"Lindows" was a some crap put together to try and not scare off Walmart customers from buying a $200 PC without Windows. It probably did more harm than good, as it was not free, which to home users is really one of the biggest advantages for linux. Microsoft complained about the name, and it was briefly renamed "Linspire" until Xandros bought them and dropped the product entirely. The only interesting thing it had going for it was the "Click'N'Run" app store, which was supposed to combine a good package management system (I think they used apt) with a front-end for searching and buying applications. However, IIRC it cost a subscription fee just to use the store.

I think originally it was a development codename and then many users latched onto this. It seems to me that this is happening to Android now too, more people I've talked to seem to refer to the current version of Android as "Froyo" and not "2.2". However, the older versions seem to be more commonly referred to by version number, i.e. 1.6 instead of "Donut".

New brooms sweep clear. Two wrongs don't make a right. A penny saved is a penny earned.
Interpretation: A flawed article will require a lot of effort to work with Loose lips sink
ships.
Yogi Berra Variant: It's not over till it's over. Common sense to a limit is Natural; But
more of it is Genius The weak can never forgive. Forgiveness is the attribute of the strong.
--Mahatma Gandhi
All frills and no knickers. As good as Greg. Theakston me, but Theakston my brother and
you'll have God to answer to First deserve then desire.
There shallow Draughts intoxicate the Brain, If the dog hadn't stopped to take a #### in
the woods, he would have caught the rabbit. Never shove your Granny when she's shaving.
Blood will out. An apple a day keeps the doctor away. Going the whole nine yards.
Different sores must have different salves. Don't make a mountain out of a molehill. If
you practice wrong you will always do it wrong No crows, no cares.
The beauty of things lies in the mind that contemplates it Possible Interpretation: Women
do not like the nice guys. Hair of the dog that bit you. While there's life, there's hope.
It's better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all.

Hello my friend!

I am ready to kill myself and eat my dog, if medicine prices here (http://slashdot.org) are bad.

Look, the site and call me 1-800 if its wrong..

My dog and I are still alive :)

From Slashdot's FAQ:

There it is, straight from the horse's mouth. Slashdot is a U.S. site, so expect all kinds of backwards things from us hicks. Expect Fahrenheit for temperatures, and the Imperial system for most measurements. When you visit a site run by a different culture, you should expect that they will use systems they are familiar with and use regularly. When I visit a British site, for example, I expect temperatures in Celsius and measurements in Metric. I also expect to see a lot of superfluous letters in words like color (colour) and aluminum (aluminium).

Also, as sumdumass stated, when measuring temperature in an inhabitable region of Earth, Fahrenheit is the only system that makes sense with a at a temperature of 70. So, if you feel the need to ask, then you are either mentally retarded or being pedantic.

Nevermind, I see now what ghostweed was talking about. Would help if he quoted that and made a new thread instead of replying to a random thread with seemingly random babble that makes Spamland seem coherent.

Huh??

From what I understand, this is the case. Google's intent was to record locations of open access points in order to use as either coarse location(for Android or maybe ChromeOS, or even to compete against a similar service that I can't recall the name of) or a public WiFi database. The implementation was to have it sniff out unencrypted packets and record it to later strip out the SSID information. What they didn't consider was the ignorant masses broadcasting private information over open WiFi and the implications of recording it. If they had put a little more effort into the implementation to strip it down to just the SSID information before recording it to disk they would have needed less disk space on these computers and would have saved themselves from this headache.

Much of this is as stated by Google, so should be taken with a grain of salt. I personally find it to be the more likely cause, and also have no sympathy for those that do not encrypt their wireless connection or at least the private data they are transmitting. Open WiFi is just that, open. It is the equivalent of yelling through windows to your neighbor across the street instead of calling them. Anyone can overhear everything you say in this manner. Encrypted wifi is still yelling across the street, but at least you are using your secret decoder rings to keep prying ears from understanding it, even if they overhear it.

The base for Chrome, chromium, is open source. I'm not sure how much, if any, code is proprietary in the Google Chrome binaries, but from using builds based on the open-source code there does not seem to be much difference. Opera, AFIAK, is mostly, if not completely, closed-source. Firefox is open-source, but Mozilla has strict rules on branding of builds not compiled by them (the reason for "IceWeasel" in Debian).

The difference between Microsoft calling NT 6.1 "seven" is that it is pure marketing. The version number that the kernel announces is 6.1.XXXX and this is for compatibility reasons. Microsoft tells developers that point releases should not break compatibility or at least have a very small impact. Software written for Windows 2000 (NT 5.0) generally works with XP (NT 5.1) and 2003 (NT 5.2). However, there is a good chance it will face compatibility issues with Vista/2008 (NT 6.0) or 7/2008 R2 (NT 6.1). Firefox has a similar versioning system related partly to extension compatibility. They do a X.Y.Z version, with changes to Z having nearly no impact to extensions, changes to Y having possible impact, and changes to X potentially completely disrupting compatibility. Unless Google has a stated policy for versioning, they can call it Chrome 6000.50 and it really won't matter.

Damn, beaten by several days:

http://news.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1824236&cid=33918164

"Mandelbrot's in Heaven.
At least, he is now that he's dead.
When I first wrote this song, he was teaching math at Yale."

Could probably be cleaned up to be more respectful but this gets the point across and fits the beat of the song.

IANAL, but as I understand it, you own a subsidized purchase, but can be liable for breach of contract if you do not follow the stipulations. Usually this pertains to keeping your account in good standing and keeping service for x number of years. Also, normally in the case of subsidized phones, the penalty for breaching the contract is the ETF and the amount is agreed upon in the contract. I'd recommend checking the contract and seeing if they stipulate that they can remotely disable software. I doubt they do, but it is certainly possible. If they do not stipulate this in the contract, you may be able to use it as an excuse to break the contract and end service without incurring the ETF.

Nook disabling/erasing itself when it detects that it is in a different region is quite a bit different from AT&T deleting software from another party installed on the phone. To make a car analogy, coats's situation would be like the dealership remotely disabling the replacement stereo you installed, while yours is like the onboard navigation disabling itself when being driven in a different country.

While NT was originally supposed to be called OS/2 3.0, it was a new OS developed by Cutler and some other devs from DEC, not continued development of the OS/2 code.

Say they use this for google image search. To simplify the math, if they serve 100 images at 100 kilobytes each to 10000000 users, thats 100000000000 KB of data or about 93 terabytes. 39% of that is about 36 terabytes of data they do not need to serve. While the 39 KB is chump change to each computer, it adds up when you scale to a huge operation like google.

While I understand why they kept the version number at 6.1(the changes were definitely not as drastic as 5.2->6.0), I have trouble believing thats why it was named "7". Windows NT hasn't been referred to by its version number since 4.0. Why start now? And then why do something confusing like not naming after the actual version number? Then again, they started NT off with 3.1, with no 1.0 or 2.0 preceding it... This is one of many reasons why Marketing should not dictate version numbers.