If the strictly chronological order disappears, so will all those users who need time-based stuff like weather, live event tweeting, etc.

No

Well, good thing gas is cheaper than it's been in a long time! That outta spur people into sustainable vehicles and energy usage.

It partially is. The whole "it just works" thing is double edged as in people expect their expensive hardware doesn't do everything and do it well forever.

Then again, that's not *everyone*. I'm still using my iPhone 3GS because it just keeps doing everything I want it to do. Sure, Safari sometimes crashes on a JS heavy webpage, but then I just restart it and use Reader mode or disable JS or, heaven forbid, read on my laptop. Email works fine, phone works fine (for what iPhone signal quality is), Dropbox works fine. Do I do Periscope live streaming with it? No. I just replace to battery when it can't last a day. I think it's on the 3rd or fourth battery now. I replaced the case and some buttons. Still going.

I'm *not* defending the choices made

Yep :)

Then again, what if Apple decided people would be unhappy with the speed on iOS 9 so they decided to limit it to iPhone 5? I bet the same people grumbling about this issue would be grumbling about Apple's forced upgrades. They are stuck both ways via expectation. I'm defending the choices made but, considering how quickly the smartphone market is still developing, is it purely reasonable to expect a device multiple years old can run everyone up to snuff, that plus developers getting lazy with memory on new devices (same old same old).

Funny. Both my wife and my ma have a 4s with iOS 9 and they don't seem to have any slowness issues. Then again, they're not running cutting edge apps/services .... an expectation issue perhaps?

Until we've all got 2D VR treadmills or holodecks, this won't be good enough. I'm sure it *feels* more immersive but you'll still be at the mercy of people with razor sharp mouse/keyboard skills.

Reminds me of playing Half-Life 2 with a P5 Dataglove http://cwonline.com/store/view... It was cool and I was aiming the gun and "pulling the trigger" but, like touchpad laptops, your arms get tired pretty quickly ...

(Relatedly, reminds me of the last time I shot skeet with a 12 gauge. My aim improved remarkably when a friend told me to "click" the skeet like a mouse pointer.)

How about, in the US at least, Congress brings back the Office for Technology Assessment so maybe, just maybe, our elected officials wouldn't have to "figure it out" but be able to ask a whole group of people who's job is to explain these kinds of things? I still can't believe that in 1995, the arguable year of the WWW explosion, the OTA was nixed.

A good UI is hard and takes *a lot* of time. I don't think the problem is a lack of designers but a lack of designers who can really put in the *time* with developers to actually polish things.

Sure, you can get things working to 90% but that last 10% that actually makes something quick and easy to use if HARD. Most open source projects just don't have enough people with enough time to devote to that last 10%.

The "open source is ugly" premise is sometimes right but for the reason that we're used to closed source software companies actually having enough staff and devoting enough time to that last 10% ... some of the time ;)

I'd say maybe you should spend 5 seconds googling yourself ... There has been a native Mac driver since Wine 1.6: https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.winehq.org%2Fannounc...

I hadn't used Wine in a while either but installed Fallout 2 last night and played without X11/XQuartz. I just had to enable the mac driver as I don't think it's on by default.

I'd prefer a "Shit Happens" button, myself.

Yes, but I remember installing and using the first Command & Conquer quite a bit more!

I'm more interested in the fact that the game used for benchmarking has the following in it's backstory: "Computronium became the ultimate currency."

Great to see everyone jumping on the bandwagon. Focusing on the flag once again ignores the real problems since it's easier to find a "magic pill" to fix everything. This is like Obama's first election where, once the flag is down, everyone will declare an "end to racism" and happily ignore the real work involved with tackling endemic bias.