Totally. I generally prefer AMD (and have for years) due to their being more system-builder friendly (longer-lived sockets). That said I couldn't bring myself to buy bulldozer. I went right from Athlon II to Ryzen. That was quite an improvement.

No point porting MS Office anywhere, when the money is in SAAS. They want a foothold in the Linux desktop space, so they can more easily sell SAAS products. What is the biggest Linux based UI platform? Android. But a close second is the Chromebook. A distant third is Linux on PCs. This may really be about the chromebook or MS' clone of such a concept.

You say "finally" like someone is waiting for it...

>I can not remember one time in my entire career where anyone came up with some impromptu great idea because they bumped into someone in the hall.

I can. Many times. It's often not some insanely great idea, it's just alignment of your stuff with someone else's stuff. That's really valuable for a medium to large shop.

Yes "coding" is best done alone. However, figuring out what to code and making it all work together as a whole is much harder than that.

Modern fault tolerant cluster computing systems are also tolerant across data centers and geographies as well. And if your cluster is set up right, you really can pull the power from an entire data center and not experience any downtime. Not knocking the mainframe, but for certain applications, it's just better to throw cluster computing at it rather than vertical scaling.

It's very hard to do any kind of equivalency between commodity x86 hardware and mainframe hardware unless you specify the workload and specify the mainframe model. Mainframes were (and are) optimized for I/O bound OLTP workloads, and they really do excel at that. You would need a large oracle cluster fronted by a fairly large application server cluster to get the same throughput as a single (large) modern system Z. At the same time, for a CPU bound workload, you're likely going to get far better performance from a cluster of X86 machines. But again, the specifics matter a lot.

We could have REAL ZOMBIES! YEAH!

:-)

I hear you. Going to be an interesting future, if we live.

Someone who broke their neck and was suffering from paralysis. You can control a chair or exoskeleton. People who can not hear today have cochlear implants, this is not all that different and might (eventually) work better. Or speak, or see. Other people who are disabled in various ways.

Web pages use SVG to render vector graphics. It uses the exact same imaging model as PDF and is implemented in all modern browsers. The web in general has taken a lot of lessons from Adobe because Warnock and Geshke, in the PostScript Red Book, got so much right about how to build an image model that many GUI developers are still learning today. If you start with a PDF, it should be possible to machine-translate it to SVG and present it as a web page.

PDF exists because it is trivial to generate it from the document renderer meant for printing. Although I have once in a while run into an improperly scaled PDF meant to be printed 8-up, I'm just not