Startup times are not irrelevant, they are very important to many users. Our biggest complaint from FF-using clients is "It takes too long to open a web link in Outlook". They don't leave the browser open because it isn't a critical or oft-used part of their workflow, and will seldom if ever have more than one tab open simultaneously,so performance after running a few hours or under extreme load doesn't have much bearing on our usage scenario.

Do you do anything special after the install to get it to get more speed out of it?

Because of the automated updating in Chrome, we'd rather not support it, but its getting to the point where we're having so many issues with FF that the tradeoff is acceptable.

I've got two D610s with fresh XP installs from work here for a side-by-side comparison, and in a vanilla FF vs vanilla Chrome test with both at their current versions (FF 15.0.1 and Chrome 21.0.1180.89), FF takes about 3-5 seconds to startup, spawn its first tab and finish loading the contents, while Chrome loads and spawns its default tab pretty much instantly in less than a second, with far less of the hard drive thrashing.

Additionally, Firefox vis a vis doesn't load its UI 'cleanly' (toolbar, tabs appear haphazardly at different times), and in some instances, actually gets classified as 'unresponsive' by windows for a bit before its done loading. These last two are especially problematic for our more naive users, as they perceive it as a problem in need of our attention rather than normal program behavior.

Unless, of course, you want to continue working for that company....

$1300 is a shit ton of money. That'd get me 2 classes closer to my degree (I'm only 3 quarters away from finishing, but I hit the financial aid cap--no more loans or grants for me :() and into some real development work.

After living and work expenses, with the current availability of work orders at my job extended over twelve months, I can't even save that much in a YEAR if I spent absolutely nowhere except the gas station. It has nothing to do with being 'bad with money'. The money just doesn't exist for us the way it does for you in a torrential downpour. We don't have to worry about 'principles & interest' on anything, because we're too busy debating things like "Which is more important this month--electricity or car insurance?" and putting off paying the other utilities until the mileage reimbursement check comes from work, then the next month carrying a balance on a different utility to pay off the late fees on the first...

'Rich' is getting enough money injected into your account on a regular basis that you don't have to worry about this delicate financial dance and can afford to use your money to invest and/or add value to your existing assets. Anarchduke was right, you could use some perspective. Do you want to come live in the hood and clean malware off people's computers for nigh-minimum wage with me?

Of course buying your own home is going to be cheaper than renting. That's one of the luxuries you get when your income and credit score gets high enough. (http://moneyland.time.com/2012/03/21/housing-math-buying-is-now-cheaper-than-renting-98-of-the-time/)

But its not that bad. Rather luxurious by my standards, actually. Before I got my current job and moved here, I was paying $325 a month for a room in a 4-roommate household with broken windows in all the common areas and barely functional heat, in a really bad part of Rochester. I don't mean bad as in 'there's unscrupulous-looking individuals walking about outside in the early morning hours', I mean gunfire and 'look outside and on a regular basis there'd be a small army of cops breaking down a door down the street' bad.

I live in the city close to work, too, which is pretty much mandatory because otherwise this $4/gallon gas crap would literally price me out of employment.

Care to email that to my boss? I haven't gotten a raise, *ever*. Granted I started at $9.00, $1.75 over the state minimum, but since I only get occasional work when someone needs me to muck around with the webserver, design a skin for a new site, or drive to a client to deploy equipment/troubleshoot something, I don't get the benefit of constant regular hours.

A raise would be killer. ;)

I'm in the exact same position as you--24 credit hours away from graduation, I hit the cap. The financial aid office said the only thing that could be done was to convince my parents to sign a PLUS loan--one isn't creditworthy, and the other hasn't been an active figure in my life since they divorced the other several years ago. So now, I'm stuck in an endless cycle of wage garnishments and the IRS keeping my tax return until someday, 35 years down the line or so, I can get out of default and go back to school to finish my degree. There's no way out, and it really, really sucks.

Somewhat offtopic, but I'm finding it kinda difficult to believe that in this job market in the US, there are people lucky enough to be employed as developers that don't understand basic RDBMS concepts like indexes or joins. I'm just an undergraduate, but even at this level competition for jobs is incredibly fierce--I can't imagine someone being considered for code-writing positions lacking knowledge of crossjoin, outer joins, indexes, B+ trees, kd trees, etc. That kind of stuff comes up in almost every interview I've had so far, and I've got nothing yet for a while. :(

Do you actually encounter on a regular basis this kind of clueless-ness? How do these people manage to get hired?

Not enough people care to change this ethos. There's a large amount of people here who would do anything to fight the "terrorists". That's how this happened in the first place.

A day of classes at a university where there curiously often aren't electrical outlets in CS classrooms.

The US has a LOOOONG history of corn subsidies (originally designed to help struggling agricultural families from falling under and ruining US food prices). By now, of course, most of it goes to corporates that own huge tracts of farms. It's a very entrenched interest group. I imagine you've seen at least one of those "don't hate HFCS, it's just like sugar!!!111" commercials on TV.

Is that seriously where we've arrived at, where a hardware company gets kudos just for sending back the defective card?

I would certainly hope they'd be legally obligated to send it back if they refuse the RMA. Personally, I think that if they can't follow through on their promise, they should be obligated to refund the purchase price of the product, but I realize this kind of common courtesy is none too common these days.

...Seriously?

There's a vote to concede in HoN, too, but that seems to be used more when people leave the game and don't reconnect, or towards the end when the winner is obvious, not so much as a "The hell with this team, we're done" button.

I had never heard about LoL until after this thread--probably something for me to look into. I like the 'dungeon crawler' feel, but as the GGP said, the community is quite noxious, and it's not really the type of game one can learn by soloing everything on the map in practice mode.