Well I'd still rather have a standalone lightweight netbook, with nice sized screen and keyboard, but with ARM-like power-sipping brains and just enough SSD for storage.

However it'd be nice if I could "tether" my handheld (phone or other devices) easily and automagically to share its cycles (and storage of course) with the active device. And vice versa. Obviously smaller devices would gain bigger benefits from such instant Beowulf clustering!

Who's gonna patent that? Here would be something for the OSS gurus to figure out, using e.g. UWB and some D-BUS, Avahi etc. smarts.

Maybe install Beowulf clustering software on both devices?

...Could you imagine a Beowulf cluster of those?

No, I cannot. Rather have something with some power in a cluster.

... :-|

My new favorite word.

Awesome.

Like all tools one should know how to use them.

And the first rule of tool use is: always pick the right tool for the task.

I'll let you know if I ever find a task for which the right tool was Windows.

Rather than clustering, I'd rather see something more like VMWare ESX's migration of guest host/OS images among devices (v-motion). Run my common tasks in a guest host VM that is light weight, but does the general user stuff (web, email, IM, notes, etc.).

When I'm at my desktop at home, and I need to hit the road, I v-motion that guest over to my phone. If I need to check something while mobile, can do the basics on my phone. If I get to a coffee shop (or a meeting, or a library, etc.), I take out my netbook, and v-motion the guest over to the netbook. When I'm ready to get on the road again, v-motion it back to my phone. When I get to the office, I v-motion it from my phone over to my workstation.

And if the "VMware Player" type infrastructure that makes this possible decouples the display from the compute engine, then maybe you could also (while sitting at your workstation) fire up a heavier weight task, and it would immediately v-motion the CPU/RAM/etc. over to a big compute farm, transparently hiding that from you (ie. you keep using your workstation's display/keyboard/mouse without any changes, except maybe a slight flicker when the v-motion happens).

Of course, that requires a UI that will scale from the phone up to the workstation. Or a UI infrastructure that can instantly morph from a phone sized UI to a workstation sized UI (imagine for a second, ignoring the CPU architecture, the same application -- not two separate copies, but the _same_ application, running on both an iPhone and a Mac, but having an iPhone UI on the iPhone, and a Mac UI on the Mac -- you can actually almost do that with Cocoa, but I don't know that anyone has really pushed that possibility very far), so that your applications don't miss a beat when you v-motion from desktop to phone, but they do instantly take on the UI of the new environment.

But, without that, you'd either have to get used to a tiny desktop on your phone, or a giant palmtop on your desk. Or something in between (that wont be very good in either environment). Though, the new Sharp device being talked about over in the Competitors forum has what looks like a mostly typical Ubuntu environment (with one of the NBR launchers) running on a 5" screen. If they fix the bug about easily moving back and forth from conventional Ubuntu to NBR ... then maybe that would be the type of glue it would take.

At a guess : you don't make a living in the anti-malware software industry, do you ? :-)

No problem.

Want some suggestions?