Gates is one of those rare people who is at a time a good developer, good manager and a cunning businessman. I started to appreciate him after watching Triumph of the Nerds documentary series. I literally loled for 5 minutes after watching Gates in an event parodying IBM which was organised by Jobs http://youtu.be/riyAe4BKAng?t=20m1s.
I think it is a bad decision from Facebook to go after Social Fixer. From the Chrome extensions page they have ~200K installs. This is peanuts compared to Facebook's user base(compared to Google where number of Adblock installs are ~40 million combining Firefox and Chrome, it hurts Google more they can't say much about it because of fearing of criticism from their core supporters). But future will be bright for them because people are accessing Facebook more from mobile devices where default mobile browsers are very restrictive and the trend will not change for foreseeable future.
Yes you can. As others have pointed out, it the DE that uses most system resources. For common development task you don't need 3D gimmick. You can install lightweight DE like LXDE or XFCE. I use Xubuntu in my home pc and installed it as a Virtualbox guest in my office pc allocating 1.5GB of RAM. Things have been buttery smooth. For a comparison of system resources used by different DEs see the article http://pclosmag.com/html/Issues/201109/page08.html. The article is a bit old but still relevant.
People here will argue that he is the worst CEO ever, that's debatable of-course. But I want to say some good things about him. To me he is a guy in a suit who understood software development. He shouted (in)famous "developers, developers, developers"[1], he knew that LOC is not a good measurement of software development[2], he poured loads of money in MSR ignoring the pressure of shareholders. For these reasons only he is a fine guy in my book. So I thank him for his works in Microsoft.
Well Chrome had this feature for a long time. Personally I don't find it much useful. But to me the killer feature of firebug is that when you open an XHR entry in new tab it opens the tab with all POST variables. Super handy when debugging REST api.
