They may have pushed away many power users and/or Linux purists, but I assure you that there's a fair number of people that are still hanging with them.

I flirted with ditching Ubuntu for something else until I kind of got used to Unity and figured out the shortcuts I needed to smooth out my workflow. There's a few bugs that are bothering me and if they aren't fixed in 13.04 (getting ready to install) or 13.10, I might ditch or at least try other distros.

If you step back and ignore what comes out of Canonical word for word and the criticism that follows and examine the situation a bit more objectively, the decision to go to Mir gets more clear and makes a bit of sense. Ignore the technical feasiblity for a moment of them getting Mir to a sane state rapidly enough for it to be used in the next year like they claim.

Canonical decided to make a gamble a few years ago which now the data suggests was wise -- mobile is the future of computing and the old laptop/desktop paradigm is going to become niche. From their perspective, Wayland didn't start out that way and might hamper their efforts to make a mobile-centric Linux distro that scales to any display format and input method seamlessly and intuitively. Add in the comfort of being the controlling party of a central component to their strategy for good measure.

Now whether or not Wayland will turn out to be great for mobile devices or they just staple on the necessary parts to the protocol in a way that isn't as efficient as possible remains to be seen. And maybe they already have solved this, I don't know.

I think you're missing the point. People don't WANT a reason to buy a laptop or desktop. They want something to carry with them everywhere they go. Microsoft either provides a compelling experience that fits in this paradigm or they don't. If they don't, they'll be stuck with businesses sticking with traditional computing models that never give up their homogenous stack and the few home users that don't want to change. That's not a model that is likely to sustain one of the largest companies in the world.

Results posted today reflect realities from a bit back in history. The shift away from laptops and desktops is ramping up extremely quickly. I'm not sure I've ever witnessed such a rapid shift in the marketplace. The closest I can think of might be the migration away from IE and that took several years really.

As an example, within the last week I've had conversations with two family members due new central computing devices. One is looking at a device like the Galaxy Note II as their primary computing device and the other is looking at a tablet. Both female. One 30ish and the other 60ish in age. Neither techies. All family members asking tech questions now are either phone or tablet related. None are asking about laptops or computers. It was exactly reverse a year ago.

Do my family members make a trend? No. But the sales figures are showing a HUGE shift like I'm seeing.

There's another trend emerging that is going to hit Microsoft really hard sooner or later that dovetails on the post-PC trend -- BYOD in companies. There are an increasing number of employees for whom tablets are just fine as their primary computing device. Basic productivity software such as Google Apps are just fine for their simple needs.

It's important to note that Windows 8 was Microsoft's first effort to insulate themselves from this trend. So far, their effort has been mostly a flop. Unless they really right the ship with Windows 9, they will shift from market dominance to just another vendor. And while this will be painful for MS employees and shareholders, it will be great for consumers.

Patent royalties cannot sustain a company the size of Microsoft. Even if it could, patents DO expire ...

I suppose if you stand back from about 3 miles and never bother to understand the underlying architcture and how it scales while ignoring the flexibility of server farms as opposed to very much a box that mainframes put you in (with very minor flexibility) then yeah -- they're exactly the same.

It's easy to draw parallels between general functionality, but you have to reduce it to "a series of tubes" type descriptions to get there.

Actually yes. The x series can be some large 4-way and higher x86 servers IBM sells that typically are used in heavy duty database clusters, large VM farms and high demand app servers. These servers can sell for over $100K depending on the config. And then there's Blade Centers series

Low end x86 tends to be the 1U and 2U varieties that are targeted for one-off web servers, AD servers and such.

If you want something resembling modern performance, then no, you don't. Intel's chipset is at least 4 years behind AMD and NVIDIA in terms of performance. Maybe 5 or 6 years.

I know I can't be the only one to think of this movie when I heard this.

If you want a full open source driver stack, then AMD is THE way to go. I know there's some effort to reverse engineer the NVIDIA closed drivers that's making progress, but there's actually paid AMD employees developing open drivers based on the opened specs for their platform. That's the good news.

Here's the bad news. The progress on the AMD open drivers is sloooooooooow because the number of paid employees working on the drivers is very few and the number of volunteers is very few too.

The silver lining is that as features get implemented, they move forward to new generations pretty nicely with the new Southern Island chipsets being an exception. The state of THOSE open drivers is an absolute mess considering devices with that chipset have been shipping for quite a while. Allegedly, that chipset will be the basis for new cards for a while, so as the support improves for the Southern Islands, new cards should benefit immediately.

If you're trying to compare 100GigE and above to single SSD drives, then you don't operate in the technical space these speeds are built for at this time.

Even corporate backbones bump into bottlenecks on occasion and I assure you that top end SANs can easily push that much data over a single interface considering they might have hundreds of drive in a massive array with caching technology that can bump performance even higher. And that's not considering if the drives are SSDs themselves.

And that's not even discussing servers that might have Fusion-io cards or something similar in them allowing huge I/O speeds out of a single server.

I've found that USUALLY if I tell users WHAT happened (i.e. the icon got moved to a folder) without saying they did it, they usually ask "well how would that happen?" knowing full well it was probably them but hoping there's a random bug that caused it, they usually don't push back when I say "you most likely accidentally did it while doing something else".

Not being confrontational and avoiding aggressive phrases using the word "you" in it, then in my experience users are very receptive to learning what they did wrong so that they can be proactive in trying not to do it again.

Aggressive: You moved the icon to a folder.
Non-aggressive: The icon got moved to a folder.
Non-aggressive follow up at request of user: You most likely accidentally moved it ...

Just because things are cheaper does NOT mean everyone involved wins.

Mathematically speaking, Wal-Mart is a huge vacuum sucking money out of communities. The profits they are making? It's money sucked out of communities.

My wife actually prefers the Unity layout to the older Gnome 2 style. I actually asked her what her feeling was when I upgraded her laptop and she was faced with Unity where just a few hours earlier she had been using (for many months) the traditiional Gnome DE. She never complained after that.

For her, the layout and most specifically the "dock" on the left made more sense than a menu driven experience.

Personally, I hated Unity at first. But since they've fixed many of the worst bugs and I've learned my way around it better, I don't have a problem with it. It's just a different way of doing things. Based on my workflow, I can't cast it as really better or worse in a general sense, but would rate it as better since I know it's intended to scale well from desktop/laptop to tablet/phone and so there will be consistency across form factors if and when I ever get a mobile Ubuntu device.

From a historical perspective, the post office WAS the internet back in the day -- i.e. it was the cheapest and easiest way to get lots of information to someone else.

I think it still serves an important function especially for people that still value sending a hand written letter. It also serves to keep the private companies honest in their pricing. As an intangible, there are cases where postal workers that have worked the same route for a long time and gotten to know the people on their route have saved lives by noticing something out of the ordinary and alerting authorities. While I suppose it's possible for UPS or other company drivers to do the same, I would suggest it's less likely since they are so profit driven, they train workers to be in and out as quick as possible. Chatting it up with people on your route is probably not encouraged. I'd be surprised if it isn't explicitly prohibited at risk of job loss.

But all that aside, you should know that you DON'T fund the post office. It operates without any money from Congress (assuming you are a US Citizen and we're talking about the USPS here).