The article linked showed battery life using different models of the Eee. Maybe I'm blind, but I did not see ANY listings of battery life under different OS. I know that UNR 9.10 does not get the battery life of ASUS' remix of Gentoo that came with my Eee 901, but the added functionality is more than worth it. I would assume the bloat of Windows 7 would also eat more juice -- or be handicapped, the way the version of XP that came with some 701 and 901s was. I will be upgrading my Eee soon to UNE 10.04 (Ubuntu changed the name, from Remix to Edition).

In have a different experience. Intrepid and Jaunty had sound issues with me, but Karmic did not. I don't use KDE because KDE sucks, and don't have a problem with GNOME. I don't know WHY KDE sucks, just that it does, and until I have a problem with GNOME I'll keep using it. Hardy worked out of the box one time and didn't others; Intrepid seemed to suck; Jaunty was better but still had problems; but Karmic has done everything I've asked of it, on several netbooks (Netbook Remix) Asheville Homeless Network owns and lets homeless peeople use and on my aging Gateway E-6100 (Full version).

In my experience the Astak EZ Reader 5" is the best deal out there. No, it does not have wireless connectivity. No, it does not have its own repository. But you can buy books from anybody and have no problem whatever. It runs Linux, has 8-shade grey-scale (not 4 of the cheaper ones or 16 of these $700 jobs). You download the book to your desktop or notebook, then transfer it via USB. The price is a winner too, you can find it some places for $199 - $230. (There's a used one on eBay for $189 Buy It Now, claims only 2 weeks' use.) They also have a 6" model for not much more.

Perhaps we would not have the problem if all staff used OOo. But many of our works have to be submitted in RTF, and VERY often we find that converting from DOC to RTF causes major problems in formatting: font changes and font size changes as well as justification, with repair of same being hours-long difficult. Mind you, the services which want RTF are eReader services, not POD. ODT to DOC causes major problems in Word, which most of Staff uses; DOC to RTF withint OOo is horrendous.

We publish ebooks, although we also publish Print On Demand. Our books are published in every ebook format we are aware of, including Kindle, Nook, Mobipocket, and others. We have found no easy work-around to OOo's bugs other than, as I said, converting to TXT and starting over with the fonts and formatting, which we do usually after hours of tearing our hair out trying to get rid of the hidden formatting and codes in OOo. Again, I have reported the bugs, and OOo states they are not interested in fixing them.

I think that your estimate of the population who will be happy with OOo is overrated. I personally know at least 30 people who are not happy with it, and am not happy with it myself. I have reported 3 bugs (one critical for my work, one moderate, and one minor) since 2.2, and have been repeatedly told that OOo is not in the least interested in fixing them. I work for a small ePub company, and when we get documents in from someone using OOo, often the only thing we can do is convert them to TXT, open them in Word, and redo all the formatting. Granted, a publisher has more need for cross-compatibility than most businesses, but in these days of Internet publishing, there are a lot more of us than the .0001% of users you referenced.

Hey, if OpenOffice.org actually worked as better than or even ALMOST equal to M$ Office, everyone at the small epublishing company I work for would be using it. But we have spent MANY hours having to fix OOo documents that just don't work in Word, and have had to require M$ Word. And when we report the bugs, OOo tells us they are not interested in fixing it. I WANT to use OOo. I simply can't, it makes my work MUCH harder. I am happy for those of you who don't have any problems with it. Usually the only way that I can effectively use an OOo DOC or RTF is to convert it to TXT, open it in Word, and add the formatting back in. I am one of dozens of people I know who want OOo to work, and they have thumbed their noses at us and others. I would not need to use a Windoze machine at all if the open-doc office package was available that actually could be used. (Amazingly, AbiWord has fewer problems -- ad KOffice more-- and Ashampoo Office (for Windoze) even fewer, but still not quite good enough.)

Then that explains why they are holding secret meetings, but does not explain why they are openly discussing open meetings.

I have just read this article and two layers down in links, and have YET to find what "ACTA" is or means. Please add this information to the article -- not all of us can remember the tons of alphabet soup we are being fed.

I hope I'm not the only one who noticed that the headline neglected to include Firefox, but that the article makes it clear they are equally at risk.

This is really not a story -- Yahoo has been censoring porn in India for well over a year. I have a Yahoo! India email account, and occasionally do searches on Yahoo! India... while most of my searches have been finding pictures of Hindu gods and goddesses, I have looked at human goddesses as well... and always have to go to another Yahoo or other Search engine, despite my having my preferences set to no filtering. In fact, for a long time, I could click the button to stop filtering -- but there was no button to save that preference, so it never 'took'.

Actually, the ASUS-Xandros which came on my Eee PC 901 had a bit longer battery life... but Ubuntu 9.10 Netbook Remix has more than enough added usability to make it worth it, and accurately reports battery data... I'm getting about 5.5 hours on a charge.

LOL Yeah, the only thing I use KDE for is on Windoze to get some Kool games... Gnome is just as flexible and tons faster...

I often find information on my favorite musical artists -- often those overlooked by the media and radio -- on Wikipedia. However, when I find one they missed, and add a page for them, it is almost invariably deleted because the information I entered is too similar to the artist's own website. Well, where else are you going to get the discography? I have given up, although I have not officially informed Wikipedia of this fact.

The earlier reports were quite a bit rosier, and a French company is already stepping up production of these vehicles. Which raises the questions: Is this Berkeley study funded by oil companies? Were the earlier stories inflated? Or both?

A later question could be, are there more efficient or less polluting ways to compress (or release) air than the one Berkeley studied?