You know Prometheus wasn't a documentary on proper anthropology, right?

As a computer tech who occasionally has to remote into someone's desktop or an unfamiliar server to change settings or fix things I enjoy the consistency that the start menu provides.

No matter what kind of icon organizational disaster the user has turned their desktop into I can find the computer and networking options under the start menu. The same applies to the task bar. Sure you can pin icons to it, but it's unlikely the user will have anything pinned to it that I'll find useful in a remote support session.

I've mostly given up on organizing the start menu since most applications want to put their icons in the root of the tree, but at least you can sort it alphabetically.

That's more of an increase in volume causing an increase in displacement. Along the same lines: just because a battleship floats on water doesn't mean it's particularly light.

That and the fact it's on all the windows workstations by default and easy to update and control through network policies. I work as outsourced IT for several companies and when you're short on time browser diversity is pretty low on your list of "TODO"s.

• It's already there
• It's going to get updates when the rest of the system gets updates
• It works with the web portals that require IE
• It works fairly well for most peoples' needs

Downloading third party software to build MSIs so I can deploy Firefox sounds great in theory and if I worked for one company and had downtime I might look further into it. We've deployed Chrome by MSI at a couple of places and a few users seem to prefer it. I'll be surprised if it takes off in a big way.

Personally I almost exclusively use Chromium these days except where the odd management software requires a FF plugin. I switched over when there was a large speed difference and I haven't had a compelling reason to switch back yet.

I have a 9800 Torch running 6. I don't imagine it would be any better at displaying the emails you've had mangled.

The reason I like it is it's simple and quick and I deal primarily with text based emails which it works well with. I do receive the odd html message that has most of its graphics ignored, but the html messages I get are generally auto generated reports I can ignore until I'm at a workstation.

In my case if I'm reading email on my phone it's often not because I'm hours away from full computer access. I'm generally just in a server room or driving between sites.

Good points:

• battery life, on/off schedule helps. This also prevents people from waking me at 3am
• Good default email app
• Good default calendar app
• BMM is excellent
• Easy to manage, deploy security policy for large number of devices
• Works well as a voice phone. Good call quality.

Bad points:

• For a small group of workers BES is more of a hassle than a gain
• Most of the entertainment apps are terrible. I've given up on finding one that isn't awful. This does not hinder work productivity, however.
• The UI is fairly weird. I'm not a fan of the multiple desktops that display redundant copies of many of the same icons.
• WIFI connections can be picky. Refuses to work with some WAPs

In summary:

Over all I do find it more productive than either the HTC Dream or iphone 3G I've worked with. I'm not a fan of small platform gaming so I'm not upset about not having a large set of games for the device.

Would I recommend it to home users? No, not really. Would I recommend it to office users? Meh.

One day Boston Dynamics is going to combine all these robots together and kill us all.

You're right. What minecraft really needs is a few romance options some poorly written plot elements and an epic ending where the ceiling collapses and everyone dies.

At the end of a commercial break there will be a series of questions to see if you were paying attention.

ActiveSync sure would be nice.

Spending 2-3 hours installing BESx for small companies that want the calendar integration is somewhat painful. If you're especially lucky someone will perform the install incorrectly and you'll get to spend 2-3 hours fixing a broken BESx. Good luck if you have some reason to try a clean install -- First run the BES uninstaller... then manually remove the registry keys and files from their installed locations because the uninstaller doesn't actually do that. Actually, I've found the uninstaller often won't run until you've manually removed everything yourself.

From what I understand the Nobel cash prize is supposed to encourage future works and thus they try to avoid awarding it to older people and why they almost never award it after death (unless the decision was made before the person died).

The main complaint I've had with Clonezilla is what a pain it is to mount an image and restore individual files out of it. From what I recall you were stuck backing up partitions by themselves if you wanted to later pull individual files, but this was a pain if you ever wanted to redeploy the machine back to hardware.

The easiest time I've had deploying / backing up workstations was simply just a full-tower windows machine with multiple hot swap SATA bays using Ghost for images. Regardless of image machine OS and software I'll take backing up disks over SATA over network cable any day. If the computers don't have fast release hard drives I'd just buy a good power screwdriver.