"The original idea of netbooks was something closer to what Chromebooks are."

The original "netbook" (which wasn't called that at the time), the eee PC 700, was a breakthrough in many areas - small size, SSD, low price, innovative interface. Once energy-efficient Atom chips became available, it also could boast long battery life. Most "apps" involved simply launching a web browser with a particular URL, which is similar to what a Chromebook aspires to. As far as I could tell, the most compelling feature was "CHEAP", also a feature of most Chromebooks.

A weakness of the original eee PC was its choice of the Xandros Linux distribution, which was descended from Corel Linux and had no mindshare amongst Linux users in general. Ultimately that may be a weakness of Chromebooks as well, even though Google is a much bigger company.

As far as why the original netbook market shrank, it was probably a combination of factors, but there is one thing we should not lose sight of - at the time netbooks first appeared, small mainstream notebook computers (a.k.a. ultra-portable computers) were sold at premium prices. Think $1K-$2K and above. Netbooks shattered that pricing strategy and are at least partially responsible for all the much more affordable computing devices (tablets, Chromebooks, whatever) that we now have today.

That battery thing was so annoying that I gave on them and went back to wired. For a while I had one of those mice with extra LEDs to create a glowing trim around the edges. Way cool, and impressed the heck out of people, but eventually the wiring broke, and that design don't seem to be made anymore. Alas.

My analog TV died just before the switch to all-digital. I never replaced it. Been CALM ever since.

The OP asks "Can you provide PUBLICLY AVAILABLE REFERENCES on the pros and cons of open and honest communication of changes and bug fixes, especially in commercial environments?"

Do any such references exist? I don't know of any.

However, I can attest to having watched one vendor who screwed up multiple times [not a software project] in some pretty major ways, and even though we gnashed our teeeth and wrung our hands, the up-fornt honesty of this vendor to admitting to mistakes (which were ultimately fixed) was actually a big positive in its favor.

Honest communications, no matter how negative they might seem at the time, do wonders in building confidence between a vendor and a customer.

My POTS is much more reliable than the electric power - can't remember the last time, if ever, that it was down. It even continued working when a large tree fell on the line. However, if the power is out, the only phone that works with it is my rotary phone. That thing is even more indestructible than POTS and will survive any natural disaster.

However, I'm still waiting for the Picturephone, http://www.corp.att.com/attlabs/reputation/timeline/70picture.html

"They should be encrypting the data on disk, on network connections ..."

Let's see how that paranoia thing works in practice.

"Microsoft's Azure service hit by expired SSL certificate"
http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9237076/Microsoft_39_s_Azure_service_hit_by_expired_SSL_certificate

Hmm, needs more work.

Good point. MS would never create anything so ... oh wait.

http://www.gamedev.net/topic/289219-api-basics/

"The WINDOWS API is technically referred to as Win32, and is a HORRIBLE MESS ..."

Never mind, move along, nothing to see ...

It is really shameful that Tesla is misleading customers with deceptive advertising about its electric cars. Here is a part of the complaint:

"... the Association says that purchase prices on Tesla's website routinely include a $7,500 federal TAX CREDIT, despite the fact that the Congressional Budget Office states that only 20 percent of shoppers qualify for the alternative vehicle credit."

None of the members of the California New Car Dealer's Association would ever stoop so low. Especially GENERAL MOTORS dealers. Especially since, according to this report: http://cncda.org/resources/10-20-08_CNCDA_Ltr-GMAC_CEO_Alvaro_deMolina.pdf GENERAL MOTORS dealers represent over 25% of CDCDA's members. Surely none of them would ...

Oh wait.

http://www.chevrolet.com/volt-electric-car.html

"Chevrolet 2014 Volt"
"Net price shown includes the FULL $7,500 TAX CREDIT"

Never mind, move along, nothing to see.

From SCO's original lawsuit:
---
94. Over time, IBM made a very substantial financing commitment to improperly put SCO’s confidential and proprietary information into Linux, the free operating system. On or about May 21, 2001 IBM Vice President Richard Michos, stated in an interview to Independent Newspapers, New Zealand, inter alia:

        “IBM will put US $1 billion this year into Linux, the free operating system.

        IBM wants to be part of the community that makes Linux successful. It has a development team that works on improvements to the Linux kernel, or source code. This includes programmers who work in the company’s Linux technology center, working on making the company’s technology Linux-compatible.”

That team of IBM programmers is improperly extracting and using SCO’s UNIX technology from the same building that was previously the UNIX technology center.
---

I bought an HP all-in-one a few years ago to replace a traditional floor tower, monitor and external speakers. With most things being built in, plus the integrated wireless, I eliminated 10 cables, 2 external boxes, and one power brick. A full-featured laptop could also have worked, but it is nice to have the big screen, and I leave it on all the time anyway.

One should probably classify BSD as "Legacy Unix" as well, since it is derived from 32V (which is AT&T Unix version 7 ported to a VAX). For several years, BSD (at Berkeley) and System V (at AT&T) were developed in parallel (part of the "Unix Wars"). Thus, Ultrix and SunOS were BSD based, while AIX and HP/UX were System V based. There was sort of a merger of System V and BSD with the release of SVR4, which begat Solaris, among others, and which soon led to Certified Unix(tm).

... who are behind the machines hosted at umich.edu which have been attacking port 443 on my router with bogus requests and clogging my log files with messages like "peer did not return a certificate".

Go away. Just go away.

Help with editing your thesis?

For my thesis I did have help - wrote everything out longhand, then had three department secretaries typing up various chapters. (This was all on IBM Selectrics with acid-free paper. Figures were outsourced to the Graphic Arts department, where professional artists did a much better job than the computer-generated junk of today.) Editing was done with liquid paper and glue.

What is this "Latex" thing?

I picked up an Acer C7 to keep at a second office for occassional use. For what I do, Chrome OS doesn't cut it, so I installed the Chrubuntu distro in a separate partition. The only real complaint, I guess, is that the keyboard is cheap and doesn't have much "feel" to the keys. Lots of other minor complaints (Unity stinks, Gnome 3 stinks) but managed to work around them all. Wired ethernet and VGA connector for external display were used heavily (sorry Samsung, you don't have either - a big negative.) Biggest surprise was that the Celeron processor actually has decent performance.

Having said that, my intent was actually to see if Chrome OS could be tweaked so as to do all the things I need, and the chroot'ed version of Linux may be the way to go to get new software installed. A project for the future.

Years ago I evaluated PostgreSQL and MySQL for a project and decided to go with PostgreSQL. One reason was that it seemed more solid, which was more important than speed. The other was the funky way that MySQL was being developed - by a single, for-profit company - even though it was formally GPL licensed. Yes, MySQL would probably have worked fine, but the current issues with forking and all that mean that I would not trust it today. The community behind the project is more important than whatever license you choose to paste into the source and documentation.