I agree with you for ultra light trade off. I guess maybe I'm not the target market but it seems like Apple for the last 5 years or so has pushed "thinnest X ever": I'm not really sure who's been asking for it. Weight I can see, battery life to some extent (basically has to last me between chances to plug it in, doesn't need to last 12hrs because other than a couple flights a year I'm never travelling non-stop for that long) but thinness makes no sense to me. "We dropped every useful port and replaced it with this one usb 3c port so we could shave 3mm off the laptop": thanks Apple.

I really hope this doesn't become the new standard. The Macbook and similar devices I think are suited for people with decent machines on either end of their commute (or hardly use a computer (Facebook dorks) at home). You use the thing while you are commuting and then "throw it away" for a real machine when you get there vs having a good laptop and then just docking the laptop to your ethernet/external monitors/keyboard etc on either end. IMO a good laptop with oddles of ports is a better deal over all unless you are the type to not do too much with a computer at home and not care on the other end because it is your employers hardware budget.

harddrive + charging: umm, all the time? Say a laptop sitting on my desk. All my media on an external drive. What do I just never charge the laptop so I can access my media?

USB is needed because a lot of laptops don't come with RJ45. Yeah you can go wifi, but my computer's right next to my router, why wouldn't I plug in to 1Gbps goodness (I don't have an ac router yet)?

Bought a new laptop a couple days ago: 3 USB ports on it, + a USB hub. My setup will be (at least when I'm at home): network, external monitor and external drive going though the hub via USB 3 (I'm getting a Dell XPS 15 with the USB 3.0 multi-dongle they suggest, hope it works well for video but if not only $60 and I'd want the ethernet dongle anyways). Another port will be tied up with my wifi mouse. That leaves one free for whatever gadget I'm playing with at the time (iPad/pod, kindle phone etc)

  I wish there were more of a selection at my local computer stores for bluetooth mice to free up the port. They usually have one and it is a tiny one meant for using your laptop on the go. I want a fullsized one but don't want to drop 50-100 on one online and have to pray it is comfortable when it arrives. I'm kind of going to be in the same boat as with my iMac: by the time I attach the things needed (mouse, keyboard, harddrive) I only have one port left that I constantly have to swap cables with (since my iPad, iPod and kindle/phone all use different connectors). I can't imagine the pain in the ass the new Macbook would be for me to use.

Yeah and it isn't just recruiting it is the whole industry. I'm constantly questioning. Are we using the right tools? If we are are they tools that are common enough that I'll be employable somewhere else? Then recruiting messages come in and they have a few languages or whatever I'm not using: should I spend time learning them just in case I decide to move? We have no stability in this industry. A surgeon that learns how to replace a knee can do the surgery the same way for a couple decades before being forced to do it a different way. Us every 6 months or so one of our languages/servers/OSs etc change and we need to re-evaluate everything again.

Yeah that really bugs me. Recruiter messages me with a job opportunity at a cool company. After reading for a page I realize it is an entire stack I have no experience with. I think it is reasonable to apply for a job where there are a couple things you need to learn as you go, but when it is completely different (ex. I do db/web services dev and I get one that is all javascript CSS, but hooks me because it is $120k a year to work at Google in the subject) ... very annoying. Heck I get recruiters offering me jobs in India. Why the hell would I want to outsource myself to India so I can earn $7/hr? My first years salary would be the plane ticket ;)

I agree it is one of those awkward but necessary parts of being in the job market. When working at one place I went on "vacation" to Fort Worth for an interview and then a few months later toGermany for another one. I wasn't open that it was an interview but when I came back with an offer and had my chat with my boss he pretty much said, "yeah I figured, it's a good opportunity you should take it". Anywhere that that isn't the type of response is not a place I want to work, and if they were jerks about it I'd have no sadness taking recruiting calls on my lunch break or whatever. I try to do the best job I can and leave things in a good state when I leave. In exchange I expect either more responsibilities as my skills improve or no problems moving somewhere else where I'd be of better use. I'm not willing to allow loyality stale my career at whatever round hole they happened to find to put me in.

We are professionals with goods to sell, namely our skills per hour. How silly it would be to allow one business owners feelings (your boss, who is trying to make a profit) prevent you from marketing your own businesses goods (for better pay, benefits, location, experience etc). Mah that is just my opinion your mileage might vary.

The problem is sites like LinkedIn and equivalent. You are there to be visible but recruiters use it to effectively spam you because they send messages through LinkedIn that ultimately land in your real email box because you don't want to use a fake one because you have networking you do want to use the site for.

You could try filtering out messages that look like recruiting spam from those sites but hard because their "you were endorsed by x", "congradulate Bob for his work anniversery" messages and the like are very canned and look "spammy" too. I read the subject of my emails then mark all read and call it a day. It is 30s of my day and every once and a while something jumps out.

I question how many people get offers from recruiters. Getting an email from a recruiter saying "we have this great position, pays $75k a year contact me if you are interested" != "We want you and are going to pay you $75k/yr contact us with details of where to deposit the check".

Must be willing to relocate, haha. I think for me it was relocate to San Diego actually. First word out of the phone interviewers month: "we don't cover relocation costs." I hadn't asked, we hadn't discussed the particulars of the job/my skills etc. Literally, "Hello, thanks for making the time. We don't cover relocation costs. Are you still interested?"

How the hell would I know if I'm interested I have no idea about the company or the particulars of what exactly you need me to do. Talk about bad at sales. "Our product has the crappiest guarantee in the industry, still interested?" Years of experience for a new technology is classic. I think recruiters are very bad at getting the details of positions correct. The client says "mid level position for someone with Swift experience" and they translate it into a posting/interview question "do you have 5-10 years experience with Swift?".

1) I've heard closer to 1000 years but still yeah limited. We've been saying 50 more years for the last 70 or so at least. Every time we run low we magically find a way of digging deeper wells, nature reserves no longer are in such need of protection etc. I think it is more like the economical supply of stuff to burn is running out, the rich will still be able to get it.

2) Military and by proxy representatives with military interests in their districts will fight it tooth and nail because the only way to keep a big military is to have a boogie man that you need to be able to fight.

3) Feeding into two: oil means the middle east is interesting, middle east being interesting means bases and wars there which justifies more military spending which creates jobs for people in your district, fodder for Bible thumpers to fire up their troops with etc.

States/nations not lobbying for "clean" coal because they just happen to have a lot of it will instead be lobbying for "clean natural gas" because they have a lot of it. Everyone likes the idea of nuclear power but most don't want it anywhere near their house. Till the fear/cost of climate change matches the fear cost of switching from burning crap and having a nuke in your backyard we'll keep burning stuff.

But we also agree on the value of a dollar. A concept since it is granted a temporary (waiting to see a temporary recording of anything say from the Motown period on) monopoly has an arbitrary, as defined by the seller value. My song is worth $100 a copy because I say it is. Yours is worth $1 because you chose to sell it for that. The market gets to decide what volume of each to buy but other artists are still banned from making copies for a ridiculously long period of time (effectively anything you hear in your lifetime that the artist wasn't dead at the time you heard it you won't live long enough to make your own version). Society isn't benefited because the person controlling the copyright gets to decide how it is distributed, if they decide 8 track delivered by donkey that is how it will be.

Money is different because not everyone is allowed to make a copy so there is a (relatively, short of opening up the printing press) finite supply. It is also more tightly tied to real objects, like food. Food takes a significant amount of effort to grow and prepare. How much does a download of a song cost? Its value is tied not to the cost/effort of production but due to the producer's ability to enforce their monopoly on the work. An artist's gifts are relatively rare and so they deserve to be well compensated for the work they do but does that mean that their grandkids should be too? There should be a temporal proximity to the effort/when the good goes to market and the financial reward. Having a good idea whether as an engineer or a singer in your 20's shouldn't keep paying you when your 70: it does society a disservice to give those capable of greatness a propetual fountain of money which means they can retire and bang models in the Bahamas for the rest of their lives rather than use their rare talents. If you want to make the money last you should earn your money and invest it, or keep coming up with ideas/products, not have a checque show up every month or whatever paying you for that great idea of long ago.

Exactly. There are only so many cord combinations, ways of saying "baby baby baby, I love you" etc. Copyright is kind of ridiculous with its duration. Okay you have a right to make a living of things you create. But should your grandkids? Should you be able to milk an idea in your 20's for your retirement? How does that help you be more creative? In my mind a limited window to make money forces you to continue to create new works. 3-5 years as suggested sounds about right. You get a chance to get some wealth off your smash hits and then the cash cow goes away till you do something else worthwhile (in a commercial sense, if artists/the industry really cared about worthwhile in a cultural sense they wouldn't want to make copyrights so long that they are handed down to your grandkids).

Well if could just end up being like using the Apple stack: you can support many OSs but you'll have to run a PC in order to have a good time doing so. I'm fine with that. I earn well more in a day than a license of windows costs. I don't see why professional developers should hesitate to use whatever tool they think best. For hobbist/people that can't get someone to pay them to do development: well lots of free alternatives exist.

System.IO is released and it is pretty tied to the platform. Problem with WPF/XAML designers: they can't decide on a schema and stick to it. WPF desktop, silverlight and Modern apps all have a slightly different way of doing a lot of things. Just when I start to wrap my head around data/command binding and such I try something different and it doesn't work the same way. Hopefully the push for universal apps will force one standard to win since more people will be in the porting business.

Yes ... sort of I think. Ex: System.IO is just wrappers around COM calls to Win32 apis as far as I know. On Mac yes you could use the compiler but you'd have to include the mono or whatever version of System.IO which might insist on changing API signatures in subtle ways to be more "mac like" and mean you have to learn everything from scratch. Not only that but a lot of .Net developers (myself included) have been spoiled so much with tooling that we really have to think about it if we try to write a compile script from scratch, especially if you are doing some things complicated in the process like pre-build, code contract rewrites etc.