your vision is clouded.

I'm not in a "windows CE embedded" niche and the grandparent poster is right.

It's not an issue with the target. It's an issue with the platform(s) supported by the development tool vendors and the chip manufacturers.

For instance: With Bluetooth 4.0 / Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE), two of the premier system-on-a-chip product families are from Texas Instruments and Nordic Semiconductors.

TI developed their software in IAR's proprietary development environment and only supports that. Their bluetooth stack is only distributed in object form - for IAR's tools - with a "no reverse engineering" and "no linking to open source (which might force disclosure)". IAR, in turn, doesn't support anything but Windows. (You can't even use Wine: The IAR license manager needs real Windows to install, and the CC Debugger dongle, for burning the chip and necessary for hooking the debugger to the hardware debugging module, keeps important parts of its functionality in a closed-source windows driver.) IAR is about $3,000/seat after the one-month free evaluation (though they also allow a perpetual evaluation that is size-crippled, and too small to run the stack.)

The TI system-on-a-chip comes with some very good and very cheap hardware development platforms. (The CC Debugger dongle, the USB/BLE-radio stick, and the Sensor Tag (a battery-powered BLE device with buttons, magnetometer, gyro, barometer, humidity sensor, ambient temp sensor, and IR remote temp sensor), go for $49 for each of the three kits.) Their source code is free-as-in-beer, even when built into a commercial product, and gives you the whole infrastructure on which to build your app. But if you want to program these chips you either do it on Windows with the pricey IAR tools or build your own toolset and program the "bare metal", discarding ALL TI's code and writing a radio stack and OS from scratch.

Nordic is similar: Their license lets you reverse-engineer and modify their code (at your own risk). But their development platforms are built by Segger and the Windows-only development kit comes with TWO licenses. The Segger license (under German law), for the burner dongle and other debug infrastruture, not only has a no-reverse-engineering clause but also an anti-compete: Use their tools (even for comparison while developing your own) and you've signed away your right to EVER develop either anything similar or any product that competes with any of theirs.

So until the chip makers wise up (or are out-competed by ones who have), or some open-source people build something from scratch, with no help from them, to support their products, you're either stuck on Windows or stuck violating contracts and coming afoul of the law.

So what if the NSA stores your data? Who cares if it's "Constitutional"? The Constitution is just a piece of paper and doesn't mean a damned fucking thing because even if some uppity people over at the ACLU or EFF make a case out if it, it will be discarded under the veil of "National Security" Face it, the USA is a Police State. AND YOU WONT DO A FUCKING THING ABOUT IT BECAUSE YOU ARE A WEAK POWERLESS WAGE SLAVE WHO VALUES YOUR SUV, JOB AND GADGETS OVER "LIBERTY" and look to someone else to fix the things you don't like. So I don't see why anyone should care -- because no one cares and nothing will be done. Perhaps these articles get posted because people like bitching about how powerless and helpless they choose to be in their pathetic existence as peons of the wealthy elite whose interests the NSA serves.

If you really want to automate this sort of thing you should have redundant systems with working and routinely tested automatic fail-over and fallback behavior. With that in place you can more safely setup scheduled maintenance windows for routine stuff and/or pre-written maintenance scripts. But, if you are dealing with individual servers that aren't part of a redundancy plan then you should babysit your maintenance. Now, I say babysit because you should test and automate the actual maintenance with a script to prevent typos and other human errors when you are doing the maintenance on production machines. The human is just there in case something goes haywire with your well-tested script.

Fully automating these sorts of things is out of reach more many small to medium sized firms because they don't want, or can't, invest in the added hardware to build out redundant setups that can continue operating when one participant is offline for maintenance. So, depending on the size of your operation and how much your company is willing to invest to "do it the right way" is the limiting factor in how much you are going to be able to effectively automate this sort of task.

In Dubai, they already arrest and convict people if they find race amounts of marijuana on the soles of their shoes, I can only imagine they will be among the first to implement these detectors at their airport so they can have fun arresting even more infidels who come to visit their dystopian tourist trap.

Thank you Google for protecting me from reality no one should have to know about bad things that happen, in fact, why should we know anything at all except for Google approved happy thoughts. Every year Google seems to do something that makes me hate them more and more. So fuck you Google - you're a bunch of authoritarian asshats who think you should control the information we have access to while trying to turn everyone into your personal little database to mine and sell info from. Just go fuck yourselves.

I wonder if they'll issue exhumation orders for Tor Johnson so the can carry out the execution...

You forget that this case is in Texas and that Porn and the Internet are involved. Quite literally anything can happen here.

I present Exhibit A: The army of skinny-jean, unshaven "Brogrammers" who use end to end, non-scalable, non-portable, all-in-one blackbox frameworks like AngularJS and a handful of selected NPMs or Gems commonly used amongst 90% or more of the existent Rails or NodeJS based sites, while writing flat MongoDB collections because they totally don't get NoSQL but love to use it because it's the new hotness and refer to themselves as "elite hackers" while fist-bumping and drinking beer at their SOMA office in SF.

It has earned it's reputation because it completely failed to address much less solve one very crucial factor: HUMAN GREED. Communism assumes the system will be for the equal benefit of all, while human greed dictates that one person or a group of persons will want to consolidate as much wealth and power as possible. So what happens is the people assuming power take as much wealth and power as they can, leaving the people they were supposed to represent poorer and with less freedoms than they had before. There is no way Communism can work unless the human element is taken out of the equation. Essentially, we'd have to delegate Governance and resource allocation to an AI.