I'm honestly curious about the i7 laptop; who makes good laptops these days, other than Apple?

In a year or two I'd like to replace my Core 2 Duo MacBook Pro, and I'm not entirely sure I like where Apple is taking their OS. I could live with Windows 7, but I'd like some hardware that isn't crap thrown together and designed to be thrown out after a year.

We've got Lenovo ThinkPads at work, and they seem to be crap, unless we've just fallen victim to their ten billion different models (and I hate the keyboard nipple). Who makes the good "Windows" laptops?

So very THIS. Bell/Rogers/Telus are so very awful, and have 94%-ish of the market sown up.

Seriously Telus, caller ID on a smartphone isn't worth an extra $8/month.

We've been interviewing co-op students for internships this week; two things that always lower my opinion of them... sending their resume in MS Word format, and having @hotmail.com as their email address.

Just send in a drone, then you don't need to worry about warrants or anything.

I wouldn't use an ISP that posts ".htm" pages. Are they hosting that machine on a Windows '95 box?

If she'd used a BlackBerry it would've certainly been "BlackBerry Allows Easy, Wireless Credit Card Fraud."

This is exactly why I made a point of buying an e-reader that supports ePub; I don't want my content tied to anyone's specific platform. (In my case, I went with Kobo because they're a Canadian company, they've got their reader software on every platform I care about, and they use ePub.)

Sure you can use handy tools like calibre to convert between formats, but it can't always do it cleanly... sometimes you get confused tables of contents, or headings are formatted as regular text, for example.

Amazon's moving rapidly towards having monopoly power over ebook sales; this exclusive deal just makes it worse.

You'd have Rogers/Bell/Telus ranked 1st, 2nd, 3rd in the Canadian market, and whoever "won" would crow about how awesome they are. And all three would take the study to the CRTC and demonstrate how Canada's cell providers are the top three, and Canadians aren't being totally boned for craptastic service from an oligopoly.

Same way Rogers/Bell/Telus look at the various international ISP rankings and declare that Canada's still a world-leader in home broadband.

This is why I bought a Kobo eReader; works with industry-standard ePub files.

The ones I buy from Kobo's store have 'Adobe DRM' on them, but I'm assuming it'll be trivial to crack if I ever have to. I mean hey, it's Adobe.

It's really nice to be able to buy books from wherever and not worry about having to convert or 'import' them onto my reader... just toss the file on and go.

I also like that Kobo's a Canadian company, but not attempting to create a walled garden for their device was a huge plus for me. I don't like that publishers are just as idiotic about ebook rights as music/movie publishers are. How the hell can an ebook be out of print?!

Lots and lots of dead/abandoned Open Source projects at sourceforge.net, codeplex.com, etc.

I don't think we need a new service for this, just go look for projects that haven't been updated in 3+ years, you'll find lots of them.

Right now, my Firefox (7.0 beta? why don't they display build number or something?) currently has two disabled "incompatible" extensions, Evernote Web Clipper and Firebug.

Evernote might have been installed from their website, but Firebug is on the add-ons page. Why is it broken?

The only thing keeping me from switching over to Safari for a bit (I'm on a Mac) to see how things are is the ultra-convenient sync functionality that keeps my bookmarks and whatnot up-to-date between my office computer and my home computer.

... Silverlight is even worse. Yes it performs better - but only on the single officially supported platform.

To be fair, Silverlight runs pretty well on Mac OS X, too. When I used to work for a company that only used MS technologies, it was nice being able to test our app on my Mac laptop without firing up a VM.

PROTIP: Encrypt anything "interesting" before storing it in the Cloud, regardless of whose Cloud you're working with.

The folks at Dundas Data Visualization have a nice Silverlight-based digital dashboarding solution. (Full disclosure: I used to work for Dundas, but I didn't do any Silverlight stuff there.)

Netflix apparently uses it, and, um, some other video-streaming things. And there are demos.

I think MS is showing some ADHD with Silverlight; they seemed really gung-ho about it, and then sort of fizzled out when it didn't immediately kill Flash and take over the net. And they appear to have boned their partners again by convincing them it's the next big thing, and then not actually getting behind it.

The "official corporate browser" is slowly moving from IE6 to IE7 though, so I fail to see how IE9's rapid development affects anyone stuck using XP and other IT-approved antiques.