afaik the tablet was in development hell for much of 2015, by the time it was ready it was no longer profitable and Jolla couldn't afford to buy more than about 600 units without going bust.

IIRC they were negotiating a startup funding round that failed, so they ended unexpectedly up not having enough money to run the company let alone pay for the tablet manufacturing. Even remember hearing about the manufacturers selling the units with Android by the time they secured at least some funding for the company, so there was really nothing to salvage.

Or it might have just been their excuse back then - if you have some newer details of how it actually all went down with the tablet, please do share! :-)

I know that the specification changed multiple times prior to launch (mostly screen related I think).

I remember they had success with a prototype on I think Mobile World Congress, even winning some price. But when they wanted to start manufacturing the screen was EoL and they had to redesign the board for a different screen. This forward pushed the delivery date, resulting in the new manufacturing start coinciding with the funding round failure.

I hope they've learned their lesson after the tablet fiasco.

It looks so. That is actually the second phone they are making since them and the first got quite good responses

or 'interactive' or 'cloud' (early 2010s).

The work done in the 80s and 90s was for very different hardware than now, when accelerated graphics wasn't the norm. MS made that mandatory with Aero and then Windows 8 a long time ago, Apple's been at it for even longer.

Wayland exists because, thanks to hardware innovations, there's a better way to do the job than what was possible in the 80s.

  >> Wayland exists because, thanks to hardware innovations, there's a better way to do the job than what was possible in the 80s.

Unfortunately Wayland is not a better way.

The Asus PA27JCV is rather less than $2k...

After the tablet fiasco in 2015 they've never been able to afford to staff their OS properly; the web browser engine still lags behind Firefox by a long way (using Gecko 91 currently).

The scenarios were calculated based on hypothetical 'policies' of a society and the availability of natural resources. The scenario (from the 2004 book) we are tracking most closely is no.2, i.e 'business as usual' but with twice as much resources as was assumed in the 70s.

LibreOffice is ok for reading and making minor changes to existing files but I haven't used Writer or Calc for anything new in years. LaTeX and Gnumeric are my tools of choice.

The Transcend consumer cards are/were generally 'hybrids' - they would work in IDE mode if connected to such an interface.

The reality is that since the invention of ICs, electronic devices have become 'black-boxes' that the vast majority of people can't hope to understand the entire workings of. Free software licenses were never going to change that.