What? Who is "they"?

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Big brother. One day, if we are not careful, the Internet will be regulated everywhere, and big brother might block it "for our safety". I wouldn't be to worried about it, seeing how SOPA and PIPA failed miserably, I think we can agree everyone loves their Internet without restrictions, and it will stay that way for decades to come.

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

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My grandmas old tower (HP Pavilion from 2005) worked great on XP. Stock, it had 3GHz Pentium 4, 512MB of RAM, and a 160GB 7200rpm HDD. She had it upgraded to 1.5GB of RAM in 2007 and it was used regularly until last year, when she donated it to a local computer shop that provides these computer to schools to have students tear them down and rebuild them. It is to fuel the next gen of geeks.

Also worth noting that this computer was thrown against a wall in 2006 when she got pissed at HP Tech Support after being on the phone for 16 HOURS. She now used a MacBook Pro 2010 model.

Most people are amused by the fact she knows how to use a computer, but at work she actually used an original IBM PC in the 1980's to the late 1990's and was one of the early adopters of America Online (and she still uses her original AOL email!).

Well, except for UltraBooks, which almost prove my point by coming out with slower processors. (matched to faster SSDs though.)

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Yeah, even the entry level MacBook Air is pretty slow. The only real "UltraBooks" (if you can even call them that) that people should consider are the ones that fit into the same area of the MacBook Pro with Retina Display. I think Dell and HP make some decent competitors to the MBPwR, so does Lenovo. Honestly though, I would pick a Lenovo if Apple ceased to exist. I have never heard of any major problems with Lenovos, especially the ThinkPads.

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.

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Hell, it will probably be 15 or more years before I even consider having kids. By then the 128k will be 45!

Only time will tell if the filesystems will remain the same.

This also reminds me I should probably get a 128k before they become more scarce.