Suddenly, property damage. I know that feeling though -- it always seems like when you're trying to do something right in a situation that seems sensitive, you do something inadvertently that makes it worse.
It's always fun to see how people configured a machine at a given time and how their use of it has changed over the years.
That's pretty harsh wording. Although, you're certainly right about a lot of things moving online. It'll be interesting to see if we continue to see hardware like the ChromeBook Pixel, equipped to give better and better web experiences. There have certainly been murmurs over the past several years about returning to centralized resource computing, and the web would make sense as a way to do it.
What? Who is "they"?
It'll actually be really interesting to see. The system requirements for software haven't increased significantly in the past few years, and reasonably nice hardware from 2004 or 2005 that runs Windows XP well will run Windows 8 well enough too. Of course, certain components have improved a lot and we have more capacity now than we've had before, but the average computer today probably isn't much faster than it was a few years ago. Our high end has gone up and our low end has followed lazily along, of course, but not so much that in seven years, computers are unrecognizeable. (Which I realize sounds odd in the light of recent threads where I've talked about computing changing exceedingly quickly and only being around in their current commercialized graphic interface form for 30 years, but
Well, except for UltraBooks, which almost prove my point by coming out with slower processors. (matched to faster SSDs though.)
Although by the time someone my age (or even someone a decade my junior) produces grand-kids, on average we'll be sixty years in the future, and the original Macintosh will be 90 years old.
It'll be interesting to see if anything at all resembling the current desktop metaphor with files in directories on filesystems is in use at that point in time.