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).

I'm not refusing to learn. I never said effective communication can't happen in a digital form. I never even said highly effective communication can't happen in digital form. I merely said the most effective communication happens in person.

Why everyone is so hostile for me pointing out something so obvious is quite odd. Maybe one day digital communications can perfectly emulate real life communications. So far, it's a really good approximate, but it's not a complete one to one replacement.

Never at any time did I manage in that way or anything remotely close to it. You should probably not assume or presume such things. It makes you look stupid.

I've managed a team where some people were remote and some local. The amount of additional effort I as a manager had to put into knowing how things were going with my remote reports vs the local reports was not insignificant. Humans didn't evolve with digital communications. The result is that the most effective communication happens in person. Period.

It's not that you can't have an effective team spread out geographically. It's just that it is more difficult and extremely difficult to be as effective as one that works together in person on a daily basis.

And I say this as someone that really really really wants to be able to have a 100% telecommuting job.

Yes, the top-right window control feels clumsy and inefficient when I do have to use Windows for work purposes.

I hated Unity at first. It was a buggy and foreign experience that made my desktop much less usable than I was used to on previous Linux experiences. Then many of the the most glaring bugs got worked out and I found out why alt+tab was so broken for multiple instances of the same app -- for same-app window switching, use alt+` instead.

There's still bugs, but they're slowly ironing it out. And about that foreign experience -- I have some older versions on another machine I rarely use. Recently, I fired that thing up to get some data off it. I felt just as foreign going back to the old as I did when I first encountered Unity. The lesson for me was that change can feel awkward, but as long as an interface isn't TOO clumsy, you can get used to it.

Maybe there are some power users out there that find missing shortcuts, but I'm just not that heavy on shortcuts. For the most part, Unity is fine for me. I just don't care enough to make it that big of an issue once I figured out how to replicate my old workflow.

A treadmill wouldn't work forever. Dogs if left on a treadmill long enough and they have to go bad enough WILL soil themselves WHILE running. I would imagine horses and cows are the same.

Oh the lying liars and the lies they tell:

http://www.teslamotors.com/blog/most-peculiar-test-drive

They're going to publish the log data which should prove interesting, but apparently he didn't charge the car completely. For a range test. If the log shows he didn't charge it all the way, then I'd call that quite a valid reason. It's borderline libel.

Really? is that what you think? So you could take a binary from XP and run on CE? How about from Windows 8 and RT?

Let me help you out -- no and no.

That's exactly like what Ubuntu is striving for except that it's exactly the opposite.

You can pay for a subscription with Pandora and get it ad free as a matter of fact. It cost me US$36.00 to do just that for one year. I can listen as much as I like without ads during that time. Not a bad deal really.

Incidentally, I do still buy MP3's of music I like that I hear on Pandora to put on an inexpensive MP3 player so I can listen while in places that taking a higher tech device is a very bad idea due to environmental concerns (sauna, steam room).

False. Ubuntu has cloud storage built into it if you choose to use it.

LOLWUT? You can compile for target architectures that are different from your own. This has been built into compilers for a very long time now.

Unless you are aware of this and meant that if the target architecture is anything other than your phone, you will have to move it off anyway. Still -- why would that matter? By the way, why would someone need to do this anyway? Canonical is shooting for a complete solution -- i.e. your phone IS your desktop when you need it to be.

The latest phone architectures have quite a bit of computing power built into them. With smaller process manufacturing on the horizon, I'd say we'll see that power go up quite a bit soon.

Not exactly. Mainframes still exist today. But just because programming work is being done on a mainframe doesn't mean much (see my reply to #2). But even still -- especially with intro classes, this is a very good thing because it puts all students on the same platform with the same guaranteed experience when they go to compile.