It works for me. Carrying around both an e-ink reader and a cheaper larger Android tablet allows you to use the tablet to take notes without screen swapping. When used in combination with a Bluetooth keyboard & folio stands I find it far more productive than lugging around a laptop.

The Trillian Project : Proof of SCO's actions

In February 1998, well before even the first prototype IA-64 chips were available, a skunkworks team at HP, with some assistance from Intel, began the work toward porting Linux to IA-64. By October 1998,around the same time that IBM, Old SCO and Sequent had finished negotiations, HP had completed the build toolchain. By January 1999, the Linux kernel was booting on an IA-64 processor simulator, months before the actual Itanium processor was available. In March 1999, at Intel, Linux was booting on the actual Intel Itanium processor.

The SCO Group (then Caldera) which had purchased the rights to sell copies of the old Unix from Novell, sued IBM because the freely available Linux competed the SCO Groups old Unix offering.

So Oracle has become the next SCO Group, quick somebody tell PJ!

Put an arbitrary valuation of the businesses data within each server per licence needed and lost of service by hour for each and compare it to the cost of Red Hat licensing. If the data is valuable enough and downtime expensive enough then Red Hat Support is really worth every cent.

Do you expect Google/Motorola to sell Microsoft Phones? no.

Why should Google/HP sell Microsoft Windows PCs?

Just sell the hardware with Linux Distros, Chromebooks, or sell the hardware no operating system installed to organizations with corporate licences. They could even farm out the Windows drivers and support to a third company.

This may be a great opportunity for Google to acquire a corporate brand and a large patent portfolio for its Chromebook for the enterprise.

Makes as much sense as Google acquiring Motorola for the same platform and patents for android.

I would like to see HP/Google enterprise hosted google apps appliances hooked up to Chromebooks as a replacement for the Microsoft Quagmire.

Google desktop widgets were an annoyance but the desktop search works very well in a small business environment where the files are stored on NAS or SAMBA servers.

I really hope that Google could produce a Chrome Local Search Plugin that replicates the search functionality that was in Google Desktop.

It would be a killer app if Google was also to include two way file merge functionality ( unison or two way rsync ) with removable media, remoter servers, other desktop computers and Google doc accounts

Has Microsoft's reputation with the public sunk to such a low point where they are now forced to acquire other Internet companies in a desperate attempt to expand Microsoft's internet/Live customer base by proxy?

Its already started!

No one pick up on Them!

"When man entered the genetics age, he opened the door to a new world. What we may eventually find in that new world, nobody can predict."

Countdown to breeding larger insects for human consumption starts in ...

Quoting myself

At some point some open source projects developers may go in a direction that the distribution vendors and end uses may disagree with. It is the licensing which allows a fork of the project to develop that sets the open source development model apart from the pure proprietary development model. Apache, X.org and even the current version of the GNU GCC compiler toolset have been all derived from an outside fork of an existing open source project. No vendor or open source software developer can block development for any substantial period of time without the risk of the development being taken over by a descendant of the same project -- it's called evolution.

Every time the leading members/developers of each of those original projects complained bitterly about the interlopers.

The longer the original team remains entrenched in their design/implementation choices, the less the original team control has over the successor project and the less original product's market share of total users.

This will remain true for all freely licensed source code that Oracle has purchased or inherited. Even for the forks of the GPL licensed Java.

In the end freely licensed source code can have no dictators, only obsoleted dickhead.

In 1980 they said that by 2010 some of us would be using jet packs to commute to work.
What they did not foresee in 1980 was the rise of telecommuting and that those same commuters would not have to travel very far.
Hence the need for only thirty seconds of flight time - it all make perfect sense.

3) connecting their choice of legal devices that do not harm the network or service, facilitate theft of service, or harm other users of the service

The phrase "facilitate theft of service" is so vague that it could be interpreted as just being in competition with the carrier's own provided services e.g. voice,SMS, video etc.

This statement puts the Internet in the USA back into the pre-dialup days before the split up of AT&T, where the carrier could deny access to any modem because it could "harm the network" or just compete with its existing services.

The patent in question was effectively denied, but the court would not impose further limits on patenting.

No. 08-964. Argued November 9, 2009--Decided June 28, 2010

Today, the Court once again declines to impose limitations on the Patent Act that are inconsistent with the Act's text. The patent application here can be rejected under our precedents on the unpatentability of abstract ideas. The Court, therefore, need not define further what constitutes a patentable "process," beyond pointing to the definition of that term provided in 100(b) and looking to the guideposts in Benson, Flook, and Diehr.

Which is about the same as saying ( Justice Potter Stewart, concurring opinion in Jacobellis v. Ohio 378 U.S. 184 (1964)),

"I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material I understand to be embraced within that shorthand description ["hard-core pornography"]; and perhaps I could never succeed in intelligibly doing so. But I know it when I see it, and the motion picture involved in this case is not that."

Fed-Soc.org - Patents: Legitimate Rights or Grubstakes that Obstruct Progress? - Winter 2000

This history shows the patent / free competition balance to be dialectical, not static. In this country, since the turn of the century, the pendulum has cycled twice between the patent right and free competition poles. The last free-competition era occurred between 1930-1950. Perhaps the zenith (or nadir, depending on point of view) was Mercoid Corp. v. Mid-Continent Inv. Co., 320 U.S. 661 (1944) where the Supreme Court held that tying sales of a non-patented product to a patented product constituted an impermissible extension of the patent monopoly and therefore patent misuse. Ironically, Mercoid facts today could support loss of profits damages under Rite-Hite Corp. v. Kelley Co., 56 F.3d 1538 (Fed. Cir. 1995). Partially as a reaction to certain court decisions (including the need to overturn Mercoid), the 1952 Patent Act slowly turned the pendulum back in a pro-patent direction. That movement accelerated full-bore with creation in 1983 of the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit to hear all appeals from trial court patent infringement decisions.

As I said before The 2000-2010 "Intellectual Property" boom is about to go the way of the "Subprime" Mortgage, Dot-Com vapor startup, Junk bond and Dutch Tulip futures. The Patent Troll Business Model is inherently flawed, and just like the aforementioned others, add nothing to a nations REAL economy.