I don't want these minor problems litigated in the first place. The mortgage case was over the rounding method used when the amount came to exactly 1/2 a cent. Do you always round up, or do you use the even/odd rule and round 22.5 up and 21.5 down. This really wasn't worth sending $65M to a lawyer to argue about. The costs passed onto me to pay for this unwanted lawyer far exceed the nickel or so I might have gained.

That's the real problem. The only winner in these class actions is the lawyers. They get $20M. The consumers get coupons and the service raises their price to collect the $20M and give it the lawyers.

I got a check for $0.02 in a mortgage case when the class action lawyer took home $65M. Funny how the account servicing fee went up $0.10 a month after that. Probably cost me over $20 to recover that $0.02 I had been "cheated" out of.

I thought of Facebook first!
Mark to market, now I owe $2B in taxes!
April 15 comes around, where do I get this $2B?
My shares aren't liquid, I'll borrow it!
Who's this Zuckerberg guy?
My shares drop to zero.

Now I have a $2B loss carry forward which I can consume at $3,000 a year for the next 660,000 years.
And I still owe the bank $2B.
Instant bankruptcy.

Before you get excited about mark to market, mark to market accounting was one of the causes behind the banking melting down we just had and it has since been repealed. Mark to market can easily cause phantom gains. Phantom gains happen when the market crashes like it did in 2001. If you got marked to market in 2000 and then your stock crashed in early 2001 you could have ended up owing more in taxes that your stock is currently worth. That usually results in instant bankruptcy (or bank failure).

Chrome runs fine on all versions of Windows.

Google has ported Quake to run inside Chrome using HTML5. You just aren't seeing fully developed HTML5 apps yet.

The GUI libraries in older versions of HTML were not equivalent to their native counter parts. A lot of that had to do with Microsoft torpedoing the standardization and advancement of HTML. They seem to have stopped doing that now. Let's see how browser centric Win8 is now that the consent decree has expired.

All of these problems can be solved. I believe the rest of the world is going down the browser GUI path, so it is up to the Linux community to decide if they want to follow. Gnome/KDE are almost certainly dead ends.

This is not an overnight switch. It will take a decade to fully transition to an HTML5 plus local server model.

One reason why so many people don't like SAAS is because the server side of the app has been implemented closed source. Providing open source servers is one way to address that problem. For example convert Open Office to a HTML5 plus local server model as a response to Google docs.

HTML5 is just another GUI front-end library. In no way does it require you to write cloud based apps. If you want a native Linux application write the GUI in HTML5 and run the server on the same machine as your GUI. Hmmm.... something kind of like the Xserver model, but brought 30 years into the future?

When people whine about the ending of location transparency with the Xserver, what is going away is the Xserver as the primary GUI library, not location transparency in general. The Xserver needs to die, it is pass its prime and we need to move onto newer GUI technologies.

So stop writing native Linux applications and instead start writing HTML5 applications that ship with a built-in server. The cool thing about apps in this model is that the GUI works on Linux, Mac and Windows plus you can run the server locally or in the cloud - your choice. If you want to help out convert some native Linux apps into the HTML5 model.

Wayland is a key transition technology. It allows apps like Chrome/Firefox to be written directly to EGL. Plus you can run a user space Xserver as a legacy tool.

Yes, yes, yes! You would be foolish to rebuild the hardware.
Here are 47,826 vendors in China willing to sell you Android tablets.
http://www.dhgate.com/wholesale/search.do?act=search&searchkey=android&catalog=#search

You can buy 7in Android tablets shipped to your door for $60.

http://www.genesi-usa.com/products/efika
Smarttop $129 thin client
Smartbook $199 laptop

They run Ubuntu and are based on the Freescale iMX51.
They are far more powerful than a Raspberry PI.

Freescale i.MX515 (ARM Cortex-A8 800MHz)
3D Graphics Processing Unit
WXGA display support (HDMI)
Multi-format HD video decoder and D1 video encoder (currently not supported by the included software)
512MB RAM
8GB Internal SSD
10/100Mbit/s Ethernet
802.11 b/g/n WiFi
SDHC card reader
2 x USB 2.0 ports
Audio jack for headset
Built-in speaker

10.1" TFT-LCD, 16:9 with LED backlight, 1024 x 600 resolution
Freescale i.MX515 (ARM Cortex-A8 800MHz)
3D Graphics Processing Unit
Multi-format High-Definition hardware video decoder
16GB Nand Flash
External MMC / SD card slot (up to SD v2.0 and MMC v4.2)
Internal MicroSD slot
802.11 b/g/n WiFi (with on/off switch)
Bluetooth 2.1 + EDR
2 x USB 2.0 ports
Phone jack for headset
Built-in 1.3MP video camera
Built-in microphone
Built-in stereo speaker

Because there are two 3D app contending for the hardware on Ubuntu and only one on the BSD system. Two apps cause locking and task swapping delays.

This is likely caused by Compiz interacting with the game engine on Ubuntu. Turn Compiz off and re-run the benchmarks.

Building it into the board means that everyone has the same chip. It really simplifies the driver problem. They can get single chip solutions from TI, CSR and others. The chips are sub $5.

Using a powered USB hub kind of defeats the convenience of this device. A wifi/BT version would be completely self contained. Just plug it into an open HDMI port on the TV and you're done.

Scale probably is not the issue, instead they want to avoid the FCC/etc radio certification.

Is the HDMI CEC wire hooked up with a driver transistor? Hooking up that wire will let the PI control all of the HDMI devices. People are already doing this with the Beagleboard so there is software available.

I'd find a version with a combo wifi/bluetooth chip much more useful than the Ethernet version. You could plug it into a spare HDMI port (HDMI provides power) on the TV and you're done. No wire needed. Wifi hooks to the network, Bluetooth connects keyboard/mouse. You have to consider the probability of having Ethernet wired to wherever the TV is located.