I mean seriously, every "smart"phone is now much faster than anything scientists had till the 1980s... yet since you are unable to write programs for it without the need of other computers, you cannot do anything they did.

On the other hand, if you had a "digital television set" in the 1980s, yes those existed, you had a device with much more processing power than the computer you could have on your desk. The problem was that your TV-set had it in hard wired circuits while your PC didn't even have the IO capacity to get the video signal in. (Digital TVs in the 1980s used digital chips to process the analogue signal, so they would digitize your PAL signal, typically with 7 Bits, and then decode PAL in the digital domain, which can bring you much better pictures at improved reliability and eventually decreased cost)

The power of a computer lies in it's capability to be programmed. If you cannot reprogram a computer, it's no more useful than any single function device.

What happens if the Sahara changes to communism? Nothing for the first years, then they start running out of sand.

So far, what I've seen most recruiters do is to read off random lists of jobs broadly in the area you are interested in. Even the ones who claim they have experience in a certain area are completely clueless.

I have seen one instance of a recruiter not being completely useless. She did an automated "objective suitability test" which was similar to an intelligence test, testing certain aspects of decision making. That was interesting at least.

So far my experience shows that companies who outsource their recruiting don't actually care about what people they get. Eventually this will lead to the "Dead Sea"-effect in those companies making them unable to hold more qualified people.

Here's a German example for it:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v...
Crash 2030 - Protokoll einer Katastrophe

Or if you like more alarmist ones which turned out to have been hugely wrong on some facts:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v...
Studio Telerop 2009

Comparing the Apple Newton and the iPhone... I'd say that the iCar would be a car that's well connected and essentially controlled by Apple. It would not work on roads not approved by Apple. It would probably be controlled by a touch screen or voice. However it would not drive by itself, as that feature has been proven to be complicated. Of course it won't have a driving wheel, instead it'll have a software driving wheel on a large touch screen in front of you.

Functionality wise, the iPhone was a _huge_ step back from what the Newton could do.

There even used to be a 1980s calculator watch which used the watchface so you could draw on your digits. The technology is rather simple so it is a logical thing to do.

The problem is, while it works for calculators, writing complex command lines is much harder.

... and the reason why on other operating systems you have to escape spaces every time. This way you cannot have the ambiguity if you mean a path with a space, or a program and then a parameter.

In short you can expect most languages younger than 30 years to disappear soon.
If a language doesn't have it's special reason to exist, it won't.

In case of COBOL and FORTRAN that was a huge amount of business critical code, as well as the possibility to simply run it on your next computer. C is seen as a "smart assembler". LISP and its family are great for logical processing. Java seems to become the new COBOL.

And there are 2 languages on the List which do have those special reasons. One is Perl, which is just a great tool for dealing with strings in a quick and dirty way, the other one is "Object Pascal" which, in it's original form with Delphi is dead, but lives in in FOSS projects like FreePascal and Lazarus, it has the great opportunity of having native code plus platform independent native GUIs. In short their way of doing GUI means that you can write a program on Linux, compile it on a Mac and it'll look and feel like a Mac program.

What will die soonish is of course the .net world as it completely depends on a single company... which doesn't use it for their important products.

.... you should _seriously_ consider getting a proper one. The number of concurrent connections should be _far_ higher than what you typically have, and the QoS should make SSH still go through like a charm.

This seems like something only useful for malware. After all the only reason you don't want the person to know what code they run is to do something they don't want you to do. And that's essentially the definition of malware.

After all its artificially limiting what you can do with the hardware. Plus it'll mean you'll have to run closed source firmware from the manufacturer on the device, which means that it'll probably contain malware. Why else would you distribute software in object code only? (No, competitors probably have reverse engineered it years ago.)

but this would mean it's efficiency would drop. If you make the filament thicker it won't get as hot and it'll last longer, however since it'll be cooler even more of it's radiation will be in the infrared and therefore lost for it's purpose. So if a manufacturer was to make longer lasting light blubs, they would be considerably dimmer and redder at the same power consumption.

The reason why LED lights give out quicker than advertised is because they are more heat sensitive. If you have a light fixture designed for light bulbs, chances are they are not well designed to keep them cool. However if your LED lights get to hot for extended periods of time, they will eventually break. Plus particularly with low quality ones, you have the problem of bad external components. However those failures are typically trivial to fix.

Well with systemd that probably will be a thing of the past. My guess is that for such minimalistic systems, people will go towards having their own simplified init. After all Linux is designed to allow you to have init as a shell script.

In a working democracy the public would be able to decide what to do with the tax money. However since in the US the democratic system is severely broken, it's not surprising parallel systems are starting to come up.

Well Apache, OpenOffice and PostgreSQL are perhaps not the prime examples of the Unix philosophy however...
Apache stores all its logs and configuration, as well as much of its data in text files. It has one function and one function only, to reply to HTTP requests.
OpenOffice isn't really Unix software, it's an office package. People following the Unix philosophy see those as a violation of it.
PostgreSQL also does one thing. It processes SQL databases... and while it's using a binary format internally, all the interfaces are text based... in fact even the backup format is text.

But let's refute Poetterling while we are there:

"If you build systemd with all configuration options enabled you will build 69 individual binaries.":
Yes, but how are the dependencies? Do they share the same huge set of bloated libraries? What will happen if, for example the DBUS library gets corrupted for some reason? How many vital libraries are there?

"Myth: systemd's fast boot-up is irrelevant for servers." He refutes that himself a few lines down: "Of course, in many server setups boot-up is indeed irrelevant"

I stopped reading there. Seriously Poetterling hasn't understood Unix, if he would he would understand that binary software is something only to be done if there's a serious reason for it.