Will they be more sucessfull launching an ultrabook or a desktop then they were launching a tablet/netbook?

MS already attacked their main clients (OEMs) and the people that push people into their ecosystem (software developers). Attacking again is only more of the same, and expected. MS seems to have a wrong idea about market dependence on their heads - they need clients more than the clients need them, but think otherwise.

Well, I guess I'll patent shirts with sleeves. Since design patents are no big deal, I see no reason for it getting denied. (Yep, that's so big a non-sequitour as your comment.)

Nobody needs a consumer, unless that consumer has something of value to give back. That line is too simplist to be true (altough they do need each other).

Din't this already happen?

MS already tried to put those companies out of the laptop and tablet markets (the most rentable ones), how would competing with them on the desktop market be such a big threat? And if they double the OEM prices for Windows, they'll reduce the price those companies "pay" for Linux, making them more prone to use it.

Most of those mission critical (no need for scare quotes, they are mission critical) VB programms run on Wine quite well. Maybe we'll just avoid the havoc.

No, it's not. And mach or L4 are evidence of that.

But the good news is that one can install the GNU userland and X11 on Android, turning it into GNU/Linux. The bad news is that this one will have to make do with a completely alien /dev architecture, and a stripped down Linux kernel, or maybe recompile the kernel - what is a harder task than it looks like (when it's possible).

I'm not convinced either way. While yes, PCs started lasting more time recently, I see no reason to think that it wasn't a continous process, but PCs sales had a really big discontinuity after the release of Windows 8.

As a conclusion, it may be true that Windows 8 caused a big drop in PC sales - or it may be that there was a jump on the average lifetime of PCs near the release of Windows 8, but for completely unrelated reasons... what is not as unlikely as it sounds, since the released was timed to cohincide with the mobile take-off, that could only happen once PCs got good enough.

Parent is(n't) clarifying that the brine will be washed long after the summer comes.

In the case of the JavaScript programmer, it involves the programmer repeatedly searching through Stack Overflow, finding code to copy-and-paste, and then hoping that it works well enough to trick the customer or employer into thinking the job is done.

And now, I'm wondering if there is another way for creating DOM manipulating Javascript. I mean, I can most of times make a Linux module by reading the documentation of a device and writting code that makes it work (but for some devices, it's the Javascript way), imagine some kind of data representation and then write it down with native types, imagine a Python map, a Haskell fold, or a SQL query, write it down, and in all those cases the stuff that I imagined works (given or taken a few bugs). But I could never, in my entire life, create a piece of DOM manipulating Javascript that did what I thought it should do. I always resort to trial and error.

I'm glad that was a joke. I think it'd be funny if I got it.

The problem is that I've seen a few people honestly holding that same oppinion - there is a "law" about no joke being obvious enough in the Internet, I just don't remember its name.

And a 70's CLI will provide you with completion that complains when you use the wrong kind of arguments, and a buffer from where you could edit your last command of "man yyymy" that you used to make sure it was the right one.

Search and tooltips are CLI like tools, imported badly into GUIs.

I hate closed source

Nope, that's not hate. it's enlightenment. Depending on closed source software is a liability in so many ways that people don't even care to enumerate, they just don't depend on it.

And sorry, but I'm not taking the time to learn another closed enviroment for administrating Windows. If cmd.exe (that I learned in other times) is not powerull enough, I'll use some open source alternative (likely cygwin).

If somebody creates an open source powershell-like environment, I may take the time to learn it. If it runs on Linux, I'll quite likely do so. By the way, the fact that nobody did that in those years that powershell is out is evidence that it's not really as good as you claim it to be.

Stock markets crash about every 4 years. Earthquakes at this place happen about every 200 years.

A comparable prediction in the stock market would have a 5 months window.

I assume that's because the working set of data fits in memory.

As memory access count as CPU time, not I/O, doing any query in a dataset that is in memory will be CPU bound. But that does not mean that you'll get improvements by adding CPU speed.

Except that GPUs are bad for most of the tasks a database do. Normaly, databases require random memory access (not mapping arrays) and complex selection rules. GPUs are best doing maps over continuous arrays, and with very simple (best if none) conditional cases.