I got on the road with my ebike in May of last year. I've got close to 3000 miles since then. I live in a city (Pittsburgh) with a lot of hills and my ride is 8.5 miles each way. I have to say that I get to work about 50% faster on average than driving my car. I also save over a thousand dollars a year on parking costs. My daily gas costs in my car were about $2.00. On the bike, it's less than $0.12 per day in electricity (including the half that I charge at work). I estimate the amortized costs of the battery to be about $0.50 per day, though I haven't had to replace my battery pack yet.

Needless to say, I am extremely satisfied with the experience, and I recommend it to anyone who's not afraid to try it. A few things I'd like to point out.

• As long I dress correctly, I can easily handle any weather, except snow/ice, including rain or temperatures down to about 20F. Sure, you get a bit wet in rain, but keep a change of clothes at the office in case you need them. Get a decent waterproof coat, shoes/boots.
• With the proper lighting on your bike, you can make it very hard for people to miss you. You should have flashing head and tail lights. Aim your head light so it will be seen by drivers in their rear and side view mirrors. It will annoy some people, but it will make sure they see you.
• If you ride at night, be sure to have enough headlighting to see safely at your target speed.
• Always keep spare batteries for your lighting.
• Merging with traffic is actually safer when you are moving at speeds closer to traffic. It gives drivers more time to see you and anticipate your movements.
• Get a good horn that people will be able to hear inside their cars with the windows up.
• Watch for car doors opening in front of you! And pot holes.
• Sometimes people like to lay on their horn at you, or pretend to run you down or pass you aggressively. If that's how they get off, then get out of their way, since there's not much you can do about it.
• Get puncture proof tires and Slime Super Thick inner tubes and you can run over broken glass and hit pot holes going 20 miles an hour without getting flats. I have ridden over 2000 miles since I did this, and still have not had a flat.
• Carry a complete toolkit with you, including duct tape! You almost never need it but you won't regret carrying it when you do.

Anyway, I thought I'd share my experience. Ebiking is absolutely a viable and economic means of transportation.

Most of us realize this use of 'enterprise class' refers to the life cycle and frequency of major version upgrades.

I'm pretty sure most of us realize that a community rebuild of an 'enterprise class' product guarantees nothing about support, or even availability of the specific rebuild of the source OS over long periods of time.

Tao and White Box Linux were perfect examples of this. They were also clones of RHEL. When they closed shop, you could migrate easily from either of them to the prevailing RHEL rebuild distro, CentOS.

Even if CentOS as we know it today goes away, the easy migration to whatever the next RHEL rebuild Linux would be an impossible-to-miss feature requirement in the new distro. It would likely require nothing more than installing a new GPG key and a new file in yum.repos.d. The whole process would likely be packaged as an RPM to make it easy on people.

Vendors are bound by Microsoft's Windows Life-Cycle policy (see http://www.microsoft.com/windows/lifecycle/default .mspx )

What it boils down to is that after Vista is out for 12 months, OEM's will no longer be able to offer Windows XP.

I can't seem to find on MS website when the support cycle for XP is to end. Does anyone know when they will stop patching XP?

Honestly, I'd rather do an apt-get dist-upgrade once every six months than be forced to pay to upgrade when my system is no longer supported. My .02 worth. Someone should put together a version of APT that will upgrade Windows to Linux. Hmmmm. :)