Yeah, they drew more than a little inspiration from that horrible board in the back ground. In fact, it looks so similar and unusable that I almost didn't notice the screen between all that crap. I also see that Fisher-Price got the color selection contract again. It is an absolute headache to behold. The entire interface looks like a badly designed website.

"harvesting the computing and storage power of desktops worldwide." Oh cool, you mean like BOINC has been doing for ages......

But on six screens?

...can it run Metro 2033 on High?

It will probably still require a 3GB patch download right after install to run the game.

Last year I was looking for a new job. I am a contracted Systems Administrator and was looking for a position directly with a company. I got pulled in for an interview with our country's main Apple Vendor but after the original position was canceled, they asked me in again, this time for a position as a Technical Consultant that can help them develop services and products that would help them make inroads into the corporate market. What was supposed to be an hour interview changed into a 4 hour debate about how Apple as a brand image does not present itself well to the corporate market. Trying to explain to the Business Developement manager that his own parent company is shooting his aspirations in the foot led to an astounding revelation of how Apple people see the Corporate market. While I was going on about Support Structures, SLA's and Corporate Packaging, he spoke about how desirable the devices are and the sleek look they can give a business not to mention their stability etc..... Listen up, the only real difference between a good and bad corporate PC is the after market support. The sad thing is that I have executives crying at me to get them "One of those cool iPad thingies" so at least at an Executive level, the guy seems to be right.

...that running Windows 8 won't cost and ARM and a leg....

I just got down to bedrock and you are not going to steal all my diamonds! Don't make me put up Lava traps!

I see the Microsoft marketing team finally got to them.

But then how do you assure you get all the oil?

File -> Print

..I mean the Latency can't be much worse than what I get here n South Africa. No...no, it probably can...darn it. Fine, just send me a new PC and some good games every now and then.

I do believe things are getting better for the most part, the problem lies in the fact that while tensions between races are subsiding, some on both sides are trying to ignite all the fires again. You have the right-wing whites who make the rest look bad (AWB) and then you have the Black Elite which does all in its power to keep the Black minority focused on hating whites while they strip the coffers. (Julius Malema) As for situations like this, while they are common place, the fact that the Media makes an effort to dig them up and expose them makes for more pressure to do better.

I work for a South African Construction Company as a SysAdmin and I have to say I was not surprised when I saw this. It is quite stupid when you consider that it is very simple and cost effective to arrange a private APN with the Cell Companies and link SIM cards to it so those sims act like VPN connections, only being able to connect to your network. We do it for about 200 people so how they didn't do something similar and used stock SIM cards I really do not know. Actually I do. There are a range of factors in South Africa that leads to stupid mistakes like this. Firstly there are the power failures. Poorly maintained infrastructure, poor capacity planning, the power is bound to go down even without the summer rain storms. Then you have the fact that Government will only give contracts to Companies with insanely high Black Economic Empowerment levels. You get different levels but to obtain the highest ones you basically have to be an all black company and by from all black suppliers. The problem is, and I know this from job hunting as well as recruiting, that there is a massive skills shortage in South Africa. It is very hard to find a capable IT Professional of any race, and 10 times as hard to find a black one to keep your HR department happy on their quotas. So what happens? You HAVE to employ a black person, but there isn't one with the skills you need so you employ the brightest looking one and train them yourself. But when you have an entire company filled with these types of recruitments there isn't anyone to train the rest. So you have a High Level BEE company that can tender for Government work but who do not really have a clue as to what they are doing. Add to this some bad apples that will leak this info to some shady friends and you have a situation like this. Strangely, I do not think this is not a JRA inside job. They just bought the system. This had to have been an inside job from the IT company that designed the system and knew the SIMs could be used for normal phone calls. Then again, that info could have been slipped to the JRA and the leaked out there. All and all this is what happens when you have a skills shortage in a country and then still try to force companies to employ only certain races regardless if they have the skills or not.