OK then, when will I be able to run Android on my Acorn A4000. :-)

Nope, he merely said it looked so ugly he was switching to another mail client.

I doubt it's 3rd party plugins that most corporations are worried about (but that might be one reason). It's stuff like rendering engine changed breaking vital internal web apps. Possibly vital in the "if this breaks, we lose a load of money until it's fixed" way. So if you update the browser, a sensible company would need to test it first.

With the previous system, you didn't need to do that much testing with 3.6.x (etc) releases, as they're only bug / security fixes, and shouldn't do things like change how the rendering engine works. You only needed to do the big tests for major releases (3.5, 3.6, etc). The major updates were spaced a reasonable length of time apart, and there was a nice period of overlap with both the old and new versions getting patches, so you didn't need to jump immediately.

With the new system, there's no guarantee that the "minor" updates won't mess with the rendering engine and so on, so you'd probably have to do more serious checks just to make sure something hasn't broken. Every 6 weeks. With no overlap when the old version also gets patches. Fun!

Apart from making sure things haven't broken, there's other issues, like the UI could also change, leading to tech support / documentation issues.

Ultimately, making non-bug/security changes to a browser every 6 weeks is just really inconvenient (as in "we'll use IE instead") for most businesses.

Windows can control the mouse cursor with the keyboard (the number pad in Windows' case), it's one of the accessibility options.

I'd personally count the stable version of a browser (which seems to be Chrome 10) as the current one. But it's all a bit moot, as Opera will probably lose the "lead" in this somewhat meaningless contest shortly.

I'm sure that people at Microsoft use Visual Studio to actually develop code for Windows (it is a good IDE), but I kinda doubt daily builds of Windows (and so on) are produced by someone opening "Windows.sln" and clicking "Build". They almost certainty have rather more specialised setups for building Windows (etc) during development.

PS. you do know the various MS compilers have command line interfaces?

On the file system level, Microsoft did have non-destructive ways to convert file systems, such as CONVERT.EXE.

For the partition resizing, other posters say that the VM software used has drive resizing abilities, but on a real machine software like Partition Magic (is that still around?) can resize FAT / FAT32 partitions non-destructively, and it could also do the file system conversion stuff in some cases (all a bit IIRC, it's been years since I used it).

I think it could just about be possible with a real machine, at least IMO, with some planning and a third party tool to resize the partition to get around size limits once they no longer apply. However I think there may be hardware issues like finding hardware that can run Windows 7 but has a legacy stuff like a floppy drive controller (and IDE for the hard disc / optical drive?) as well.

I kinda have the opposite issue with Opera, I really don't like it that to set another browser's UI to my idiosyncratic setup inherited from using early versions of Opera would mean having to install a load of third party extensions. It's just a bit annoying that even simple stuff like having tabs on bottom (as in between the status bar and page) seems to be beyond the default options of other browsers, let alone stuff like the ability to minimise tabs[1], mouse gestures etc. when they're just standard features / general (GUI accessible) settings tweaks in Opera.

Of course we don't seem to be approaching this from quite the same direction, I don't really case about the exact curves on tabs and so on, so whilst Opera's skinning tools don't seem to be what you want I don't mind Opera's default skin[2] (although I suppose I should get around to tweaking the icons so they aren't as monochrome).

I do wish the content blocking / privacy stuff in Opera was better, as what's there often has a clunky UI (it's the main thing that would draw me something like Firefox + extensions I guess), but it's got a fair better now that there are extensions (and an ability to disable plugins), but it could be better.

[1] Although Opera broke the tab order when minimising with 10.5. (Is a slightly broken feature better than a non-existent one?).
[2] However the "Windows Native" one is a disaster area.

Probably feeding the trolls, but Linux (etc) has plenty of GUI file managers as well. The Windows equivalent to the OP is nearer:

[Windows]+r, cmd[enter], del filena[tab(s)][enter], [alt]+[f4].

Deleting files is something pretty basic that every CLI can do, and even Windows has tab completion for filenames.

The main extra keystrokes is tied to the fact that Windows doesn't have a default key combination to launch a command prompt. You can assign one of course, although it seems that it'll have to be something nearer to [ctrl]+[shift]+x (a whole extra key!), at least without resorting to third party tools.

Note: With Windows 7 you can use [windows]cmd[enter] instead (although I'm not sure if this is a 100% reliable behaviour of the W7 search box).

The properties window for the recycle bin has a "Display delete confirmation dialog" checkbox, as well as the option to turn off the recycle bin on a per-drive basis, at least on Windows 7. I'm pretty sure the options are in earlier versions of Windows as well, but can't check ATM.

Is it just me, or does this site kinda completely fail on the current stable version of Firefox?

In fact, I've tried all these (on WinXP):

Chrome 9
Firefox 3.6
IE8
Opera 11
Safari 5

And only Chrome actually works (Opera gets a bit nearer to actually working, the menu appears, but the boxes with links to Bugzilla just have a spinning blue thing in them). I'm sure FF4 beta works, but really, did the site have to be so HTML5ish that most of the stable browsers out there can't actually use it?

Amazon UK avoids VAT on stuff like DVDs and CDs by shipping them from the Channel Islands. Long slightly rambling Wikipedia article about it. In Amazon's case these items are sold by "Amazon's Preferred Merchant", Indigostarfish.com who are based in Jersey. This loophole is used by just about every other British online retailer for DVDs and CDs though...

Ctrl-Tab in Opera works that way (or at least it can be set to work that way, I might have changed the setting from a default myself at some point).

For instance, it'll be nice to be able to "alt-tab" from one browser tab to another browser tab (so much so that sometimes I open new browser windows just to be able to alt-tab between them).

Ctrl-Tab.

No, you need to cut a bevel onto the edge of the CD first fool, and the marker is black. Of course that's only part of the full treatment you need to do to improve your CDs and DVDs, as detailed here.

(Another highlight of the site is a £3,500 kettle cord).