I worked for a company in the mid 2000s that supplied a series of augmented, helmet mounted displays for some of the tank/armored car crews in Iraq. They were red-laser displays only (low cost blue and green laser diodes weren't available at the time) that crew commanders used to site targets and other battle field information.

A couple of years later I was at dinner with a group of people and met a solder who was part of one of the brigades that used our HUD/helmet display. I asked him what he thought of them...turns out that many, many of the troops hated using them. Thanks to an unnamed congressperson, these units were forced on the Army because our company was in a certain state and got a contract to fulfill a large order of HUD/helmet displays.

I guess some things don't change.

While visiting the Apple store for an iPhone battery replacement, I tried the MacBook Pros that were on display. The "new" keyboard is positively terrible - not much key travel and poor feedback.

Major updates every 6 months is like having to install service packs twice a year (I know the monthly updates are cumulative). Even if major features are added, I hold my breath every time these big updates come. It's inevitable that some driver will stop working, or some program will be auto-removed without much notification. In last year's Anniversary Update, my finger print reader stopped working on an older HP laptop. In the Creators Update, a AMD Raedon 7600 HD video card stopped working in my 4 year old desktop. Although the telemetry may tell MS that the majority of Win10 big updates install problem free, there are many, many users that have problems like I have.

It seems that the devs are adding back previously cut features and code to NMS. A lot of what was hyped about the game had to exist in one form or another at some point. I've never played the game, and avoided purchasing it based on all the negative feedback. If Hello Games had been more upfront with the missing features at launch, and then had some sort of roll out schedule, things might have been better. The deal with Sony may not have been a great idea.

While I've moved on from XP and realize that MS is not supporting it anymore, MS was still selling copies of XP as late 2009. Yes, that's 6 years ago, but calling an OS ancient is over the top when MS was putting it on netbook PCs from 2009. If you're willing to sell a legal copy of XP eight to nine years after it was first introduced, you shouldn't be surprised when people are still using it (and this netbook was a consumer product).

Is AOL anything more than the Huffington Post and Tech-Crunch these days?

This discussion reminds me of some of the press and marketing hype before Windows 95 was released. Many PC industry authors praised Win95 as a "complete rewrite from the ground up", "a completely new 32-bit implementation of Windows", or "Windows with DOS completely removed".

In his excellent books "Unauthorized Windows 95" and "Unauthorized DOS", author Andrew Schulman went to great lengths to debunk the popular misconceptions about DOS7 and Win95. Many times things were hinted at by MS, fanned by the press to include their own desires for the OS, and then left to stand by MS. Pretty great marketing.

(1) Fix Windows Explorer so it doesn't crash and restart when accessing network or smb shares.

(2) Improve os signal handling or inter-process communication...I don't how many times Windows seems like it locks up waiting for something, but it looks like it has crashed.

(3) Take all of the functionality that was in TweakUI and PowerToys for XP and roll it into the standard Control Panel.

(4) Make it easier to install programs somewhere else besides c:\program files\ ... many programs do not give you the option.

(5) Improve the speed of MS networking - why does it seem that NFS is faster?

(6) Fix UAC, it's still too annoying

(7) Develop a multi-pc license package for home use (5 windows installs for $250-$300)

(8) Fix media player so that it does a better job detecting, downloading and installing codecs. How many times does it say that a codec has been found and installed, but the video still does not play.

(9) Faster booting and startup

(10) Browse Xbox harddrive, be able to move "save games" files and other purchased content to PC (I know something like this is on the list, but I would like to be able to more easily move my Oblivion and HL2 files from console to console).

(11) Better estimation of my "Windows Experience" score in Vista - my wife's 2.2Ghz Core 2, Nvidia 8400GT, 2GB RAM laptop has a lower experience score than my P4 Dual-Core 1.6Ghz, Intel X3100, 1GB desktop.

(12) Built-in SSH, SCP, SFTP

(13) Better command completion (like my favorite tcsh)

(14) Built-in virtualization or OS guest hosting.