Good point, I'm used to only thinking as far back as the 8088.

Can't argue with cleaner, but only newer by a few years.

Just the usual tech industry over-exaggeration. Every time X releases something that works a little better than their competition Y, it's all "IT'S OVER, Y IS FINISHED" and "X UTTERLY DOMINATES Y" and the like. The reality is that X just gains a slight advantage, and often not a straight up unambiguous one, Y might still suit other use cases better. And even a somewhat significant straight advantage generally isn't enough to drive an exodus of customers from one to the other. And raw performance still isn't the be all and end all of a product's worth, nor is the price:performance ratio many obsess over.

I'm not saying that's not a valid concern... but if locking out other operating systems is a specific goal of theirs, they already had all the option they needed to do just that with Secure Boot on their current lineup. You can still boot whatever you like on them if you want to. In fact historically they've basically never shown any interest in actively blocking other operating systems from being run on their computers, in spite of people complaining about Apple "locking down" their hardware. There have been occasional hiccups in terms of compatibility, but that's more out of Apple not especially caring to provide active help to Linux developers, who then have to work to catch up.

Yes, they do lock down iPhones and iPads, and I suppose it becomes slightly more of a concern if their laptops become a hardware platform more similar to the phones and tablets, but I still wouldn't rule out the possibility of a Boot Camp-style tool to support running an ARM build of Windows and by extension *nix.

Or maybe they will just say "fuck it, too much effort, MacOS or nothing now", in which case those who run Linux on Macs will pick which they like more and either use other hardware to run Linux or decide MacOS is good enough for their needs. Not the end of the world for anyone, and in any case a decision Linux users have had to make with other hardware manufacturers before.

That's great and all, but do we have any practical solutions? Like for example an apt repository for Chromium?

This is based on some really fucking big assumptions, like that kind of growth being sustainable.

Tell them that if they have a problem or something that needs doing and there's no existing or easy solution, think about what would solve it or solve it more easily than the current options, then think about what's needed to make that happen. Tell them that probably most ideas will go nowhere, but to keep looking at new ideas anyway, because sooner or later you'll come up with something that works.

I'd say canning upper management is more key than canning middle management, if you're looking for where to start. Which is to say, you definitely get rid of those just below the CEO (assuming getting rid of the CEO as well isn't necessary) and keep going down until you reach people who don't like the way things were done previously.

Fucking lol. I can count the number of people I've met who genuinely liked and wanted Windows on a blind butcher's worst hand. For the vast majority of people it's what comes with the computer so it's what's needed to make it work, and for most of the rest it's just necessary to run the software they actually want or need to use. Some weigh up their options and decide that overall it's less troublesome than mucking around with compatibility layers on other operating systems or using different software for the task.

Oh sure, there are going to be some people who did genuinely like and were happy to pay for Windows, and given the total world population it is going to be a fairly big number. But it's not how Microsoft made the majority of its money.

They do no such thing. They are not the underdog good guys standing bravely against evil, they're just a different and currently less successful evil. I hate Facebook and everything it stands for, and Google absolutely needs reining in, but championing Microsoft is not the way to oppose them. Microsoft exploited their users, are still doing so and plan to continue doing so going ahead.

It really doesn't. If Microsoft disappeared overnight, things would be a bit inconvenient for the corporate customers they've locked in to their products and services, but things will keep working, kept running on unsupported legacy platforms (which there's a lot of anyway; obsolete versions of Windows, DOS, even some of their predecessors still) or migrated to other systems, and it won't really gain Google or Facebook much at all.

Of course, it would be very nice if Microsoft could reform itself in a meaningful way to become actually good rather than a perceived lesser evil, and this is something I do want to see happen. What it would take though is an absolutely complete change of culture within the company, and that's going to require completely restructuring the business and purging their workforce of everyone who worked under the old regime.

Yeah, no shit. We've been saying ever since they started being a thing that "smart TVs" are privacy nightmares.

Yup. Repelling kids from something that would keep them entertained and occupied is going to do the opposite of make things better overall. It's sure as hell not going to reduce vandalism; if they can't hang around relatively harmlessly at a park or recreation centre, they're going to wind up going somewhere else and definitely vandalising something else.

To be a modern equivalent of the C64 that a kid could feasibly buy with their allowance and learn to program with is literally what the Raspberry Pi was made for. Sure it'd be great if Windows and Android shipped with such a programming environment, but if you want relatively easy programming with full access to the hardware's capabilities, get your kid a Raspberry Pi. It has the additional bonus of not nuking the family PC if the kid messes something up while experimenting.

Because what we have is good enough for most practical purposes. Or at the least, further improvement isn't worth the massive additional effort, resources and expenditure needed to get it. Diminishing returns. Or there's simply no point. Let's look at what these enthusiasts in 2000 might have said we'd have, and really think about whether or not it does us any good.

What, on a website, could I possible need in realtime 3D? About the only thing even vaguely useful to have in 3D is to look at items in online shops, or maybe showing parts for instructions in DIY build or repair projects. But even there a fully detailed 3D model doesn't really offer much advantage over decent photographs or video from multiple angles, and is more effort and expense to implement.

Most people don't really want their games to look indistinguishable from reality, they want them to be fun. Sure for a long while everyone's been wanting game graphics to be more realistic, but we're about at the point where it's good enough for most people.

You need certain economies of scale to make things like that cheap enough, and not enough people are so interested in being able to capture 3D models of anything they come across, or to spend the time actually doing it (it's sure as hell not going to be as fast as even professional photography where a dozen things need to be adjusted an accounted for before taking a snapshot) on some random objects out in the world, to get there.

Again... this depends largely on them being things lots of people want. That depends on there being some practical use for such things on such a mass scale.

That's an unrealistic expectation if ever I heard one. A camera in a single position might capture a 3D image from one perspective just fine, but true holographic, no.

TVs and broadcast TV content will be in holographic 3D.

Why? What practical benefit is there to the viewing experience? Being able to go and look at something else while the action is going on is a pointless gimmick at best.

Sure that'd be nice, but ultimately that's just a matter of processing power, which A) progress is no longer super quick on in general, and B) is going to have massively increasing needs if everything's getting so much more detailed.

About the only thing that would be leaps and bounds better than incremental improvements to current creation software and input methods is functional mind reading, and we're still a long way off that.

This isn't to say there couldn't be a new push of advancement in the field, but it's probably not going to be in any of the directions people were thinking about 20 years ago, and probably requires advancements in other fields before it can start to become possible.

As long as I can get what I need to done, I am willing to put up with just about anything other than ads.

If the browser prevents me from blocking ads, I will not use the browser. This is the most fundamental possible deal breaker for me.