The thing is, dear author... The ability to automate one's work by computer (scripting, coding, etc.) is now truly an absolute essential if one is to compete in any valuable job today. In the work that I do in device testing. Where we used to do a lot of hands-on work in measuring "stuff" on our devices, now we automate that work. There is also a cascading effect... Such automation gives us reams of data that again must now have some automated method of culling it for more in-depth analysis.

If a person is truly computer illiterate, I don't recommend hiring them at my place of business any more. Additionally, there are people from outside our country that are prepped for this work and will take and "do jobs that natives won’t do" (tilting hat -- slightly askew -- to Dubya). The jobs of the future -- especially the valuable ones -- require computer literacy.

The basic problem I see is that the fundamentals of business AND of societal expectations upon business are changing, and we must adapt to that change.

Thing #1 - Yes, we are now on the verge of comoditizing the tools for the production of goods and for the automation of that process as well. Think of 3-D printing, of web frameworks, of robotics, of the commoditization that open source brings us -- these are making and will make a small team capable of doing great things with little investment and quickly.

Thing #2 - Government intrusion into the healthcare system is pushing hard on companies to be ultralean and is also forcing the majority of the workforce that is not part of the core into a 29 hour work week -- both of these are caused by ultra-lean companies need to avoid having to "deal with" the government mandated healthcare system.

So... this will be the new structure... and we have to be ready for it. The requirements for working in an ultra-lean company in the US are going to be much different than working in a traditional company... It is going to require higher education, more technical higher education, and multi-disciplinary people. It is also going to require programmming skills for every single member of the core (non-temp) team.

But, if you think about it a moment... instead of dwelling on the chance of the unrest of an "unprepared" society -- if society prepares itself and embraces the change... this is such an exciting a time in history. Never in the history of the world has there been more opportunity to be successful and for so few to touch so many lives. People are empowered as never before to produce an individual contribution to society. There is more to the world than brick and morter, and more freedom accessible than ever before for those willing to sieze on the opportunities at hand.

Let's teach our generation to cast off the old unproductive model and embrace the new and more fullfilling model of the future.

Yes, gl4ss I'm of the same opinion... that the best design was the simple original... The more this moves away from simple and toward candy, big graphics and open sidebars, the more time I will spend at http://news.ycombinator.com/

Using the select buffer (as opposed to copy buffer) and middle-click paste is and has been a feature of all Unix/Linux windowing implementations... and one that I _rely_ on... Especially when it comes to working in a terminal. When I click inside a windows VM, it's one of the things I always miss. If it is removed, it's one of the first extensions that I would find a way to get... Sure, take it out of core (for the neophytes), but it needs to be an extension at least for us old guys that could actually participate in your dev process via at least giving you more coherant bug reports (and maybe even fixes) than "my window doesn't work right." Gnome should be very careful to stop "ticking off" developers, but to think of them first at least -- even if it is through creating extensions for each feature they remove.

I wonder if the same concept could be used to help relieve stress on the cables of space elevators? How much charge would it take to offset the weight of some amount of cable and can solve a measure of the strain problem?

If you are interested in no fuss, get your elderly parent an iPad. They will love it with Netflix streaming because they can make it as close to their eyes as necessary for them, and they -- and they can get a good quality pair of headphones (with inductive coupling to the hearing aid, possibly) to make it eaisier for them to hear. And yes, the ipad app has captioning.

When they are more comfortable, they will download books and recipies, and love it because the paper won't take up much space in their home and they can enlarge the text to exactly what they want. They will be delighted when they figure out how best to do video chat with you (whether that might be Facetime or otherwise) for "free."

And for you, once her internet connection is up and running, the purchase will be a "painless" one for support... no need to configure the device for her, no need to "set the clock on the DVD player" or what have you... You will be free to have conversations about more important things for your life.

This is from a long time Linux geek whose 70+ year old mom is pleased as punch with her iPad. Even though I am a die-hard Linux guy & would rather have myself on the latest and greatest Linux-ish device -- her happiness & piece of mind is worth a lot to me. This makes her happy.

Big/little is a lazy way out of the power problem... Because instead of investing in design and development and in fine grained power control in your processor, you make the design decision of, "Heck with this -- silicon is cheap!" and throw away a good chunk of silicon when the processor goes into a different power mode... You have no graceful scaling -- just a brute force throttle and a clunky interface for the Kernel.

So, not all ARM licensees have been convinced or seen the need to go to a big/little architecture because big/little has that big disadvantages of added complexity and wasted realestate (and cost) on the die. Unlike nVidea (Tegra) and Samsung (Exynos), Qualcomm has been able to thus far keep power under control in their Snapdragon designs without having to resort to a big/little and has thus been able to excel on the phone. So far, the Qualcomm strategy seems to be a winning one for phones in terms of both overall power savings and performance per miliwatt -- where on phones every extra hour of battery life is a cherished commodity. Such may not be true for tablets that can stand to have larger batteries and where performance at "some reasonable expectation" of battery life may be the more important.

I actually had a thought about this... What if several thousand of us started sending "strongly encrypted noise" to places known to be "snooped" by the NSA -- say, just 1TB per person _daily_? At the very least, it should use up wherehouse-loads loads of disk space very quickly with "garbage," and with this, the NSA's current tactic would be rendered inneffective...

What you want in the OS is to enable the most smooth and efficient access to your work. For now, that means getting to your apps & getting out of the way, and in the future sharing data between apps and between apps and the external world. Interface change that does not improve efficiency is not useful and will drive customers away.