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AOL: Lindows Is Misleading People

jgeelan writes "According to this breaking news item, AOL has apparently said over the weekend that it is going to ask Lindows to change its promotional material after concluding that Lindows is misleading people into thinking that it has a strategic relationship with AOL."

8 of 175 comments (clear)

  1. And for 3 outta 3... by danamania · · Score: 5, Funny

    For their next trick, having pissed off Microsoft and AOL, Lindows will be renaming to iLindows, just to attract attention from Apple

    Lawyers - collect the set.

    a grrl & her server

    1. Re:And for 3 outta 3... by stubear · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Have you seen the Lindows website? They're already a couple steps in the right direction if their next goal is to piss off Apple. Open Apple.com and Lindows.com side-by-side and compare them.

  2. I wonder... by chegosaurus · · Score: 5, Funny

    ...just how hard is it to mislead potential AOL customers?

  3. Does anyone else get the feeling... by duffbeer703 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    That Lindows is a really shady operation? Everything they do seems a litle scummy.

    Reminds me of AIMster.

    --
    Conformity is the jailer of freedom and enemy of growth. -JFK
  4. And in other news by PD · · Score: 5, Funny

    Richard Stallman, director of the Free Software Foundation, wrote a 43 page letter to Lindows telling them why they should NOT call their operating system GNU/Lindows.

  5. Hurm... by Jippy_ · · Score: 5, Funny

    Lindows is misleading people into thinking that it has a strategic relationship with AOL...

    This just in.. Company changes its name to AOLindows. Claims it's just an amazing coincidence.

    =-Jippy

  6. That being said.... by Tikiman · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Why shouldn't AOL team up with a linux distribution to make some kind of "AOL-Linux"? It would be a niche product basically for people who use their PC's exclusively for AOL and web browsing. A 50% tax on perfectly usable hardware ($200 bare bones at Walmart, $300 for same system with windows) is quite excessive.

  7. Reviewers praising broken stuff... by dpbsmith · · Score: 5, Informative

    That MSNBC article reminds me very much of the early days of micros... when nothing worked but nobody would admit it. An attitude that has, alas, to some extent been internalized into the whole PC industry.

    In the late seventies, an acquaintance of mine used to rave about his Northstar system. I asked about reliability and he said it had been perfect, never any problems. I asked for a demo. He said he'd love to give me one but he couldn't right then, as the power supply had burned out. I said "I thought you said you hadn't had any problems." He said, "Oh, the problem is just in the power supply. The computer itself is fine."

    The MSNBC article has that flavor to me. "As for the Microtel hardware, everything works as advertised except for the CD-ROM drive, which I haven't been able to get sound from yet." Right. It's not as if sound were an important function.

    He says "I mentioned that Lindows was originally touted as being able to run Microsoft Windows programs. Guess what? IT CAN." (Capitals his). That's what he says first. It's only a little later that he mentions "[in Office the] Open New Document icon; ... doesn't work. Outlook almost works (it can't find my e-mail server at work) and Internet Explorer works sometimes. I haven't tried other Windows software titles, but I'm told some do work."

    Yeah, right. It's not as if you'd ever want to create a NEW document, editing existing ones should be good enough for anyone. It's not as if it matters that the email program can't talk to your email server. And, yes, I'm so picky that I expect IE to work more often than "sometimes." I demand nothing less than "mostly," and you should, too.

    Lindows... "IT CAN" run Windows software. And my friend's Northstar computer wasn't broken.