What will computing look like after 2014?

You're talking about net neutrality, which is very dangerous and likely to happen. It's really not related to cloud computing as you would be paying for cloud-as-a-service as opposed to your ISP segregating internet plans.

 

Hungry Man: umm, don't you mean a non-neutral Internet?

I've rather suspected this for some time... The main thing I worry about on Win2k at this point is worms transmitted by hotpluggable media, e.g. Stuxnet. Disabling autorun.inf doesn't always work for those. Otherwise I've found it's mostly a matter of safe browsing habits and not installing anything of ill repute.

 

I can never remember which is which.

 

It doesn't matter if it's paying for access to the cloud in general or for individual web applications. Either way, the user becomes bound to their terms and time constraints when the software isn't on his/her own system. I realize that users don't own the software they install, but with installed software the user can continue to use it indefinitely. With the applications on someone elses servers, it changes from an indefinite lease to a repeating rental. I'll give you one guess which will cost more in the long run. That combined with the loss of control over your data and who has access to it makes web computing a bad deal for the user.

 

Believe it or not the Windows XP/2003 kernel source code is available for academic research: Windows Research Kernel v1.2

If Microsoft would open source the kernel source code... ASLR, DEP, SEHOP and all of the other modern mitigations could be added to Windows XP and allow the OS to live potentially forever.

Just got off the phone with my bookie over there in Las Vegas... he tells me the odds of that occuring are 1,000,000,000 : 1



Best Wishes,
-MessageBoxA

 

Even something like that isn't a problem unless you plug in USB sticks from other sources or someone has physical access to your PC (and a reason to want to compromise it). Depending on how much you use USB, there are other ways to mitigate that kind of problem too, some of which are permanent.

 

For me, much the same as it does today.

BSD has been around since 1977 and I'll be staying with FreeBSD, which has been around since 1993.