The most annoying part of Chatzilla being abandonware is that I can't find a better IRC client for Windows.

Pidgin is terrible, didn't like Trillium... seems like most other IRC clients haven't been updated in even longer than Chatzilla.

This pretty much sounds like every corporation to me; executives are constantly soaking the company and providing poor value for the amount of resources they're absorbing.

Good ol' crony capitalism is going to send the work back into a feudal state...

Another easy way would be to mine their LinkedIn (or other job sites) profile... mine says I've never stayed at a job as long as five years. Presumably the employer already knows how long you've been working for them.

I always find it sadly hilarious when HR constantly tells everyone "We only hire the best!" and then "We pay average market rates, no raises for you people."

So, what you're telling me, is that we're awesome, but underpaid? OK then.

I'd happily give a Surface Pro 3 a try if you want to send one my way.

I was considering buying a Surface (some previous-gen ones were on sale for a reasonable price), but was driven away by the extra $$$ for the keyboard/case and the lack of decent apps in the Windows 8 store... there's a whole lot of crap there, and not a lot of things I'd like to use.

I call this sort of interviewing "Tech Trivial Pursuit"; it's stupid, it won't give you any indication of how the person is going to work out in your team, and it doesn't give any indication of how someone produces a real solution to your actual problems.

It just tells you how quickly someone can come up with a reasonable solution in an interview, and/or how quickly they can remember the solution to your problem that they read in one of the "How to Interview at Google" books.

It's worse when the people interviewing you aren't from the team you'll be working in. I feel bad for those teams... they're going to get someone who's good at answering interview puzzle questions, but maybe they're entirely impossible to work with, or total assholes in day to day situations.

Yeah, yeah, Google's very successful and rich. But it's not because of their broken interview process.

Toshiba's on the slower end of the scale, but Apple uses them, so they can't be TOO bad.

I wouldn't use that as an indicator of quality; my old MacBook Pro (the Core Duo ones where you could easily change battery/RAM/disk) featured "wonderful" Hitachi drives that failed ten times (that is, I had ten dead drives in less than six months) until I gave up on Apple's replacements and just ordered a Seagate.

Luckily I don't live in the US, so I can happily ignore the DCMA.

Consensus seems to be Mint Cinnamon, so I'll give it a go!

Honest question that I haven't been able to find an answer to...

Is there a desktop Linux distro that will play DVDs "out of the box"? Specifically, you stick it in the drive and it starts playing.

I've got an olde Pentium 4 system that's currently running Windows 7, and I wanted to put Linux on it... the main use case for this machine is playing DVDs during workouts.

Wa-tor va-pour gas
It's what hu-mans need to live.
What about E.T.?

Pulling bits from a foreign CDN also leaks information via the referrer headers, which might be something you need to worry about if you're using it for internal projects.

Hopefully this will result in more laptops with better displays... I'm boggled that manufacturers like Dell are still selling 15+" laptops with 1366x768 displays and have the gall to call them "beautiful" and "high-resolution" in their marketing. WTF.

When I was looking for a new laptop a year and a half ago, I had to look very hard to find 15" laptops with decent ('full HD', 1920x1080) resolutions.

Stop the madness!

Switched to Pale Moon when Firefox when full-Google Chrome in the UI; it's like Firefox classic, compiled for 64-bit systems.

Only been slightly annoying at work, due to Cisco's WebEx not having a 64-bit plugin, a fact that I can't seem to remember before trying to join an online meeting... every. damn. time.

Oh, and annoying when Firefox Sync upgraded their back-end in ways that blocked Pale Moon from working. Installed Xmarks (hey, I use LastPass anyway, why not) and forgot all about Sync thanks to being able to sync my bookmarks properly between Firefox, Pale Moon, Chrome and Safari (IE too, if I ever used that for anything other than my company's broken internal sites).

Look at it from the point of view of your executives.

Getting rid of (err, sorry, out-sourcing) the support group massively reduces costs in one area by spreading the cost of downtime and whatnot across all the other areas in the company.

One executive gets a huge bonus for reducing costs, and the other executives get slightly smaller huge bonuses because their efficiency has gone down. It's win-win for the exec who "owns" the support group.

It would be significantly better news if Synaptics had bought whoever provides the Mac laptop touch pads and/or whoever creates the drivers for those. Then Windows laptops could start having good track pads.

I wonder if that's the reason for Windows 8 being touch-focused... an end-run around the terrible track pads infesting Windows laptops.

Seriously, the hardware in my IdeaPad 500 is great, except for the horrible, horrible track pad. And the Canadian Bilingual keyboard, but that's my fault for not paying enough attention during ordering...