Except of course that it takes about a decade* to get a nuclear power station up and running, but you could power from one of these http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_Tres_Power_Tower inside of two years.

* Assuming you can get on the list to get a containment vessel - they can only make about 10 per year.

If I had to bet on the replacement for the keyboard it would be something like the Leap Motion paired with sign language - perhaps a one handed version.

and the mess when they finally do go down is going to be catastrophic for those industries.

Books like this are at least a warning to managers that putting all their eggs in a single basket might not be the best strategy.

I guess a cluster of RaspberryPis is going to be the desktop computer in the not too distant future.

I agree completely with your analysis.

The marketing peolple are looking at the rapid rise in tablet sales, rather than the actual numbers sold which is still tiny in comparison to sales of PCs.

However, while the first computer for most people is likely to be a laptop, (and later we may get little servers like the FreedomBox idea), I can see a use for several tablets if the price is low enough. For example, one to use in the kitchen for recipies, one for the lounge to surf the web, and one for the bedroom for reading, or watching a movie.

A more likely killer for the PC is the smartphone. If Google mandated a specific connector and protocol for docking then businesses (and even consumers) would invest in fitting out their offices with docking stations confident that they would be useful for a reasonable period of time. Similarly there would be a rush of docks hitting the market.

Computers can have free speech when that speech is theirs and not something algorithmically derived from what some human has said or written and when they independently demand that they have the right.

Interesting. I am currently beginning some experiments in self organising systems. I am using randomly generated genes and a genetic algorithm to spawn a self organising structure. Later I hope to be able to use these structures to create software. If I succeed, and give this software to you to run - who would be responsible for what it did ?

I have been using gnome 3 for a few months now. I have applied enough customisations that it is tolerable - not great, but good enough to get real work done.

The three things I would like to see are:

Named Workspaces In addition to the dynamic workspaces, which I quite like as a concept, I want a fixed set of named workspaces for my routine tasks.

Task Display I want to be able to see, at a glance, what is running on a workspace. I do not want to have to switch to the workspace view just to see if something has slipped under another window.

Task Launching The idea that I would want to reuse a terminal session on another workspace is daft. I can see that for some apps it might be OK, but for others its just wrong. This needs to be something that can be set on a per application basis.

Most of these solutions seem to be getting the cart before the horse.

Back in the early '70s, in Australia at least, you could get a university education almost for free. The result was that students studied what they had a passion for without worrying too much about what career they would end up with. The lucky ones got the careers they wanted, others with a real passion started businesses, and the rest ended up as teachers where they taught with that same passion.

Now a universtiy education is so expensive that it must be carefully tailored to where the good paying jobs already are. The passion has been lost, and along with it the good teachers and the innovative engineers - like those that started Sun, HP, etc.

Society has to put the investment back into education if it wants to get the rewards. Give the kids that education and they will go out and dream up new businesses that we cannot even begin to imagine.

I think that what MS is looking for is another income stream and they see the App store as a way to make a lot more money from software sales. For this they will be pushing everything onto the Metro interface.

MS can probably survive the failure of 8 to really take off. However if 9 goes wrong as well they might be in trouble.

OK (Its late in this bit of the world and I need more sleep.)

Agree, I cannot imagine too many office workers that I am familiar with being happy if their desktop machine was replaced by a tablet. In the office environment you want a big screen and a keyboard so that you can read docs while preparing emails - they live in Outlook.

I think TFA premise is wrong. The tablet is too big to be used as a phone, too small for office apps (other than note-taking, and a pen and paper is usually better) and Apple and Amazon have the other use cases well under control.

The only other possibility that I can think of is as a remote display for an existing computer - sort of like an X-Terminal. If I could get them at less than $100 I would buy three tomorrow.

True, but if i am going to build a tablet style app for Windows then I am going to build for the Metro interface so that I get both x86 and ARM at little extra cost.

Just curious, but what sort of processing do you consider to be "real world"?

My previous job for 12 years was maintaining a system for a large govt department that was mostly batch processing text files, with a little bit of image processing for good measure.

How about a tablet that just runs an X server - like the old X-Terminals?

For the business user they should have plenty of access to servers to run the software on - Linux or Mac.

Users are not currently expecting to run Windows on tablets so now is the ideal opportunity to get another product out there.

Agreed. Somehow we need to make a copyrighted work a liability rather than an asset.

[The best I can think of is to get the distributors involved in a legal battle amongst themselves.]