Just perhaps

HP is looking for a way to commercialise its latest break technology, that thing of the memristor or whatever its called. It was said, this could be *cough* a paradigm change in memory technology... See BOOGLE for more details.

Holiday season madness?

Soreacle and Xen? Such an acquisiton would kill Slowaris's own virtualisation toys dead. Does Larry really need Xen that badly he'd be willing to upset the Sunshiners and pay the loony price? CISCO might, if they had the cash spare, and there would be less anti-competitive kerfuffle, but not at the current pricing. A merger with Novell would seem a likelier option, but again not just yet.

As for RAMBUS and hp, the only thing I can think of was a rumour from years back about some RAMBUS technology for massive memory RAIDing across systems using XDR-RAM. It would be a shame - I've been quite happilly anticipating the day when RAMBUS get their long-overdue come uppance. I'm not sure hp would buy one memory company (especially one which is more a patent company than an actual memory manufacturer) when they could simply license the memristor tech to the others. XDR-RAM doesn't seem a big enough carrot to lure the Hurd donkey with. Maybe hp suspects RAMBUS holds a new killer patent much like the DDR-RAM patent.