Please ignore this post, which makes the utterly ridiculous recommendation that customers should care about what tools developers use in their work.  Programming is such an individualized task that what works for one person will not necessarily work for someone else.  

That's why, when talking about tools, I like to describe why *I* like the tools and how it makes my tasks easier.  I've tried a lot of different IDEs over the years, and I always come back to jedit.  Some of it is definitely due to comfort, but big IDEs tend to make assumptions about how and where you organize your code, and want you to do all of your work via the IDE.  I like to drop to the command line a lot, to do SVN diffs, commits, and updates.  It feels faster to me, even if it isn't, plus those are the tools I have at my disposal on my server's command line - no fancy GUIs there to guide you.

If the answer is notepad++ you should stay away from that company, no matter how cool the flash design looks.

When evaluating a development shop, you're much better off asking them how they score on the Joel test. It gives you a much more complete look at "the quality of a software team." But Oscar, #9 says "Do you use the best tools money can buy?"  As I read the question, its really asking if you provide them with the best tools to keep them productive and happy.  If someone is a wizard with notepad++ or vim, who's to say they must use anything else?

The recent revelation that at Microsoft, the top developers prefer Old School methods highlights that fancy programming environments aren't necessarily better or make for better programmers.

["When there are five things on the screen, you can burp that out [in text]. But when there are 500 things, [graphical programming] is completely unusable. You zoom in and zoom out and you lose all context. I think it's just smokin' dope."]{.Apple-style-span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 17px; "}

Confused by the new privacy settings rolling out on Facebook? The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has a thorough run down of the changes and recommendations for keeping what you post as private as possible. The best way to keep stuff private, of course, is not to share anything you don't want made public. This is also a good time to remind you to donate to the EFF.

Facebook will justify the new push for more sharing with everyone by pointing to the new per-post privacy options --- if you don't want to share a particular piece of content with everyone, Facebook will argue, then just set the privacy level for that piece of content to something else. But we think the much safer option is to do the reverse: set your general privacy default to a more restrictive level, like "Only Friends," and then set the per-post privacy to "Everyone" for those particular things that you're sure you want to share with the world.

Facebook's New Privacy Changes: The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly | Electronic Frontier Foundation

Nigel Reed gives a good summary over what's at stake as MLS's Collective Bargaining Agreement runs out next month.  It'd be a disaster to have a work stoppage in a World Cup year.  But then again, outside of MLS's hard core fans, who'd really notice?

By global standards, MLS and its players union is a unique case. The League holds all the aces and its players, with the exception of those talented few good enough to attract transfers abroad or those hired as marquee performers, have been left to lump it under a salary cap, governed by executives who will not risk fiscal irresponsibility.

CBCSports.ca - Blogs - Major League Soccer's winter of discontent