For infrastructure technology, C will be hard to displace.
Sometimes when you fill a vacuum, it still sucks.
Unix has retarded OS research by 10 years and linux has retarded it by 20.
Twenty percent of all input forms filled out by people contain bad data.
One of the obvious things that went wrong with Multics as a commercial success was just that it was sort of over-engineered in a sense. There was just too much in it.
For books, I don't read much fiction, but like travel essays and good pop-science.