Seems odd for such a non-technical article to latch onto a term like "micro-kernel" like it was all hot and new. OS X is built on a BSD which has it's roots in 60's and 70's OS design, just like the VMS roots of WinNT.

OS X didn't change the world by bringing some great new underlying architecture to the table. In fact, their kernel and filesystem are arguably getting long in the tooth. The value that OS X brought to the table was the fantastic Carbon and Cocoa development platforms. And they have continued to execute and iterate on these platforms, providing the "Core" series of APIs (CoreGraphics, CoreAnimation, CoreAudio, etc.) to make certain HW services more accessible.

There's very little cool stuff to be gained in the windows world by developing a new kernel from scratch. A quantum leap to something like Singularity would not solve MS's problem. The problem is the platform. What's really dead and bloated is the Win32 subsystem. The kernel doesn't need major tweaking. In fact, the NT kernel was designed from the beginning such that it could easily run the old busted Win32 subsystem alongside a new subsystem without needing to resort to expensive virtualization.

Unfortunately, the way Microsoft is built today it have a fatal organizational flaw that prevents creating the next great Windows platform. The platform/dev tools team and the OS team are in completely different business groups within the company. The platform team develops the wonderful .NET platform for small/medium applications and server apps while the OS team keeps crudging along with Win32. Managed languages have their place, but they have yet to gain traction for any top shelf large-scale windows client application vendors (Office, Adobe, etc.) Major client application development still relies on unmanaged APIs, and IMHO the Windows unmanaged APIs are arguably the worst (viable) development platform available today.

What Windows needs is a new subsystem/development platform to break with Win32, providing simplified, extensible *unmanaged* application development, with modern easy-to-use abstractions for hardware services such as graphics, data, audio and networking (which would probably look not entirely unlike an unmanaged counterpart to WPF/WCF/WinFS).

Hydrogen peroxide powered rocket packs fly for around 30 seconds, because they have a specific impulse of around 125, meaning that one pound of propellant can make 125 pound-seconds of thrust, meaning that it takes about two pounds of propellant for every second you are in the air. Mass ratios are low for anything strapped to a human, so the exponential nature of the rocket equation can be safely ignored.

A pretty hot (both literally and figuratively) bipropellant rocket could manage about twice the specific impulse, and you could carry somewhat heavier tanks, but two minutes of flight on a rocket pack is probably about the upper limit with conventional propellants.

However, an actual jet pack that used atmospheric oxygen could have an Isp ten times higher, allowing theoretical flights of fifteen minutes or so. Here, it really is a matter of technical development, since jet engines have thrust to weight ratios too low to make it practical. There is movement on this technical front, but it will still take a while.

John Carmack

No. The personalized homework system that I envision would be deployed online, and grading/feedback would be automated. I've already deployed something similar to a population of >10,000 and it worked quite successfully.

There was a comment that said on self powered phones, like cordless phones, you could skip the Battery or USB power source.

Thanks for thinking of me, first. Have a great day.