If American business were anything other than clod-blodded regarding the bottom linethey wouldn't be shipping IT jobs overseas as fast as possible. Maybe Red Hat hasn't taken over the world because when they look at those supposedly minimal migration costs, it doesn't add up. But who knows? If you see Itaniau as the key to the future your crystal ball m ay be slightly clouded. That chip has proven to be a sore disappointment for Intel. Arguably, their emphasis on Itanium has given AMD and Opteron a great window of opportunity. Intel was finally forced to create the EMT64 Xeon in response. I'd look for Itanium to be used mostly for high end server boxes competing with proprietary Unix systems, rather than a workstation stalwart. As a general purpose 64 bit CPU, IBM/Apple's Power 5 is probably a better bet. Now the question is, are they smart enough to woo Microsoft into putting Windows on it?

"Democracy is a pathetic belief in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance." - H. L. Mencken