That was going to be my question. If you need AD for user authentication and management then you'll need a Win server. I would think for a law firm securing the user logins and domain access would be critical. What do you mean by one-size-fits -all?

Like, zoinks! I was thinking the same thing.

Yeah...VM is not ideal for graphic intensive tasks like streaming video. I had the same dilemma until I got a TV with Netflix built in. If you want to stay open source and not surrender your money to M$ for one specific task, then you might look into something like a Boxee Box or Roku. They are build on Linux, can potentially cost less (base Roku model is $60), and offer a lot of cool features. It sucks that you can get Netflix on a machine running a Linux kernel, but not in a mainstream distro, but as mentioned previously, it comes down to DRM. I don't buy the market-share argument. There's now way you can say that they are more people with these linux-based devices than self-installed distros.

+1 for Linux Mint. All of the benefits of Ubuntu with some nice extras thrown in. I'm currently using LMDE, but I wouldn't recommend it to a total newbie. Start with standard Mint, then maybe move on when you feel more comfortable.

Here here...I hate Evolution. As a mail client, it's OK. I tried it and it had some nice features, but I could never get it where I liked it as much as Thunderbird. What drives me nuts about Evolution though, is that if you try to remove it, you get all kinds of dependency errors. The system basically tells you that you have to remove Gnome to get Evolution completely out.

I use both. I sometimes like a mail client so I can check all of my email accounts simultaneously. Thunderbird lets me check both of my gmail accounts (one for real correspondence and one for newsletters, mailing lists, etc) and my university account all at once. I can also open a message from one account and forward or reply to it using a different address. I don't store any mail locally. I turn off "keep messages for this account on my computer". That's just a waste of disk space. It's also easier to purge old mail in a client when it's cleaning time. Going through page after page of gmail conversations and having to individually put a check next to each one takes forever! In a mail client you can hold shift and select a range. To quickly look at new messages from a specific account or search for a conversation gmail web interface is the way to go.

I did pay. I bought a phone that is branded with the "Google Experience". Cyanogen's mod is written specifically for this type of device, so he is not re-distributing anything that consumers didn't already pay for. And how is the "Android" Marketplace a closed-source Google app? I'm shocked the OHA allowed that to happen.

You can get some apps, but not others. If there is no way to get all of the apps, you are essentially crippling the device. The biggest problem I would see is that the phone's address book (all of your contact information) is synced from GMail contacts. If this is disabled, you would lose a lot of functionality.

Google was my BFF, but I think it's time for the "it's not me, it's you" talk...

The problem I see is in the timing. Android isn't all that important right now, but it's just on the cusp of being so. There are close to a dozen new Android phones slated for Q3 and Q4 release and there has been talk of Android on some netbooks (but with the ChromeOS announcement, who knows what's going on there). The reason I ditched my Blackberry and bought an Android phone was because I wanted a device that is based on open standards. This would inevitably create a vibrant developer/modder community and make Android a very powerful platform. Things were definitely trending that way, but for Google to slam the brakes on that just as it was gaining momentum is a bad move. Now I'm locked into a contract so I'll be following this problem closely for a while, but I'm also going to start paying a lot more attention to Moblin. This definitely changes my view of Google, whose services I use extensively (GMail, Google Voice, Google Docs, etc). If their corporate philosophy is going to start evolving into "Microsoft, the Sequel", I'm going to start looking for alternatives.