I've only had mine about a month, but I love it. It's awesome for the train commute in from Mission to downtown (about 70 minutes). In the morning I can get some paperwork done before getting to the office, and on the way back I can kick back (relatively, train seats don't recline) and watch a couple of episodes of something, read an e-book or do some additional paperwork if needed. My experience with the battery is that it will last for both rides, morning and evening, and still show about a 30% charge when done. Perfect for my needs. Right now I've only used the default Xandros install, but I have upgraded the RAM to 2GB (of which Xandros' kernel only sees one) so I am probably going to throw Ubuntu on it in the next couple of weeks.

I have strange feelings about Edison. When I was in grade school decades ago, I did a report on him. It was probably the biggest report I've ever done in terms of pure research and time on a subject. The books I had access to at the time (school library) painted a picture of Edison as a plucky, pull yourself up by your bootstraps kind of guy with an unquenchable thirst for knowledge and research, who led a creative (small) team of researchers trying to create a "better" world.

It wasn't until much later I found out about a lot of things that really took the shine off my image of him. Things like he wasn't really all that nice a guy. Actually, I should qualify that. It seems that when he was an up and comer with no real successes yet, he was a nice guy. Once he'd sold a couple of his inventions and gotten enough money to start Menlo Park, he turned into a dick. His "small" team at Menlo Park was more like a a huge lab that was a patent sweatshop, and he would patent other peoples' inventions in his name or the name of his lab. His dealings with Tesla were horrifying in how far he would go to take advantage of someone whom he perceived to be vulnerable.

Then there's the movie/audio stuff, his feelings on rights for records and movies were, shall we say, interesting. If he were alive today he'd probably be the head of the RIAA and MPAA both, calling for filesharers to be executed in public, and was fiercely protective of his Intellectual Property, yet at the same time was more than happy to copy films that were made in Europe and distribute them in America, similar to the business model of today's DVD pirates. It's noted he drove Georges Méliès into bankruptcy by doing this.

And him trying to discredit AC power as dangerous by electrocuting animals was just the icing on the cake. Acipolone, I don't believe he derived pleasure from the killings either, but the sheer amorality of killing animals to attempt to discredit a competing product is appalling, particularily when you consider that DC wasn't all that much safer.

I'd like to think that the karmic scales got balanced at least a little in light of how Edison acted.