Desktop Docks

If a phone can run windows 7 or 8 and you can put it in a dock that is connected to a monitor, keyboard and mouse then it can operate in a desktop mode as well. I think this is possibly the way things are going and may have something to do with the announcement. Motorola's atrix dock already allows a simple desktop operating system to be used when the atrix is docked to a monitor. Granted they don't really yet have enough power as a nettop even but I'm sure that will change.

Programming Diligence is also important

Interesting reading a lot of the comments here. From my experience some of the brightest minds don't necessarily produce the best code. Most companies need simple effective solutions to problems that don't involve large spaghetti codebases. I find that programming diligence is just as important. Clearly defined classes, interfaces and methods that are well documented and have suites of unit tests are the important thing. At the level of the individual testable units, the code should be simple and understood by all who need to. It is also about recognising where code can be re-used effectively and making use of existing libraries so time is not spent on re-inventing the wheel.

@Andrew Culpeck

"This could then mean that milions of mobile phones are charged only for as long needed rarther than overnight. This could save a lot of CO2 being waisted as the phone charger sits trying to top up the phones battery all night when it only needed charging for say 3 hours."

This is nonsense. I recommend you go and read David Mackay's book "Sustainable Energy - Without the hot air". It is extremely good and reveals the true facts about sustainable energy. Two quotes from this book are relevant here: "All the energy saved in switching off your charger for one day is used up in one second of car-driving." and "obsessively switching off the phone-charger is like bailing the Titanic with a teaspoon."

Lithium-Air batteries seem more likely to be mass produced than these.

Won't happen for another hundred years - at least.

The idea that we could send humans to mars and return them safely to earth by 2030 was completely insane anyway. We are probably still twenty years away from trying a mars sample return mission of a few pounds let alone some kind of exploration vehicle with a life support system that can land and take off from the surface of mars. This is not going to happen for possibly another 100 years. We need decades and decades of manned moon exploration, near earth asteroid, mars moon exploration etc before we could even comtemplate the idea of sending humans to mars and returning them safely. It is an order of magnitude much harder than sending man to the moon and back. The craft that is sent would have to be considerably larger than the apollo command/service/lander stack and the ascent vehicle would need a pretty big rocket. It would cost an absolute fortune.

Hits is meaningless

measuring hits is pretty meaningless. a single web page can be made up of any number of unique files (hundreds even). it would be more informative to know the number of unique visitors per day, week, month.