Of the following four adjectives that might plausibly be applied to the snow leopard, the animal appropriated by Apple for the name of its latest operating system, which do you think test well with focus groups?

FORBES: Apple: Think cuddly.

There's also the latest BlackBerry, which melds a familiar name with a brand-new operating system.

ENGADGET

There are ubuntu education funds, ubuntu tents at development conferences, ubuntu villages, an ubuntu university - and it's now the name of an open-source operating system.

BBC: Bill Clinton, Labour conference

On the positive side, at least they didn't name it the Genetic Lifeform and Disk Operating System.

ENGADGET: FBI to roll out $1 billion public facial recognition system in 2014, will be on to your evildoing everywhere

Once the codename for Apple Computer's (nasdaq: AAPL - news - people ) latest operating-system upgrade, the company opted to keep the name because it sounded so cool.

FORBES: Magazine Article

On January 4th, Linus Torvalds, the Finnish programmer who co-ordinates the development of Linux (see article), quietly released the latest version of the Linux kernel the software that, as its name suggests, is at the core of the operating system.

ECONOMIST: Computing