It's much easier to just download the ISO and burn it, or make a live USB stick out of it. Going through the hassle of actually requesting it and waiting for shipping seems to be very awkward, and obviously costly for Canonical.

I probably won't need it much anyway, as my system will just show me a prompt: you want to upgrade to 9.10 now?

..of the gigantic clock someone is building, that should work for 10,000 years. Maybe we should engrave a manual in that thing, that when it is done, the world does not end, but you have to rewind it.

We found a black dot on one of the hi-res lunar surface pictures! It must be a cave, and could mean a bunch of stuff, but let's think of some high expectations now..

*Josh hides cigarette that fell on the map printout last night during late shift*

If you are really a paranoid traveler, then you should put the bootloader on a stick (and possibly one half of the key too, the other in your head).

I read a description somewhere how to make it work best. Install a bare bone windows OS on one partition, put on some icons for crap so it does not look too shrink wrapped. Put your real OS (preferably not a Windows one, as this would make security mostly futile anyway) on a second partition.

Then make your stick the primary boot medium, hdd the second one. Maid comes in and finds just a diversion OS with no data to compromise (as this boots when the stick is not inserted). Even if the bootloader is played with, once you put in your stick and boot up, your real and encrypted OS will be booted from stick, which had no manipulation what so ever.

Add some individual touch to make it harder to compromise.

You also evade stupid border guards stupid questions this way, as your real OS stays kind of camouflaged (well, not really, but more than enough for people with no clue).

And be careful of those flashable BIOS'es.

Taken from Googles Android platform page: "Android is a software stack for mobile devices that includes an operating system, middleware and key applications."

And that's probably the thing that makes it fly, it unifies the software stack and a big corp. is behind it. Guess that's a good thing.

Still, calling Android an OS is a misnomer, as the Java framework is the crucial part about it.

..but everyone else is!

But you know, that (almost) nobody is buying this stuff at full boxed retail price. The OEM license for Dell will be around $50-70 for customers, the hardware is bought in big unit counts too, and gets appropriate discount, so the PC's will go somewhere between $600 - 1200 depending on some other factors like graphics, RAM and HDD models/capacities and branding.

Not many people MS Office boxed version. Most private people will pirate it (and Microsoft is actually more happy about it then if they would use alternatives like OOo). Many will also go legal and use OOo or get a copy from the company they are working for.

Businesses will go volume license, and the package of software / seat will also circle around $200 - $400.

That said, I'll still continue to use Ubuntu + OOo + other open source software. I also build my PC's myself, so I get the best fitting solution and opt out of the MS tax (and be it just because of the principle, though the financial aspect is also counting). Considering the current economic downturn (and the fallout that is following as we speak), more businesses are and will also go a more open source way, though not the majority and many only partially (i.e. Windows 7 + OOo).

One thing is true though, the Win 7 (re-branded Vista) will increase sales of PC's for a little time, especially since Christmas is approaching.

I played and occasionally still play one or the other MMO that relies on similar models: you can play free and have a great game and you can upgrade and get some more benefits anytime you want.

Much easier to get folks hooked with some quality game time than with a shiny box, and once they are, they quite happily play some premium.

Now this is not new, there are a lot of folks doing this, mostly small indy developers with smaller mmo's and browser games and they seem to be doing very well.

They obviously don't. Some cohesive naming might give you at least an indication on what you are dealing with.

My favorite is the nVidia one: GF 6xxx -> GF 7xxx -> GF 8xxx -> GF 9xxx -> GT 2xx .. WTF?

Now don't ask me why. I think it's stupid.

Not really. Pretty much all the big cloud computing companies build on open source, not just because it is cheaper, but because it is also better suited for the task / more adaptable.

The application software for big science related calculations isn't exactly off the shelf either, most of it is custom made.

Once you put together this kind of project, you can also hire some developers to build a software that runs on it, and are no longer restricted by home / small business development / deployment barriers.

There are very strict regulations on what radiation is acceptable. Why did the not add a failsafe or critical warning, something like a big red blinking message "What you are gonna do is probably stupid" or so?! Just to give the therapist a hint that something is wrong. I mean, implementing this kind of failsafe should not pose that much of a problem, would it?

Wouldn't a rail acceleration ramp (railgun) be better suited for this purpose? At least I can imagine that it would distribute the starting acceleration a lot better. With this thing you'll have difficulties keeping the stuff together you want to catapult up.

See, I don't like MS and have my itch with Samba for that reason, but most people that like MS are accustomed to the clicky-pointy interface for AD and will have a hard time to accept Samba just because it is too cryptic.

Or differently speaking, bigger organizations (except govt.) will take this new possibility into account because of the cost reduction potential (they only need a few very bright people to keep this running for a very big, otherwise license expensive infrastructure).

For middle class organizations this won't change much. They swim or sink with the rest of the world.

The application is very impressive, as far as the video goes. It shows that a human process of recombining existing material based on a hunch.

Problem is, searches (for base data set) for CC Share alike / commercially usable is a best spotty (many artists don't care much about explaining the image rights, and most others are jerks).

So in practice, this will only be useful for private entertainment, maybe prototyping, but not for professional use.

It's a great idea, actually a pretty innovative one, but it will break when facing western establishment.

But then again, it is created in China, so they'll have more space to act on it, which is kind of ironic taking in account their political system.

I can imagine a situation like this in 500 years in a games museum:

Guide: This is the bare-bone version of the game Dragon Age: Origins, a very popular game in the beginning of the 21st century. This exhibit contains 20% of the game content from the original game.
Visitor: Why is it bare-bone, what happened to the rest?
Guide: It got lost.
Visitor: Why?
Guide: The distribution models in that dark age of information made it completely impossible to archive most kinds of software.. which is why our archives are somewhat spotty for this period.
Visitor: Woah, humans were really this primitive back then? Unbelievable..