You are assuming that most people still using XP at this point actually know how to burn a DVD from an .ISO image or make a bootable USB thumb drive to install Ubuntu themselves. That's kind of a dangerous thing to assume.

Yeah... the information they had on me was profoundly wrong.

They said that I was a single factory worker/tradesman making $25K to $50K a year, with an odd interest in cosmetics. Weird.

The information that they had on my car and house was accurate, though. They must get that info from my credit report.

I updated the info to (accurately) show that I was a married technical worker with a household income of $125K a year. That should make sure that I start getting better junk mail in the future :)

It sounds like Microsoft wants a three to six month jump on their competition for Windows 8.1 "Modern UI" apps.

Seems stupid to me, considering that most users aren't really buying into "Modern UI" anyway. I would want people filling their app store with as many launch day titles as possible to build legitimacy to the platform.

Yeah... how do these people plan on breaking up Microsoft, anyway? The only really profitable divisions are the Office division and Windows division... everything else is barely making a profit (Like the XBox division) or are losing money by the boatload (The tablet division, the phone division, Bing, etc.)

Unless you paired some of the unprofitable divisions with the profitable ones, things like Bing and the Surface would die immediately. While I'm sure that many Slashdot fans would cheer about that, it's probably not the best outcome for Microsoft.

By predicting that the Kickstarter is going to come up short of their goal, these armchair analysts have likely (and amusingly) impacted their own projections. Now that more people think that the project is going to fail, even fewer people will bother to invest in it. Depending on how many people read the article on Slashdot, it might cost Canonical another $500,000 to a million in contributions.

It's only a matter of time before Microsoft unloads all of these unsold Surface RT tablets for next to nothing, just like HP and Blackberry did with their failed tablet designs.

Anyone want to take a guess when the remaining Surface RT's will start showing up on liquidation sites like Woot for around $149? I'm thinking that they might make great door-busters for a Black Friday sale... you can finally get that person who's been drooling over your iPad a tablet of their own. Just don't be surprised if they hate you for being a cheap skate.

You know, like the one from last week's XKCD?

http://www.xkcd.com/1243/

It seems that Julian Assange is a hardcore Bitcoin fanboy... he spent about a third of his interview talking about it.

That said, if he took his own advice and invested heavily in Bitcoin back in 2011 when they were less than a $1 each, he'd be a wealthy guy right now.

Considering that one of their freelance journalists (Tim Lee) on forbes.com is one of the biggest supporters of Bitcoin.

Check out all of the articles he's written about how great Bitcoin is:

http://www.forbes.com/sites/timothylee/

I find it amusing that they let this one freelance writer attempt to pump up his personal Bitcoin stash on such a popular financial site.

Of course, this is Forbes... They'll post anything for page views and ad impressions. I still remember the crap they posted about the merits of SCO's pathetic Linux patent infringement case against IBM back in the day, mostly because they loved the negative attention from the Microsoft and Linux fanboys.

With the number of Bitcoin fanatics currently on Slashdot, I'm sure that there would be at least one person here who would rather be dead than lose their wallet file with a $100,000 worth of cryptocurrency on it :)

Yeah... if you're going to try mining with a botnet, it would make a lot more sense to mine Litecoins instead. The Litecoin mining software still works relatively well with CPU miners, and there is a better chance that the currency is going to appreciate in value.

It seems that good ol' Bitcoin is having problems scaling up to meet the new demand for cryptocurrency. Perhaps we should start looking into alternate cryptocurrencies like Litecoin instead?

Yeah... it's more of a "pump and dump" scam than a ponzi scheme.

I think of Bitcoin along the same line as penny stocks... something that is basically worthless, but can be easily inflated with some good story and enough suckers to buy into it.

Then you sell out of your position quickly, and watch the whole thing crash. If you're lucky, people will forget what what happened in a few months and then you can pull the same scam all over again.

Hell, Bitcoin has already crashed before once when Mt Gox got hacked in 2011. Do you really want to invest in a "currency" that can go from $30 to $1 in less than a day?