Anonymous Coward wrote:

Could you elaborate? A 7" tablet's screen is big enough to contain two windows the size of a phone's screen, and a 10" tablet's screen is as big as that of the laptops they were selling from 2009-2012. I have one of those laptops, and I have no problem putting two 80-column text editor windows side by side. The only thing missing from Android is a manifest flag for flexible screen size that would allow this sort of window management. Currently, applications are allowed to assume window size is fixed at install time.

Mark Shuttleworth said in the article: "What's nice about Ubuntu is the phase change to the PC experience up from the tablet really just introduces window management." Does this mean that Ubuntu on tablets will run all maximized all the time, even when a tablet is docked to a keyboard? That hurts my use case, which involves doing a little Python coding during the commute. I currently have a 10" laptop, and my setup in IDLE puts a source code editor window down one half of the screen and a second source code editor or the output window down the other. But with the discontinuation of 10" laptops at the end of last year, I don't know where I'd go.

Wouldn't motorcycle riding be more moral than driving because of the fuel savings? Or does the health cost outweigh the fuel savings in this case?

Any PC will support that setup as well. All PCs have VGA out, and newer PCs have DVI or HDMI out. All LCD HDTVs have HDMI in, which is compatible with DVI signals, and most LCD HDTVs have VGA in. So except for a few edge cases with a VGA-only PC and an HDMI-only TV, you can still game from your recliner with a PC, a gamepad, and a TV. And I'd bet there are more games for PC that aren't on Xbox 360 than there are games for Xbox 360 that aren't on PC.

For smaller game makers, navigating PC hardware diversity has often proven easier than navigating the console makers' developer and game approval bureaucracy.

Do they advertise affordable machines in cases that aren't the typical 8-inch-wide tower that sticks out like a sore thumb next to a TV?

That was fixed. The Firefox memory heap is now divided into "compartments", and Firefox 15 changed memory management to be more aggressive at purging compartments associated with closed pages.

But is it worth $495 per seat, as the web site appears to imply?

Today's forecast for Fort Wayne, Indiana: High temperature 26 (-3 Celsius), winds from the south that could gust over 40 mph (60 km/h).

And how much for a taxi to get somewhere at night or on Sunday, when no buses run at all in my home town? And how would you haul a week's worth of groceries for the family?

Or two-income households, with one adult working on one side of town and the other on the other. Or the business relocating to a different location.

I do take the bus to and from work but often not elsewhere. In some cases, it takes as long to walk from home to the nearest bus stop and from the nearest bus stop to the destination as it takes to just drive to work. In other cases, buses don't run at all at night, on Sundays, or on the six major holidays. There are even parts of Fort Wayne that Citilink doesn't serve at all on Saturdays.

And you've explained half of why much of the United States prefers SUVs over compact cars. (The other half is CAFE forcing automakers to phase out station wagons, but that's another topic.)

One can't necessarily choose where one works. If the jobs in one's field are concentrated in cities with poor public transportation and cost-prohibitive housing near the office, it's either drive or retrain to a different field.

I use my 10" laptop on a bus. I use my 10" laptop in a car. I have had no problems with it. The only problem is that they don't make 10" laptops anymore because the rest of the market failed to appreciate their versatility advantage over tablets that run smartphone operating systems with their all-maximized-all-the-time window management policies.

It's a bit hard to steal it when it's stuffed in a messenger bag with the strap across my chest and back. One advantage of the 10" laptops was that they would easily fit in such a bag.