Fool me once, shame on you... I bought a Windows Phone 7 device last April and have been nothing but happy with the OS itself. However, I've been nothing but pissed off and mad at the decisions Microsoft has made about it. They shouldn't have let manufacturers make these nice, expensive "flagship" devices three months before Microsoft announce no further updates would be made. Or the elusive 7.8 update that's been full of questions and ambiguity. Now, we don't even get the crappy web based Google Maps website access because we didn't get IE 10.

It's really not that bad, I'm running it now. For my main day-to-day usage, I'm still in the desktop. The Marketplace is limited, but with a nice large trackpad with supported drivers I don't feel like a second class citizen. This OS is faster and does everything I used to do with Win 7, and it's *certainly* worth $15 to upgrade. I use a few "Not Metro" apps too, simply because they get the job done in a more direct and beautiful way than before. I was a huge skeptic and the "Previews" truly sucked. However, the full release is really much more usable and very much polished. I've found a number of annoyances with Windows 7 to be *fixed*, not more broken. I still have a few complaints with it, but honestly far less than the junk GNOME has thrown recently.

Come on, look at the shift your average user has taken. Grandmothers aren't using eMachines, they prefer iPads. My laptop is heavy so I stick to my Atrix as often as possible when out and about.

It'd be stupid for Intel to ignore this market, especially with Win 8 RT not supporting the "full desktop" experience we love and know.

Unfortunately, my Atrix with 2.3.6 doesn't "just work." I'd be happy with a few patches to Gingerbread, but Motorola has been so poor with this I don't think I'll ever get another one of their phones.

On the other hand, if Motorola updates this to ICS by the end of the month as promised, I'll be a happy camper (provided they fix what's already broken with their buggy Gingerbread Motoblur).

It is clean, intuitive and easy to work with. My problem, aside from what you've listed above, is the "worst case" scenario for launching a program. That's usually what you use a DE for anyway, right? It draws windows and gives you a way to open new ones and manage them. If I had a nickel for every second lost due to sifting through unfamiliar icons and nonsensical categorization I'd have quite a few nickels. You can hate Windows, but you can't complain about the workspace efficiency of Windows 7. It's just a very very polished iteration of the Windows 95 everyone in the world grew up with.

To be fair, I use CentOS because of the GUI. Sure, I know how to install XFCE or Cinnamon, but I'd rather not bother learning a new system. This is supported and works fine. It's not that I hate GNOME 3, KDE or XFCE from a workspace efficiency perspective. There wasn't really much broken with GNOME 2. Unfortunately I'll be thrown into the GNOME 3 "goodness" when RHEL decides to upgrade, but I'll make that decision when the time comes.

I absolutely agree with this. It's a "fine" machine (that won't last long, but whatever) and with your own beans it gets pretty close to a traditional drip cost. I'm talking about factoring the cost of the machine in with the beans and everything. The Keurig machines are still a lot more than my $15 General Electric 5 cup maker, but the cleanup and maintenance is just so easy and convenient. Hopefully when the K-Cup patent goes free the "older" style machines flood the market.

This day may very well never come.

Yeah, but this has nothing to do with TSA. Delta wasted their time just as much as the rest of the passengers, including Arijit. I don't question the validity of your claim, though. Just seemingly unrelated to yell at the TSA when they weren't at fault here.

Why they haven't fixed that or flat out disabled automatic indexing is beyond me. It's the main thing from using KDE on a regular basis, because otherwise I have no problems with it (aside from the occasional Kwin fudge).

I agree with everything you say, except for:

You can influence the mainstream market with shiny designs, but you'd be hard pressed to see companies and schools replacing their ThinkPad, ProBooks and Latitudes with MacBook Pros. This isn't a niche market and PC manufacturers will always replicate and improve upon Mac features in a cheaper, better way. It's the nature of the relatively vertically modeled hardware-software ecosystem they run. They can afford to be bullies because they've got tons of cash, but they won't be Microsoft. They've had many chances, but it just can't happen unless something changes in the way they do things. Almost like the Chinese economy in the 70s.

Thank goodness. The biochemical weapon I was running on iTunes was lagging like you wouldn't believe.

Hah, I say to you! My ThinkPad has drainage canals in the keyboard for such an event. I know from experience that a ThinkPad keyboard can take a can of Pepsi, while a MacBook Air/Pro cannot (when proper steps are taken post spill). There are things Apple could do to idiot-proof their computers, but they're cosmetically ugly. They go for "pretty," so the addition of these features would hurt their business. More so than all the business lost by upset customers with shorted out hunks of aluminum.

If we wanted him dead, he'd be dead already.

Yes, *our* courts. He is not American, however, and his organization is responsible for posting countless numbers of classified documents online. You'd be hard-pressed to find an industrialized power today that would sit by and allow it to happen. There is no perfect shining beacon of the benevolent transparent government in the world, not today or ever in history. The government needs to be accountable, I certainly don't endorse any of that shady CIA coup stuff that's been going on for a better part of the last century. Certain things just cannot be out there for the public to see, and that is not WikiLeaks' decision to make. Surely you can agree with that?