OpenVMS is available. For free if you get a hobbyist license. You can then either run it on Itanium, Alpha (real or emulated), or VAX (real or emulated).

There are several Alpha free emulators out there for Windows. There's also Simh which emulates VAX servers and is available for Linux, WIndows, and probably others.

IBM mainframes may be expensive but when you're talking about mission critical things like core databases for your statement of record at banks, expense becomes a little less significant.

Not quite the same without those unlimited data plans, though.

Verizon's new family shared data plans allows you to use your phone to tether as much as you want. The grandfathered unlimited plans are unable to do this per the agreement.

They've got the HP 3000s which run MPE/iX but that was EOL'd so I'm not sure if that's what you were referring to, though they do run on PA-RISC.

They've also got Tandems which are considered mainframes by some.

Honestly, I think HP can move the Tandems and OpenVMS to Xeons, though OVMS may be a bit of work.

The Tandems / NonStop servers also use Itaniums.

I had a friend work at a large company that began moving to working from home. He jumped at it, rented his house out, and rented a place out in Hawaii with his girlfriend. He loved it. Not too many others jumped in. He was baffled and started asking why. No one wanted to be at home all day. Some found being at home too stressful; spouse, small kids, noise, etc. Others simply liked being around other people they know for a part of the day. Others were too programmed with the office/home mentality of work/not-work.

There was an article that was showing the Metro UI after a number of apps were installed. It started to become quite a mess. The Start menu was a bit easier to deal with for me, particularly since you could just start typing in what you wanted and Win7 would get you pertinent results.

When men say they love lesbians, they really mean bi-sexual women.

Google has done well but they have their own problems. iGoogle, for one. I really didn't want a gob of search results for the category I was looking into, nor did I really want a boat load of amateur widgets mixed in with the ones I'm more likely to want.

Napkins are, and have been used, for note taking. The same thing we're talking about for iPads and laptops.

It's not the touching of something riddled with germs that's the problem. It's actually seeing what's on the screen between the smears and smudges that's at issue. I don't think most of us are going to be terrified at the thought of germs from someone else. We'd simply like to see what's on the screen. Hence the comments on clean screens, etc.

Given that a single-core phone can handle all of that at the same time, it's still not a compelling reason as to why four cores are needed.

You'll still have Windows in a corporate environment for a while, so long as MS Office remains king. That is a tie you're going to need to break before you can start to say, "no one needs Windows any more." Even then, that's only one major piece. There are still many others to follow.

I picture that someone as Steve Jobs on a day where he's feeling extremely benevolent.

Alpha and MIPS being the other two I recall off the top of my head.