Is it legally binding?

http://www.backblaze.com/

You may remember them from this post on their blog where they provide a detailed description of their technical setup. Their services are excellent, IMO.

The most important asset Google-approved Android devices have is the Android Market. So, how far can a manufacturer go toward replacing Google's applications and services before Google says "No Android Market for you!"? By the way, I believe most Android devices that come out of China don't ship with Android Market so there you go.

http://www.theonion.com/video/internet-archaeologists-find-ruins-of-friendster-c,14389/

...after this and the whole Google fiasco, manufacturers will take a hint and make WPA encryption mandatory. You can't realistically expect users to know how to configure this stuff and it doesn't actually cost the company anything extra.

Who was she talking to? (considering the lack of cell-phone towers)

Ugh.

Seriously, any posting on Nokia/Symbian/MeeGo will have the inevidable person calling Nokia to adopt Android but this one gets the cake, claiming that "Symbian's dead, and MeeGo won't cure ailing Nokia". Nokia's recent press release (Engadet coverage) claims the exact opposite, e.g. that Symbian and MeeGo are gaining unified development environments via Qt and Symbian is now a consolidated effort, unifying the seperate Symbian ^x releases into a constantly evolving release model (which means that older phone models will get constant feature improvements instead of just bug fixes). Nokia had a good Q3 and last I checked, they still held the majority of the mobile phone market. Talk about missing the point.

Why are we giving these people creedence again? Oh yeah, he writes for InfoWorld, that must mean he's on to something.

Just because they sued doesn't mean they have a valid case (assuming the case hasn't yet gone through the preliminaries).

http://kakaroto.homelinux.net/2010/08/psjailbreak-usb-gadget-kernel-driver/

There you go. Still not released, but well underway (check the blog for updates).

The summary (conveniently?) left out the part where it says that this package is only included on OEM installations, not normal installs.

I disagree. In principle, you are correct, Canonical, as a company, has nothing to do with me, as a user, filing a bug report on some piece of software. However, how many of these bug reports would exist in the first place if not for Ubuntu, for which Canonical is largely (if not wholly) responsible? Something about eyeballs and shallow bugs.

For me, Canonical succeeded where most other companies did not, in marketing Linux and GNOME as user-friendly solutions, which in turn, I believe, will draw developers to produce more software for Linux.

Whilst this is, in part, due to the relative maturity of both products, for which Red Hat is largely responsible, I believe that GNOME benefits greatly from Canonical's approach towards user-friendliness as much as Canonical benefits from the infrastructure on which they base their products. Canonical has produced great software (like Upstart) which may not be obvious.

The census is correct in implying that Canonical has not as many modules in upstream GNOME repositories, however that is only half the story. The census counts all commits since the beginning of the project, so Red Hat has a 6-year head start. Not to mention that Red Hat is a much bigger company than Canonical.

Canonical provides a lot of things of value to GNOME and the free software community in general. The (recently established) Canonical Design Team produces research on software usability, the value of which is not easily quantifiable. Many pieces of GNOME software live on Launchpad and are not strictly part of GNOME upstream (Simple Scan, for instance). This might change if (or when) these modules are accepted in GNOME proper.

To claim that Canonical is freeloading on other companies' contributions is a bit of myopic, in my opinion. How many upstream bug reports came from Ubuntu users?

Which also means you'll need to buy batteries, which are quite expensive, and have a fairly short lifespan. Which was always the point.

You could at least mention that Rob Pike had a large part in designing Plan 9, a programming language called Limbo, and oh, UTF-8, and that by "he and other Google engineers", TFA means Ken Thompson, who created B (a predecessor to C) and had a part in creating an operating system called Unix.

These two people are the closest thing to a "computer scientist" there probably is, and I'd wager they know quite a lot about programming language design. Pike is known about his feelings towards programming languages like C++.

Rob Pike made a talk about Go and programming language design and makes some interesting points. It's available on youtube.

I think he meant to say that user options make a product too complicated.

To paraphrase Bjarne Stroustrup:

"An organisation that treats its users as morons will soon have users that are willing and able to act like morons only."