There are a handful of sites, such as web comic sites, where the people who made the website I'm viewing for free have politely asked me to unblock in AdBlocker, since it's a direct impact on their ad revenue. If they asked nicely (which all the web comic people did) I have done so. I even click through a few of the ads since I know they get more money that way and it takes me two seconds of effort. In exchange, they keep their ads scrubbed free of malware and bad advertisers. And give me funny web comics every day!

I don't hate Office 2013 as much as some folks do. (I also got it for free from my school. Lucky me.) So I've got both 2013 for the people that insist I work in the Microsoft formats, and LibreOffice for everything else.

They went through and optimized the code, for one thing. I seem to recall they culled about 50% of deprecated code that was just hanging around like junk DNA, doing nothing but bloating up the program. After they cleaned up the code, they tightened up the rest of it. The result was a leaner piece of software in all modules, so it loads faster and runs faster.

You don't need to be a mechanic, but you do need to know that when your car hits 60.000 miles you probably ought to get the timing belt changed. Or if the temperature gauge starts climbing, suck it up and pull over because it's probably not going to magically go back down again on its own. Or that you should get your tires checked (or do it yourself) once a month, especially in winter months, because they gradually lose PSI over time.

I'd be grateful if any time a marketing person found a bug in the code, they knew to snag a screenshot rather than give me a call and say, "My monitor broke again. Help!"

Graphics, especially, are just beginning to look old. Not that WoW was ever a paragon of robust graphic design (although mad props to their art directors), but for what is approaching a decade players were able to overlook the graphics because so many other aspects of the game were fun and appealing. Now, with over a dozen major MMOs due out this year, with every single one of them having better graphics than WoW by leaps and bound, people feel no obligation to stick around. (Also, many of my WoW-quitting friends found that Mists of Pandoria was the game jumping the shark, even if it was a fairly solid expansion.)

As I'm fond of saying, WoW is the King of MMOs in the same way that Budweiser is the King of Beers. It's popular and profitable. Personally, I prefer craft brews and niche MMORPGs.

While I agree about RT (stupid decision), the lack of adoption with Windows 8 has more to do with the lack of adoption by business app vendors. In fact, they're panicking about Win 8, because the morons never even got their crap running right on Windows 7. We have three XP systems with $3,000 software dongles on them that are still running XP because the vendor never made a Win 7 client.

Actually, I love Office 2013. I was using 2010 at work, and while I was off put by the design choices in 2013 (all caps? seriously?) the thing has worked flawlessly for me in Excel, Word, and Powerpoint.

One of the requirements of teaching classes in accredited education programs is that there's almost an apprenticeship aspect to it. Starting in sophomore level classes, prospective education majors are sent into the field for observations. This is followed up by mentoring and assisting a teacher directly, and then finally by a full semester of student teaching as a partner to the teacher in their senior year.

I just don't see how Coursera can replace that experience, which is what actually makes or breaks many education majors.

I think they also realized this, which is why they're starting out with continuing education and staff development. (Students don't need student teaching if they're already managing a classroom on their own.)

Hey, that was my 8th grade science experiment. Colored light filters affecting the growth of plants. Unfortunately I didn't have enough time to grow my baby plants so there wasn't any noticeable difference by the time I had to present.

I want to see what the actual patent rejection contained that would make a lawyer assume someone was drunk and hit "mail merge" with another letter.

A friend of mine worked for EA for about a year in Japan as a programmer. He quit because they treat their employees just as poorly as they treat their customers. He now works for a smaller company for a lesser salary, but still makes plenty enough and actually gets to go home for dinner with his wife during the week.

I once met a guy who said that when his company ditched his AS/400, he'd take it as a sign to retire. Smart man.

This took down one of our clients who pay for Google apps. So it's not just the freebie users who got affected on this, hence Google's rapid response.

Don't leave businesses out of the equation here. Businesses chew through more desktops than consumers these days. None of our client's apps are certified for Windows 8, so we're buying hardware and imaging Windows 7 on it with our volume license key (something we hadn't had to do for a few years.) The big ERP application vendors are both Microsoft's salvation and downfall - because they only run on Windows 7, no one will switch to Mac or Linux. Because they only run on Windows 7, we're still deploying systems exclusively with Windows 7. (In-house, we're transitioning to 8 because we're gonna have to support it someday... better get used to it. Our SaaS stuff runs with no problems.)

However, once the sluggish ERP industry gives the green light to their major client server apps on Windows 8, the adoption rate of the OS will pick up significantly. I give it another year.

No, that's why I'm a 10x writer. For the last project I worked on I created three different manuals - a twenty page admin guide, a six page limited user guide, and a one page quick links cheat sheet. If someone has to call tech support from the admin side of that website, then they didn't RTFM.