HP is taking legal action against Oracle for allegedly breaching its 2010 partnership agreement of porting HP’s core software products with the latest versions of Itanium. In March, Oracle announced it would not be developing any new versions for products designed for the Itanium processor. Itanium has the ability to power the so-called Business Critical Systems hardware for extremely demanding enterprise applications. However, Oracle said the chip line is about to die.

The companies’ lawyer met in the Santa Clara County Superior Court with Judge James Kleinberg presiding to discuss their side of the event. Others in the courtroom included Ann Livermore, HP board member and former enterprise business chief, and Oracle’s co-President Safra Catz. Catz and Livermore were the two key negotiators for the agreement. Livermore was to testify later in the day. Kleinberg is set to rule if the companies had a legally binding contract.

Jeff Thomas, HP’s lawyer, focused on the so-called Hurd Agreement wording, where the companies reiterated their partnership after Oracle hired Mark Hurd, former CEO for HP. HP also sued Hurd for breaking the confidentiality agreement.

Thomas and the lead lawyer for Oracle focused on one paragraph of the agreement, which read Oracle would continue to provide its product suite on the HP platform in a way that’s consistent with the existing partnership before Hurd’s hiring.

Sage wisdom states that there are two sides to every coin. This timeless wisdom will be borne out in spades with Windows 8/RT. Let's get into the dark side first.

If your users are veterans of Windows it is safe bet they are going to take one look at Windows 8 and scream blasphemy. Users whose brains are geared towards visual learning will undoubtedly yell the loudest and longest.

There's a good reason for this. Mick Jagger brought his band to the Redmond campus, performing live "Start Me Up" in the summer of 1995 (it was a great show). This heralded in the abandonment of program icons sitting on the desktop and introduced the now legacy Start button.

Ending the life of the 17-year-old start button is not going to go well with some users.

A string in Python is enclosed in either single or double quotes.  Therefore, either one does the trick.  A common practice is to place single words with no characters that can be interpolated in single quotes and multi-word strings that contain interpolated characters in double quotes.  This may be a carry over from Perl where interpolated characters are in double quotes. 

If you do not want to interpolate a string, use a raw string ... r"\n".  With the exception of the last print statement, each of the print statements prints hello on a separate line from how are you?.  They are great for regular expressions.

Finally, triple double quotes """ some message about a function or class ... """ are used for docstrings.

print "hello \n how are you?"
print 'hello \n how are you?'
print r"hello \n how are you?"