Specifically in computing, the past ten or fifteen years have been a war on general-purpose computing; all the brands names he's slinging around amount to a cel

Specifically in computing, the past ten or fifteen years have been a war on general-purpose computing; all the brands names he's slinging around amount to a celebration of the black-boxing of internet services. Ten years ago I could do all this stuff without needing a quad-core 2GHz phone to run a full-featured HTML5/CSS/JS browser platform. I fully agree. Ten years ago, I was chatting using XMPP without any problems on a Pentium II or III machine. SIP was the new kid on the block at the time and gave interoperable voice chats. Now I am messaging with disparate groups over Hangouts, Facebook Messenger, and Whatsapp, because none of the systems are compatible. Ten years ago, there was still genuine optimism that Linux was making inroads on the desktop. Ubuntu was just getting started and things were getting better all the time. Now we have two major systems that run on the most popular devices (phones and tablets) and while they are built on open systems (Linux plus BSD and Mach plus BSD), they are nearly closed for the general consumer, with locked boot loaders rather than BIOSes than run any operating system. Of course, there are good things like the Raspberry Pi, that still allow newer generations to tinker and not get locked into incompatible ecosystems, however that is more despite the assault on general-purpose computing.