Could be a new source of income

1. 1. Buy a bunch of online games
2. 2. Kick up huge debt
3. 3. Sell kid to traffickers
4. 4. Pay off debt
5. 5. Impregnate wife again
6. 6. GOTO 1

Not just that, they are huge, fixed sizes & occupy a disproportionate area on the screen. Hit the Windows key again, and you get a desktop, but just 1. Oh, and when you add new apps from the Windows store, they are invisible, unless you pan down and get it added to the Metro screen

I bought a new laptop last week, and wiped out Windows 8.1, replacing it w/ PC-BSD 10. It was some work, had some rough edges, but was worth it!

Plan 9 is an academic project? I thought it was an internal research project of Lucent/Bell Labs

Minix3 is a BSDL OS. So even if AST stops working on it, others can take the code as it is, and build it further, fork it or do whatever

Virtualization OSs are not microkernels. Microkernels require the bulk of everything to go into userland, such as device drivers. In Hypervisors, OTOH, device drivers and a whole lot of other common resources that OSs use are packed in the kernel.

Until you do a search for a new address, as opposed to something you had already bookmarked

Neither MapPoint nor 'Streets and Trips' were free. Both cost ~$20-30, IIRC. Ever since the advent of free online maps from Google, Bing, OpenStreetMaps, et al, it's doubtful that anybody would have paid real cash to buy something that was a more crippled version of those, sans features like location of major landmarks, updates & so on. End result is these products being canned. Only thing I'm surprised at is them being canned now - I'd have expected that to happen 10 years back.

Incidentally, does Microsoft still sell Encarta in the era of Wikipedia?

I flew recently, on 2 occasions. They clearly ask people to disable cellular functionality on their phones at all times, and leave the phone in Airplane mode. As of now, Airplane mode still disables not just cellular reception, but Wi-Fi and Bluetooth as well. So it's misleading to claim that despite FAA rulings, things have not changed. The reason things have not changed is that the airlines have not transmitted that decision, but have kept it at status quo - allowing only Airplane mode.

One of the flights I was in had an in-flight Wi-Fi. I think it's time that the OSs - iOS, Android, Blackberry OS and Windows Phone - all changed Airplane mode to leave Wi-Fi and Bluetooth on, but disable cellular. That would be the most workable solution.

I do recall a magazine called 'Linux Extreme'

The rupee symbol has an HTML representation 8377 or &#8377. Even if /. doesn't want to support Unicode, can't it at least support the HTML representations that are there, so that people using that can represent foreign currencies or other symbols?

So Humans who live around the Arctic Circle - Lapland, North slopes of Alaska, Northern Canada, et al - they sleep for 6 months continuous and stay awake the other 6, right?

Time should be recalibrated so that it's all in powers of 2. 64 seconds will be a minute, 64 minutes would be an hour, 32 hours a day, and so on. Readjust how long a second is so that the above adds up to a day.

The Russians could just go to ReactOS, and not have to worry about this one

...then it - Internet of things - would be a good thing. I do hope that it accelerates the demise of IPv4, which has overstayed its welcome