It recently occurred to me that I never reboot. Even my four year old Win2K machine never crashes any more. Pretty much the only time I turn off or restart my computers is when I travel; I even ignore it when installation programs prompt to reboot.

But what's replaced that? Restarting Firefox.

Mozilla grows to use up a gig of memory, occaisionally crashes (especially profiles with lots of plugins), and generally behaves exactly like operating systems used to.

This is because we've pushed all the bleeding edge development and day to day program usage into the browser where it's safely abstracted away. After all of Java and VMWare's efforts, we finally have everybody running many of their common tasks (see also: Jamglue) inside a virtual machine. Now we just have to get the browser as stable as modern OSes have become.

Today's photographic nomination is borderline betwee Object and Architecture, but I'm going with Object:

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