No standard USB interfaces. Fewer and fewer devices with SD slots (and nothing I've seen with a useful size for specific things like CF). No gigabit LAN (so forget getting data on and off quickly).
Hell, most tablets lack a network-capable file manager (android is far better at this then Windows thanks to ES File Manager, but still not great).
Ethanol is not dissolving fluorinated polymer seals anymore then octane or the other components of gasoline are - you know, given time and contact. In all the fear-mongering people forget that regular octane is a pretty damn effective solvent.
I'm pretty skeptical of the "offline hard disk" approach. Unless you are very careful with those things, they're not inert when unpowered - you've got grease slowly hardening, oxygen leaking in, thermal cycling stress - and they're most importantly, designed to last about 3-5 years under constant use, not 10 years on the shelf.
Actually the real saving grace of ZFS is that you can't get into the absurd situation of rebuilding a whole drive that only has a single bad sector. This is a life-saver, since chances are you end up finding another bad sector somewhere else during the rebuild, but thanks to the checksums if you do you're not left with corrupted data.
I had this happen to me with an mdraid6 volume: single disk, single bad sector - kicks out the disk (and so stop's syncing changes to it). Triggers a rebuild, finds another bad sector elsewhere, kicks out that disk. Suddenly my 2-disk redundancy has dropped to zero, and god help me if there's a bad sector anywhere else.
This is asking for the wrong solution to the wrong problem.
If you don't care about the data on the drive, then this is what RAID is for - what it was designed for. High availability. If the drive fails, you don't care and you just replace it.
Spinrite and related tools are answering the question users end up with though which is "I know I should've backed up, but I never got round to it..."
Also Bluetooth connects damn fast these days. I pretty much never turn it off, so being able to just hit an app launcher that would connect and open could be handled in about a second - which would be incredibly useful.
Other than the new iPod nano and the iPad, you can replace all of the batteries in Apple products. Sure there's no battery door, but it's as easy as popping the back off with a screwdriver and swapping out the battery. I've done it in about 10 minutes on a couple of iPhones, a MBP, etc.
Nothing I own that has batteries in it takes more than ten seconds to change and none need any tools whatever to do it.
You mindless fanboys (shills?) amuse the hell out of me! You make excuses for a goddamned faceless corporation! WTF? It's a bad design and there's no rational argument to the contrary.
So, 10 minutes every 2 or 3 years vs 10 seconds.
For that I get a machine with no battery door and a bigger battery? Worth it.
No "excuses", simply a different design philosophy.
You haters simply can't exist without something rage against to define yourselves. It must be exhausting.
No it's more like when my phone runs out of battery, I can't just drop in another one and keep going. I can't have a battery in my car that I can just swap over to when I'm on the go.
My old iPaq did this perfectly back in the day - it had a Li-Polymer and Ni-MH reserve. When the battery got low you could just eject the Li-Polymer battery and swap it with one docked in the charger. 10 seconds and you were good for another 24 hours.
With my iPhone I have to carefully plan my app usage, and I basically expect to run out of power pretty much daily (late afternoon).
Depends on one's perspective. I have no problem with the government demanding my neighbours demonstrate a minimum level of safety and competence in constructing and possessing devices which are capable of endangering me and my property.
I mean if you build a railgun with a mean kinetic energy above that of a rifle round, well hell, I'd really like to see a requirement to register the existence of such a thing and keep it properly stored and backstopped.
Giving everyone a basic income would provide them a safety net, encouraging risk-taking and innovation. Whoever does succeed contributes more back to the societal safety net.
But some people don't try. They don't want to try. If given a choice between a free shack and a nice home they can work to afford, they will choose the shack. How do we get them to contribute something positive to society, and to take the risks that the safety net is intended to promote?
Then, by being a thorough accountant of society, you realize that you're not just providing them with a free shack, you're actively disincentivizing criminality and thus preventing them causing a much greater drain on surrounding society.
Police force, hospitals and shattered families aren't some sort of unrelated cost.
If we are compassionate, we can give the displaced workers opportunities to learn new skills.
As we move towards a post scarcity society some questions are raised that can only be answered by something closely resembling central wealth redistribution. Not full blown communism but the guarantee of a reasonable standard of living for everyone, with the opportunity to get more if you want to. Much of Europe is basically operating on this principle at the moment, and as time passes I feel we'll see a higher standard emerge.
No, and I mean NO! because central wealth distribution has been shown time and again to disincentivise people from actually doing something useful with their lives. If you earn enough from benefits, and your benefits reduce if you work/produce value, then why do anything useful? And Benefit Dependency is a really nasty pernicious place to be in.
This is functionally indistinguishable to where we just give everyone a fixed income from the government or something similar. The problem with benefit dependency is when it doesn't scale properly with income level - i.e. a necessary part of career advancement manages to actually reduce your standard of living compared to not doing it.
A properly scaled system doesn't suffer from this. A system where we simply never remove the benefits doesn't suffer from this, which is what the OP was saying.
History however has shown time and time again that an upper-class that feels itself untouchable usually...isn't.
It's not like the soldiers of the world's most powerful armed forces are rewarded with a life of luxury for their service, and their sworn to protect the people, not the corporations even if they seem to be used that way sometimes.
A sufficient level of automation leaving most of the world's population disenfranchised and unemployed? The latter is the exact recipe which led to the uprisings that finally ousted dictators in Egypt, Libya and is presently driving the revolution in Syria.
The fact human progress over the last 200 years has been faster then (and involved reinventing most of the technology of) the 30,000+ years before gives the answer: it took us a long time to develop the basic structures that let us advance further then that - but once we did, look at all that's been accomplished.
Which is my point: you're overvaluing human intelligence as a survival trait sans civilization.
There's nothing humans can do to survive a global event, much like there's nothing the dinosaurs were able to do. An asteroid impact of that scale ignites a global firestorm - a whole region of the Earth catches fire over the next 24 hours as the superheated air is rolled over the landscape. There isn't a way to think your way out of that problem - you either get out of the way (which you can only do if you have satellite networks, communications etc. and even then - it's impractical to move millions of people that quickly) - or you die.
I would dare say that I don't think there are very many extinction-level type events could plausibly happen anytime in the foreseeable future which could also wipe out the human race unless the incident were also actually detrimental to the entire physiology of the planet. I do not think that a collision of the magnitude that led to the wiping out the dinosaurs, for instance, would have the same effect on us. Certainly no small number of people would die, but I do believe humanity itself would endure.
My reasoning is simply this. We have intellect. Dinosaurs did not.
That's only worth something if you can apply it. We're not so good at that when our civilization support structures become non-functional. You might note that for most of our history, our intellect was enormously repressed because our civilization was primitive.
KSP is one of the best things to happen in gaming lately. Even though I had a basic understanding of orbital mechanics, playing around with the rockets in KSP makes the whole thing seem so much more intuitive since you're looking at Duna thinking "right, I need to get at least 2 tanks of fuel into orbit to do a landing...".
I thought there was some line of thinking that all the radiation hardening may not actually be as necessary as it seems - it's just done at the moment because if you're 2 billion dollar rover breaks down, you absolutely can't go out and repair it, so why take chances (since the cost is tied up in getting it there, not so much the rover).
There was a student satellite a few years back which was basically built from off-the-shelf computer components (it was basically a PC put into orbit) that survived radiation much better then anyone expected.
I have to agree with this - I find 80 characters uncomfortable too small on most monitors. The window size I'm browsing Slashdot at right now is 1358 pixels wide, and the text input box I'm using is about 160 characters wide. I just don't find it comfortable to read most types of documents along an 80 character margin - though I do find it interesting that a 2x multiple works well (at least for me).
I think we can safely ignore the Windows Phone in most predictions.
Windows RT is more troublesome - but I would go with the point that dual support may make sense (and usually does) but you can't deny that all other platforms go with OpenGL, and with everyone building games from engine toolkits these days, there's not really a huge duplication of effort involved if the backend is written to support both (which was very common place not too long ago).
It's resilient until it isn't, and it's incredibly stupid to assume a nation's resilience means you should do nothing to remedy it's problems. The US's centers of government, technology, society and culture are all located on it's coasts - along with a sizable number of it's population. The US's fiscal advantage - the perceived stability - is exactly that, a perception. You may tank that avoidably due to your internal politics within the next decade - but if the US is perceived to be constantly overspending due to natural disasters, you'll see the slow - but sure - move of dollars to other safe haven's, perceived to have more able governments (China would be a good candidate since it has no trouble doing what's necessary for an opportunity, but the EU - with it's diverse and inland member states, is another option).
What does the US do if it's not just New York recovering from flooding, but also 2 or 3 other cities? What do you do if before repairs are ever considered complete, you're facing yet another storm? Everyone will knuckledown and speak of resilience, but the reality is you'll have streams of people leaving those cities, and welfare systems full of what politicians will call "moochers" because it'll be a more convenient lie then the reality which is they'll be the former-middle class.
Totally wrong. How about "all that arable farm land in the middle of the US will be parched desert
How open with "Totally Wrong." and follow it up with a totally wrong statement? How... expected of you. How do I know your statement is totally wrong? Easy. During those periods of history when the NA climate was the most hospitable to life year round, it was warmer than even the worst AGW predictions expect it to get. Much warmer.
The worst case prediction from the IPCC report is an average temperature rise of 4.5C. The average temperature increase during the PTEM was 6C -- not above temperatures today, but above temperatures during the rest of the Paleozoic and Eocene period. Compared with today, global temperatures were about 11C warmer.
The fossil record [url=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paleocene%E2%80%93Eocene_Thermal_Maximum#Life]indicates that during this time[/url], deep sea creatures faired rather poorly, with nearly 50% extinction. However, plankton, plants, and land animals -- especially mammals -- had a huge population explosion, spreading and diversifying wildly. North America was a tropical to subtropical environment at this time, not the arid wasteland you seem to suggest.
You know what wasn't really around that time? Modern human civilization.
You know the harmony of nature? Yeah that's a lie - it's harmonius because the war is at a gentle simmer, and one species hasn't succeeded in eating all the members of the other. And it's fascinating when you're an outside observer, rather then a member of any of the things involved in it.
North America has been extensively deforested since that time. And the conditions which led to the first temperature rise are not the same conditions which are leading to the next one, nor likely to have the same impacts in the same regions all over again. The explosion and diversity of life rather implies that no one species was successful in remaining dominant during that time, and none of those species were a structured human civilization sustaining more alive members then at any other time in it's history via a complex global economic system.
The paleoscene, was 56 million years ago. The very continental plates were different at that time. Mountain ranges didn't exist in parts of the country (the Rockies were still forming - and that would have a dramatic effect on local climatic conditions due to global effects).
Which goes back to the ColdWetDog's post: if your only concern is life going on, then you need not worry. Frankly I don't care about life going on, I do care about human life going on, my children's life going on, my life going on. And if I care about those things, then I very much need to care about major shifts in climate disrupting the established settlements of billions of people. And the US frets about a few thousand Mexicans fleeing drug wars each year.
This is ridiculous. There'll always be a reason to develop for the next gen of processing power. There'll always be a Steam Box Mk II, Mk III etc. You can't expect people to upgrade their XBox's though - but you can expect your Steam players to think "this game is awesome, I want it awesomer" and to upgrade their systems. With the attendant benefit for everyone that the Steambox Mk III can run all the same games just as well.
Valve's Steam gets those sales because it ISN'T a CONSOLE.
That's true. Yet, once they put that console out there, two very important things happen:
1 - Game developers will learn OpenGL. Why write a Windows only game, when you can target all the Steam maket with nearly no increased costs by just changing your language? That'll make Linux a better gamming plataform than Windows, destroying one of the MS lockin strategies. (Yeah, there are others, people won't flock into Linux just because it run games.) That'll also remove the X-Box biggest selling point.
The other really important aspect here is the tablet/smartphone issue.
Tablets and smartphones, be they Android or iOS - run an OpenGL variant. If you're a developer studio, keeping your people familiar and lucid in the OpenGL APIs starts to look like a really good move. Hell - we have Mass Effect 3 running on the WiiU now, so even for big resource heavy games it starts to make more sense as a business decision.
No, but work and other forms of entertainment have always worked great on Linux. Hell, I can use random off-the-shelf printers more easily on Linux then on Windows now. It's a superb OS when you want to get some data analysis done.
There are only two reason to boot into Windows - Office, and gaming. Office is a legacy issue - my professors are now using iPads and other devices which don't speak "native" office and I suspect sending them ODFs would lead to less "your formatting is all broken" problems.
People make gaming out to be a triviality, yet gaming has made commerical-scale flight simulation an off-the-shelf affair - and I remember when Voodoo graphics cards were a big deal for Descent 2. If you don't need to boot windows to do your gaming, then that's significant - suddenly people are thinking "what else don't I need to reboot for?" and looking at that $300 Windows license as over a year's worth of purchases on Steam weekend sales.=.
That change infiltrates. It may take time - it won't be overnight - but again, I've lived through the growth of PC gaming from cube-model software rendered graphics to wanting the latest and greatest graphics cards to not caring because mid-range will last for years.
But we'll know when Microsoft is worried, because Mono will suddenly be good enough to let us run Office on Linux.
Slashdot Mirror
They're not really great at storing data.
No standard USB interfaces. Fewer and fewer devices with SD slots (and nothing I've seen with a useful size for specific things like CF). No gigabit LAN (so forget getting data on and off quickly).
Hell, most tablets lack a network-capable file manager (android is far better at this then Windows thanks to ES File Manager, but still not great).
Man what?
Ethanol is not dissolving fluorinated polymer seals anymore then octane or the other components of gasoline are - you know, given time and contact. In all the fear-mongering people forget that regular octane is a pretty damn effective solvent.
I'm pretty skeptical of the "offline hard disk" approach. Unless you are very careful with those things, they're not inert when unpowered - you've got grease slowly hardening, oxygen leaking in, thermal cycling stress - and they're most importantly, designed to last about 3-5 years under constant use, not 10 years on the shelf.
Actually the real saving grace of ZFS is that you can't get into the absurd situation of rebuilding a whole drive that only has a single bad sector. This is a life-saver, since chances are you end up finding another bad sector somewhere else during the rebuild, but thanks to the checksums if you do you're not left with corrupted data.
I had this happen to me with an mdraid6 volume: single disk, single bad sector - kicks out the disk (and so stop's syncing changes to it). Triggers a rebuild, finds another bad sector elsewhere, kicks out that disk. Suddenly my 2-disk redundancy has dropped to zero, and god help me if there's a bad sector anywhere else.
This is asking for the wrong solution to the wrong problem.
If you don't care about the data on the drive, then this is what RAID is for - what it was designed for. High availability. If the drive fails, you don't care and you just replace it.
Spinrite and related tools are answering the question users end up with though which is "I know I should've backed up, but I never got round to it..."
Also Bluetooth connects damn fast these days. I pretty much never turn it off, so being able to just hit an app launcher that would connect and open could be handled in about a second - which would be incredibly useful.
Other than the new iPod nano and the iPad, you can replace all of the batteries in Apple products. Sure there's no battery door, but it's as easy as popping the back off with a screwdriver and swapping out the battery. I've done it in about 10 minutes on a couple of iPhones, a MBP, etc.
Nothing I own that has batteries in it takes more than ten seconds to change and none need any tools whatever to do it.
You mindless fanboys (shills?) amuse the hell out of me! You make excuses for a goddamned faceless corporation! WTF? It's a bad design and there's no rational argument to the contrary.
So, 10 minutes every 2 or 3 years vs 10 seconds.
For that I get a machine with no battery door and a bigger battery? Worth it.
No "excuses", simply a different design philosophy.
You haters simply can't exist without something rage against to define yourselves. It must be exhausting.
No it's more like when my phone runs out of battery, I can't just drop in another one and keep going. I can't have a battery in my car that I can just swap over to when I'm on the go.
My old iPaq did this perfectly back in the day - it had a Li-Polymer and Ni-MH reserve. When the battery got low you could just eject the Li-Polymer battery and swap it with one docked in the charger. 10 seconds and you were good for another 24 hours.
With my iPhone I have to carefully plan my app usage, and I basically expect to run out of power pretty much daily (late afternoon).
Depends on one's perspective. I have no problem with the government demanding my neighbours demonstrate a minimum level of safety and competence in constructing and possessing devices which are capable of endangering me and my property.
I mean if you build a railgun with a mean kinetic energy above that of a rifle round, well hell, I'd really like to see a requirement to register the existence of such a thing and keep it properly stored and backstopped.
Giving everyone a basic income would provide them a safety net, encouraging risk-taking and innovation. Whoever does succeed contributes more back to the societal safety net.
But some people don't try. They don't want to try. If given a choice between a free shack and a nice home they can work to afford, they will choose the shack. How do we get them to contribute something positive to society, and to take the risks that the safety net is intended to promote?
Then, by being a thorough accountant of society, you realize that you're not just providing them with a free shack, you're actively disincentivizing criminality and thus preventing them causing a much greater drain on surrounding society.
Police force, hospitals and shattered families aren't some sort of unrelated cost.
If we are compassionate, we can give the displaced workers opportunities to learn new skills.
As we move towards a post scarcity society some questions are raised that can only be answered by something closely resembling central wealth redistribution. Not full blown communism but the guarantee of a reasonable standard of living for everyone, with the opportunity to get more if you want to. Much of Europe is basically operating on this principle at the moment, and as time passes I feel we'll see a higher standard emerge.
No, and I mean NO! because central wealth distribution has been shown time and again to disincentivise people from actually doing something useful with their lives. If you earn enough from benefits, and your benefits reduce if you work/produce value, then why do anything useful? And Benefit Dependency is a really nasty pernicious place to be in.
This is functionally indistinguishable to where we just give everyone a fixed income from the government or something similar. The problem with benefit dependency is when it doesn't scale properly with income level - i.e. a necessary part of career advancement manages to actually reduce your standard of living compared to not doing it.
A properly scaled system doesn't suffer from this. A system where we simply never remove the benefits doesn't suffer from this, which is what the OP was saying.
History however has shown time and time again that an upper-class that feels itself untouchable usually...isn't.
It's not like the soldiers of the world's most powerful armed forces are rewarded with a life of luxury for their service, and their sworn to protect the people, not the corporations even if they seem to be used that way sometimes.
A sufficient level of automation leaving most of the world's population disenfranchised and unemployed? The latter is the exact recipe which led to the uprisings that finally ousted dictators in Egypt, Libya and is presently driving the revolution in Syria.
I was trying to do this when I first got my iPhone...then Google did Exchange sync and all was well. And now this.
Still, the open-source stack is looking a lot better these days - time to do it again.
The fact human progress over the last 200 years has been faster then (and involved reinventing most of the technology of) the 30,000+ years before gives the answer: it took us a long time to develop the basic structures that let us advance further then that - but once we did, look at all that's been accomplished.
Which is my point: you're overvaluing human intelligence as a survival trait sans civilization.
There's nothing humans can do to survive a global event, much like there's nothing the dinosaurs were able to do. An asteroid impact of that scale ignites a global firestorm - a whole region of the Earth catches fire over the next 24 hours as the superheated air is rolled over the landscape. There isn't a way to think your way out of that problem - you either get out of the way (which you can only do if you have satellite networks, communications etc. and even then - it's impractical to move millions of people that quickly) - or you die.
I would dare say that I don't think there are very many extinction-level type events could plausibly happen anytime in the foreseeable future which could also wipe out the human race unless the incident were also actually detrimental to the entire physiology of the planet. I do not think that a collision of the magnitude that led to the wiping out the dinosaurs, for instance, would have the same effect on us. Certainly no small number of people would die, but I do believe humanity itself would endure.
My reasoning is simply this. We have intellect. Dinosaurs did not.
That's only worth something if you can apply it. We're not so good at that when our civilization support structures become non-functional. You might note that for most of our history, our intellect was enormously repressed because our civilization was primitive.
KSP is one of the best things to happen in gaming lately. Even though I had a basic understanding of orbital mechanics, playing around with the rockets in KSP makes the whole thing seem so much more intuitive since you're looking at Duna thinking "right, I need to get at least 2 tanks of fuel into orbit to do a landing...".
I thought there was some line of thinking that all the radiation hardening may not actually be as necessary as it seems - it's just done at the moment because if you're 2 billion dollar rover breaks down, you absolutely can't go out and repair it, so why take chances (since the cost is tied up in getting it there, not so much the rover).
There was a student satellite a few years back which was basically built from off-the-shelf computer components (it was basically a PC put into orbit) that survived radiation much better then anyone expected.
I have to agree with this - I find 80 characters uncomfortable too small on most monitors. The window size I'm browsing Slashdot at right now is 1358 pixels wide, and the text input box I'm using is about 160 characters wide. I just don't find it comfortable to read most types of documents along an 80 character margin - though I do find it interesting that a 2x multiple works well (at least for me).
I think we can safely ignore the Windows Phone in most predictions.
Windows RT is more troublesome - but I would go with the point that dual support may make sense (and usually does) but you can't deny that all other platforms go with OpenGL, and with everyone building games from engine toolkits these days, there's not really a huge duplication of effort involved if the backend is written to support both (which was very common place not too long ago).
Hollowing out the eggshell.
It's resilient until it isn't, and it's incredibly stupid to assume a nation's resilience means you should do nothing to remedy it's problems. The US's centers of government, technology, society and culture are all located on it's coasts - along with a sizable number of it's population. The US's fiscal advantage - the perceived stability - is exactly that, a perception. You may tank that avoidably due to your internal politics within the next decade - but if the US is perceived to be constantly overspending due to natural disasters, you'll see the slow - but sure - move of dollars to other safe haven's, perceived to have more able governments (China would be a good candidate since it has no trouble doing what's necessary for an opportunity, but the EU - with it's diverse and inland member states, is another option).
What does the US do if it's not just New York recovering from flooding, but also 2 or 3 other cities? What do you do if before repairs are ever considered complete, you're facing yet another storm? Everyone will knuckledown and speak of resilience, but the reality is you'll have streams of people leaving those cities, and welfare systems full of what politicians will call "moochers" because it'll be a more convenient lie then the reality which is they'll be the former-middle class.
How open with "Totally Wrong." and follow it up with a totally wrong statement? How... expected of you. How do I know your statement is totally wrong? Easy. During those periods of history when the NA climate was the most hospitable to life year round, it was warmer than even the worst AGW predictions expect it to get. Much warmer.
The worst case prediction from the IPCC report is an average temperature rise of 4.5C. The average temperature increase during the PTEM was 6C -- not above temperatures today, but above temperatures during the rest of the Paleozoic and Eocene period. Compared with today, global temperatures were about 11C warmer.
The fossil record [url=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paleocene%E2%80%93Eocene_Thermal_Maximum#Life]indicates that during this time[/url], deep sea creatures faired rather poorly, with nearly 50% extinction. However, plankton, plants, and land animals -- especially mammals -- had a huge population explosion, spreading and diversifying wildly. North America was a tropical to subtropical environment at this time, not the arid wasteland you seem to suggest.
You know what wasn't really around that time? Modern human civilization.
You know the harmony of nature? Yeah that's a lie - it's harmonius because the war is at a gentle simmer, and one species hasn't succeeded in eating all the members of the other. And it's fascinating when you're an outside observer, rather then a member of any of the things involved in it.
North America has been extensively deforested since that time. And the conditions which led to the first temperature rise are not the same conditions which are leading to the next one, nor likely to have the same impacts in the same regions all over again. The explosion and diversity of life rather implies that no one species was successful in remaining dominant during that time, and none of those species were a structured human civilization sustaining more alive members then at any other time in it's history via a complex global economic system.
The paleoscene, was 56 million years ago. The very continental plates were different at that time. Mountain ranges didn't exist in parts of the country (the Rockies were still forming - and that would have a dramatic effect on local climatic conditions due to global effects).
Which goes back to the ColdWetDog's post: if your only concern is life going on, then you need not worry. Frankly I don't care about life going on, I do care about human life going on, my children's life going on, my life going on. And if I care about those things, then I very much need to care about major shifts in climate disrupting the established settlements of billions of people. And the US frets about a few thousand Mexicans fleeing drug wars each year.
This is ridiculous. There'll always be a reason to develop for the next gen of processing power. There'll always be a Steam Box Mk II, Mk III etc. You can't expect people to upgrade their XBox's though - but you can expect your Steam players to think "this game is awesome, I want it awesomer" and to upgrade their systems. With the attendant benefit for everyone that the Steambox Mk III can run all the same games just as well.
That's true. Yet, once they put that console out there, two very important things happen:
1 - Game developers will learn OpenGL. Why write a Windows only game, when you can target all the Steam maket with nearly no increased costs by just changing your language? That'll make Linux a better gamming plataform than Windows, destroying one of the MS lockin strategies. (Yeah, there are others, people won't flock into Linux just because it run games.) That'll also remove the X-Box biggest selling point.
The other really important aspect here is the tablet/smartphone issue.
Tablets and smartphones, be they Android or iOS - run an OpenGL variant. If you're a developer studio, keeping your people familiar and lucid in the OpenGL APIs starts to look like a really good move. Hell - we have Mass Effect 3 running on the WiiU now, so even for big resource heavy games it starts to make more sense as a business decision.
No, but work and other forms of entertainment have always worked great on Linux. Hell, I can use random off-the-shelf printers more easily on Linux then on Windows now. It's a superb OS when you want to get some data analysis done.
There are only two reason to boot into Windows - Office, and gaming. Office is a legacy issue - my professors are now using iPads and other devices which don't speak "native" office and I suspect sending them ODFs would lead to less "your formatting is all broken" problems.
People make gaming out to be a triviality, yet gaming has made commerical-scale flight simulation an off-the-shelf affair - and I remember when Voodoo graphics cards were a big deal for Descent 2. If you don't need to boot windows to do your gaming, then that's significant - suddenly people are thinking "what else don't I need to reboot for?" and looking at that $300 Windows license as over a year's worth of purchases on Steam weekend sales.=.
That change infiltrates. It may take time - it won't be overnight - but again, I've lived through the growth of PC gaming from cube-model software rendered graphics to wanting the latest and greatest graphics cards to not caring because mid-range will last for years.
But we'll know when Microsoft is worried, because Mono will suddenly be good enough to let us run Office on Linux.
No industrial process is 100% efficient, nor will ever be 100% efficient.
But it is likely we can continually get incrementally closer to 100% efficiency, barring hard physical limitations.
Ergo, perpetual growth even with finite resources is possible, since the future will always be slightly more productive then the past.