you obviously don't remember XP SP2 and SP3, both of which were very painful updates for many.

and the Dreamcast ran Windows CE, so it could be said that MS was the innovator originally.

ESXi is free for a basic featureset. For a low budget, I'd recommend it over Workstation which isn't free. If you're working on the same box as your VM host, then maybe Virtualbox would work for a free solution.

it was probably a distribution station, not a power generation facility.

St. Louis used to have a video game museum, but i think it went out of business years ago. I remember finding it on a trip when I was 10 or 11 and thinking it was the best thing in the world.

Jurors are supposed to ask the Judge if they are unclear on a definition or term used. The Judge will decide what outside information is acceptable. This was a mistrial because the Juror went out on her own to find the information rather than through the proper channels.

Tivo has collected this information, which you can opt out of, for a while. Some information about his is in their privacy policy (search it for "Anonymous Viewing Information"). I believe they combine the data per zip code and use it for their "Stop Watch" service. More information here

Ninite is awesome. Makes rebuilding a Windows system from scratch a lot easier than it used to be.

I'm one of the people that get headaches trying to watch this current run of 3D tech. Until we get actual 3D holographic projections, you can count me out.

I use ESXi on a box at home to host about 6 VMs. the base OS is about 70MB so it's got a tiny footprint on the server and most of the resources go to the VMs. For a dedicated box it's a great solution. For running VMs on a computer that's doing more than that VirtualBox is great.

it's actually the full ESXi that's free now with the basic features. If you want things like clustering you can pay to enable those features.

this is good for the end user IMO. I remember sometime over the last year Apple was bit with a security hole by including an older version of Flash in an update. Their Java version also usually lags behind the current releases. By not including both the end user will be able to update them more frequently or not have them installed at all if they don't use it. I can see people that don't have a need for Java at all.

3D is getting better. I've been playing Battlefield 1942 in VMWare Fusion on my 2008 Macbook Pro and it's surprisingly playable. Granted it's an older game, but it still impressed me.

I remember the same issue, but when the problem first started their support didn't know what was going on. After the problem was more well known, we had the same quick service that you stated. That was a big headache for us as I worked at an all-dell school at the time and we had a huge number of affected computers.

WinPE used to be a standalone product, but I think it was legal when it was released of Windows Vista, but definitely with 7.