I see it as the only way to compete with android. Just give it out, completely free. Still charge for the server level OS's and support, but for a desktop, MS makes money from plenty of other areas. Office is still a cash cow. Xbox is a profit center.

Google makes its money from their "free" OS through the app store. They also have a pretty neat ecosystem and various ways app makers can make money (in app advertising) They control the entire ecosystem. If MS could do the same with windows, I think we'd see the desktop come back.

I spend more time in IRC than I should, but often we crack jokes about how a product "Has aids". I won't go into all the other things we talk about, but it's like a bunch of 30-40 year olds pretending to be 14 again. It's all jest, and in good fun. Doesn't mean we're homophobic (one of our regulars is Homosexual) but even he takes all the jokes in stride, because we're all friends.

I know folks from the last generation, before political correctness became so steeped in our culture. They give each other shit for fun. A venerable fountain of racial slurs and epitaphs flow freely from them, with no concern for peoples feelings or political correctness. It's a short form of hazing, to see if someone can congeal in the workplace, put aside differences and work well with others.

Those days are gone. What we have now is a work environment of walking on egg shells and carefully measuring each word for fear of offending someone. We spend an almost equal amount of time worrying about in office politics as we do actually working. I don't like it.

I buy used Dell's from Weird Stuff Warehouse in Sunnyvale.
http://www.weirdstuff.com/

I have a few projects that require a windows OS and can't run under wine. By buying a Dell from weird stuff, the OS is licensed to the machine. So it's little more than a convenience thing for me.

For those that don't know, the record was done at Fort Funston. A lot of us that fly RC gliders in the bay area go to FF because of the unique topography there. It's basically a seaside cliff.

Wind rushes off the pacific, hits the cliff, and with no other place to go heads up, creating lift. (Sometimes called slope effect)

Statute of limitations only applies to when a case can be filed. A trial can go on for years past the statute.

When you see exclamation points, run :)

I actually tried talking to one of these clowns once, and as AC said above,

When I called them, it sounded like they were in a boilerplate telemarketer center in some far off place in the world.

Haven't had the same experience myself. For reference, I live in San Jose California. Here's a snippet of what I get.

Well, $36 is too low for me, and I live nowhere near Vegas.

Yah I've created some neat stuff with reaper. Being able to route tracks into silent tracks for audio signal triggering is tons of fun.

In case folks were wondering. Frankel and some of the original crew moved on to creating a DAW called Reaper flying under the company name Cockos.
www.reaper.fm

If Winamp is only worth $6m today, I'm pretty sure he could buy it back. There's so many things in reaper that have been missing in Winamp for years (namely good ASIO support, the ASIO output plugin for winamp stinks)

You probably wouldn't even need that much these days. An android tablet capable of taking panoramas. Take pano, then load up the gallery, then lay on your chair again.

Thanks for taking the time to answer Esther. I'll definitely take your pointers next time I try and submit something.

What is your secret Esther?

And expanding on this comment..

Since google is a big user of the FUSE project, they could probably write a userspace driver for windows to read EXT-2/3/4.

I got the nexus 4. The lack of the miniSD slot has really been a bummer on this phone. I know google's answer is "Everything in the cloud!" but in real life (meaning, not in Mountain View) the lack of an SD slot is irritating.

16gb can get used up really fast. Even with the best carriers you're going to lose coverage AND bust that cap on your monthly data usage.

I don't think a local DA would make the claim that Pulcrano owns it unless it was true.

http://www.change.org/petitions/stop-providing-the-means-to-sell-girls-and-boys-for-sex