On a practical note, since this was an 'invention' in 1993, wouldn't the patent expire next year anyway (20 year patent life?) In that case, won't somebody like IBM just tie this up in the courts and give the lawyers something to chew on until it runs out anyway?

Wondering if a big state-of-the-art chip-fab like AMD getting into ARM processors might make sub-45nm ARM processors a possibility? AFAIK, only X86 chips are made like this just now. Could lead to fantastic performance-per-Watt chips coming off the line.

BeagleBone doesn't even come with any video-out connector as standard so probably not the best solution in this instance. More likely Beagleboard or Pandaboard for higher $.

Chinese New Year celebrations likely delaying Raspberry Pi ETA by a week or 2 I guess, but not long now....

I remember watching the interview with John Pilger some time ago, Assagne is certainly a compelling speaker.

And people complain that the Raspberry Pi (which is not even out the door yet) doesn't support VGA... sheesh.

I'm more inclined to say that this implicit assumption of 'infinite growth' is more part of the problem than anything else. Endless growth is the paradigm of the cancer cell, and not a good model for civilization.

Rather than making solar-powered phones, Nokia have pretty much solved the problem already by making simple high-efficiency phones like the 1280, which can run for 2 weeks between charges.

Don't fix it. XP is a perfectly reliable platform. I can understand Microsoft wanting to shift more units, but no need for change-for-the-sake-of-it really. Or maybe I'm just an old codger :)

A more interesting benchmark for me at the moment is performance per $, which is where Raspberry Pi is going to have a big impact soon I think.

Don't expect any replies from the German readership.