Computing goes in cycles, as always. There's nothing new about the concept. Now, stuff is moving online to server farms, since companies are able to manage resources most effectively. In another decade or so, things may start to come back to desktop computing. Maybe people will have small servers built into their routers that all devices will sync to, i don't know.

And if things do end up moving all the way to hosted solutions, with the standard being thin clients in every home, why would we bother with one in each city? Bandwidth's getting cheap enough now that we could go with two or three hubs to a continent and have that be our computers.

"We need air support at coordin *call dropped*

I wonder if the service provider *cough at&t cough* would be liable for troops' lives.

In which case they could downgrade. I would at least hope that firefox will make that task somewhat easy. The thing to remember is that security/bugfix updates are (almost) always-you guessed it-fixing bugs and security holes. The better way to go IMO is to fix the problems you know and give a chance to revert in case the fix breaks some other untested thing.

And how does seeing "This application has an update" allow you to magically deduce whether the update will be good or not? If you're decently tech savvy you'll probably just look and see if it is a major version, and if not just update and be done with it. If you're not, you'll hide the update in the corner and treat it like the devil, and maybe call your poor poor cousin to help you out. They already said that major updates will still ask for confirmation, and for security updates all parties are better off with auto updates. Unless you're a security auditing nazi, in which case you can disable the auto-update feature for yourself, no one's stopping you.

Packages are only slow to update if they are part of a lethargic/paranoid distribution Very little patching is generally involved. Packages are almost always designed to be installed to root, but you're right that it is possible to install it for single users. Using Arch, update times are hardly ever a problem.

Rumor is that a software store (and assumedly a unified update manager) are coming to Windows 8.That'd be nice.

In the context of "here have some cash", 15% is pretty often.

It won't be becoming corporate in the foreseeable future, but if IE really bites the dust then Firefox could be seen in the light of slow and memory-leaking. We'll see if FF4 fixes this.

I'll stick with my chromium and see what happens.

I have a linux machine at home running an ssh server. I like this, it allows a lot of flexibility in what I do anywhere. This constitutes a web server. I would also like to get a personal website running soon as a place to host projects. Does any of this make me a small business? No? That's right, and I shouldn't have to pay the fees of a small business customer for home use.

I think the big difference is that much more focus was given to training the teachers in OLPC, while in the NC study they tried (and failed) the fire-and-forget strategy. Computers are no more magical at improving learning than calculators, encyclopedias, or whatever tool you can attempt to hand out, let sit for a month and see what happens.

Teach them as much as you can, as fast as you can (within reason, of course) and if they complain that they can't understand some of the stuff, slow down.

then having a computer in the house is not going to magically make it appear. If they do, however, computers are the single most valuable resource available in doing so.

And last I checked, steam ran fine under linux. So it's all good.

To clarify, it has been quite a while since I did check.

How would this guy be responsible for the bug? Did he create it? Did he break into the M$ servers and implant the bug in the source code? If you want to be whiny and lump the blame on someone, find the coder who wrote the code with the bug. The Google employee is only being responsible and notifying the public about a standing security hole that needs to be protected against. Security through obscurity is no security at all.

I dunno, I'm not sure I feel safe with all of my web traffic going through a little box, no matter who it's offered by. I like my privacy, and having it go through Comcast is bad enough.