I've got a Lenovo T530 with Linux Mint 15 installed and it works great. It even works well with my docking station and dual-monitor setup... very happy with it.

Interesting data. However, I don't think that salary entirely explains the trend. I know 3 elementary teachers who refuse to teach anything higher than grade 3 because the prefer teaching younger kids. One teacher said her reason was because she felt she had a greater impact on the development of the child at that age.

I didn't say it was a good thing, just that men don't tend to go into teaching just as women don't tend to go into programming. It's true that there's sexism and hostility to women in IT (and many other fields). However, even if we could wave a magic want and made all that bad stuff go away we're never going to see a 50/50 split in the technology field.

I don't agree with that. Off all the women I know from childhood, only a small fraction have gone into technology. The rest have gone into fields like accounting, law, finance, sales, marketing, teaching and medicine (doctors, pharmacists and nurses). They didn't choose these fields because they were "pushed away" from programming.

Wish I had mod points. I have a female friend who works as an elementary school teacher and she told me that 100% of the teaching staff at her school are *women*. So what? Who cares? I think women are drawn to other fields, simple as that.

I'm sure it differs per industry, but in my area most employers want 40+ hours a week from contractors. Therefore, somebody only wanting to work 10-20 hours a week wouldn't even be considered for the job.

Why is this such a hard concept to grasp? I just don't get how some people think that healthcare coverage should be a choice. Do they think that cancer is a "choice"?

Sometimes companies won't touch the code at all unless it's a BSD style license because of various legal reasons. Personally, I'd rather see companies using BSD code with the possibility of some of them releasing there changes than having companies not use the code at all because it's GPL'ed.

UPnP; I use it mainly to connect to my mediatomb server. It works really well.

Your post resonates with my own thoughts on the subject of software interviewing. I've talked about this subject at length with a few colleagues several times over the last few months. I know a senior guy who holds several patents that didn't get an offer because he "failed" an interview because he couldn't answer some obscure question about embedded programming. When I got out of school with a graduate degree and a strong background in software, I still had to answer bullshit questions like "what will the output of this function be" etc. I basically didn't get an offer because I couldn't figure out what a format string in a printf statement would do. Normally, I would figure it out via "man printf". These days, I'm the one doing the interviewing and I'd much rather ask conceptual questions and talk about what a candidate has done in the past than to ask questions that are easily solvable using Google. I use Google, Wikipedia and StackOverflow all the time to find answers to questions about C++, Perl and Python. Is it fair to expect a candidate to have all that information at their fingertips?

That's why I put them in quotes; but buzzwords help when speaking to manager types... ;)

Reminds me of the quote "In Chaos Lies Opportunity"... Sounds like a perfect opportunity to become a "value added" employee by "leveraging" your past experience and introducing "proven best practices" to your current company.

Sorry; meant to mod +1 funny, but selected "redundant" by accident.

It's still there, just not shown be default. Right click on a heading in the playlist; click on "Show Column->Last Played".