1. 1. Restrict API usage to dissuade third-party clients from innovating and creating new features and functionality
2. 2. Fire your own developers too
3. 3. ???
4. 4. Profit!

. . . it's aliens.

(Semi-seriously, it doesn't have to be a buried monolith; we haven't taken sufficiently high-resolution images yet to have been able to see one on the surface, eh?)

Are there any slimmed down versions of Chrome that don't include Chromecasting or Hangouts or Facebook or etc., etc. I'm looking for a lean 64-bit build of Chrome.

Err, well as far as I've checked my version of Chrome doesn't "include Facebook" and in fact I needed to install an extension to include Hangouts, but if you're looking for a version of Chrome without the proprietary bits and blobs (which presumably includes this, although I could be wrong), you should just use Chromium.

Failing that, as others have pointed out above this function can be disabled.

There are also plenty of Blink and WebKit based browsers out there, although as someone who's quite satisfied with Chrome and Chromium and uses Google services extensively (and so benefits from such integrations) I can't say I've used any extensively myself. The Vivaldi browser seems to be the new trendy one, last I checked, although it isn't as open as Chromium. And if you're looking for a lean 64-bit build of Chrome, even if existing builds aren't lean enough for ya you could probably skip some things at compile time and slim it down even further if you built it yourself.

Err, what? I chromecast between wired and wireless sources and wired and wireless sinks all the time. My Nexus Player is hooked up via a microUSB ethernet adapter, for instance, and I often cast to it via my phone (or when random guests are over and want to show something briefly on teh projector they do so with their own phones). And I've cast from my desktop computers to a wireless ChromeCast before I had the Nexus Player hooked up.

Huh? I'm not sure where you're getting your hate for the Chromebook Pixel in this case. The Pixel, in addition to two USB Type-C ports, has two USB 3.0 ports, a TRS jack, and an SDXC slot. By my count that puts it at the same connection count as the MBA, and I'd personally take two Type-C ports over a magsafe and a lightning port (but of course that's preference; if you're in the Apple ecosystem of devices already you might well prefer differently) which is the only difference in terms of ports and slots.

Now, I can't actually buy the current-gen Pixel because Google for some unknown reason won't sell it to Canada, only the US and UK, but that's another story entirely and has nothing to do with what we're talking about, I just bring it up incessantly because that's what annoys me about the Chromebook Pixel.

Actually . . . yeah, personally my back is terrible (a combination of a childhood accident and mild scoliosis), but it's honestly quite fine as long as I don't spend long periods of time with my spine in a non-straight position or carry things for very long. I walk everywhere, and my Pixel C (which is a bit less than 1 Kg with both it and its keyboard) combined with a few other things in a bag are starting to reach the limit where it'll cause issues for me, but I'm fine as long as I keep things at that. A nearly-2-Kg laptop would be quite questionable for me, personally.

I have a cheap (~$200) LG IPS monitor and it's completely fine when rotated vertically, so I'm sure any IPS panel will be fine. I'd bet your Dell has the ability to use VESA mounts, so even if its own stand doesn't support rotation you could probably just get a stand to use instead and mount it using the VESA mount points.

Try https://github.com/felipec/git for a git fork with some attempts at being kinder with its behaviour (although it doesn't appear to be maintained anymore).

I migrated the company I work for to SVN just a few years back now. Some of the programmers expressed worry that we were jumping on "the latest bandwagon", but I reassured them that if Subversion was a bandwagon, it was a bandwagon abandoned in a ghost town. Change-adverse as engineers are, they found that reassuring. And I mean hey, at least it isn't CVS anymore!

When I first came in as the sysadmin I found out the company was using CVS (specifically cvsnt running on an old CentOS box), which the lead programmer had been administering. First time the cvs lockdaemon went down, I tried restarting the service . . . and it didn't work. I tried again, didn't work. Eventually it came back up after 7 tries, writing nothing at all helpful to the log file in the meantime. I asked the lead programmer if he had any idea what was going on, and he just said "oh, it does that some times, once took me 11 tries!".

So, you can imagine that I was able to convince the herd of cats (ie. the dev team) to adopt any other version control scheme was a huge relief. I had been kindof hoping for Git, but the new guy replacing the older lead programmer hated Git with a burning passion (he's a hardcore Windows fan and hadn't used Git for many years at the time, but that didn't stop him from holding unwavering opinions on it). And, frankly, the "CVS done right" tagline may have been rightfully mocked by Linus Torvalds, but SVN as a version of CVS that works 450% more reliably and has quasi-modern tools associated with it was exactly what the doctor ordered in our case.

We'll migrate to Git in 2024.

His raw 200 million number was bogus, but the numbers still show PC gaming as easily above the Wii U and rivalling the other current-gen consoles. Even just Steam alone there were as many as 11 million people concurrently on Steam at points in the last 48 hours, for instance, so nearly as many people playing games on Steam at a time than have ever even bought Wii Us (source: http://store.steampowered.com/... ), so PC gaming is nothing to scoff at.

It's more like on Windows there's no fully-featured and user-friendly substitute unless you got the Microsoft route (which, fair play, but many of us won't for one reason or another). On Linux there's KMail, Trojitá, Evolution, Geary . . .

Hmm, that doesn't sound quite right.

There we go. As is the sacred duty of attentive /. readers, FTFY.

Contrary to the good old Windows 98/XP days we can't trust freeware for everything these days, so get an open source torrent client. The two I know best are Transmission and Deluge.

I've long been a fan of KTorrent, and I find the interface personally better than Transmission, especially if you have large number of torrents (legally, of course! I'm talking tons of distro ISOs, archive.org concerts, etc . . . yup yup).

I mean, you even mention earlier in your comment that it wasn't exactly unoccupied . . .

I mean, the system is expressly designed so that one is allowed to post anonymously and not lose mod status on a post, so I'm not sure it's so underhanded. Personally, I do think that's enough of a barrier so as to prevent the negative outcomes of being able to moderate and be moderated in the same thread (aka the Reddit Effect). Anyways, their droplet of insight was appreciated, so I'm okay with it. All that being said, I do applaud your vigilance.