Standing all day is really difficult at first. It took me about two weeks to adjust, but it's still slightly uncomfortable if I stand in one place for more than about 20 minutes without moving. I consider this a feature, not a bug. Things I've noticed:

bad:
- I get frustrated more easily when coding. I often find that I have to leave my desk and pace around more often
- not comfortable
- I want to leave my desk a lot, which is bad for wearing headphones. get wireless headphones.

good:
- I don't feel tired after lunch. in general, if you're already tired, it's much easier to stand and be alert than sit and be alert
- my back feels great. I find myself unable to maintain even remotely decent posture while sitting, but I find it easier to straighten my back when standing
- I sort of absentmindedly wander around the room while thinking. This keeps me moving which is good, and I think better while pacing anyway, for some reason
- at the end of the day I feel like I've done actual *work* and I find it easier to get to sleep at a reasonable time.

Overall, it's definitely worth it.

This entire scheme is based on information asymmetry. Let's create our own HFT system, glean this information in the perfectly legal manner described here, and publish this information publicly, in real-time. Then the value of secrecy evaporates.

What the hell is a flight bag?

Chrome does silent updates, so it doesn't matter to me if it updates every night. I left FF completely when version 6 was released. It was the easiest way to make those stupid upgrade dialogs go away. I was happily using 3.5 for awhile, but then in rapid fire I'm hit with 4, 5, 6 in what seems like a month or two. Sorry, I have shit to do. Dealing with FF-generated popups every day isn't my idea of productivity. If there were an easy way to get rid of the damn update things, I might have given it a chance. Both "Cancel" and "Ask Later" both end up popping another dialog up the next day. Sorry, but fuck off already. In short, I don't give a shit what they do now. They already pissed me off.

as a good developer, not a good [insert language here] developer. I just graduated from college in May. I know Java, C++, and all the other usuals. I was hired into a full-time position where I write code in Erlang. I had never written a single line of Erlang before, but I got the job because I marketed myself well. I'm sure plenty of other CS types could outcode me head-to-head, but I marketed myself as an I'll-do-anything-you-throw-at-me programmer and plenty of them still don't have jobs in their field.

Yes, because .NET developers writing software for Windows Mobile make so much money selling their apps to the few dozen Microsoft employees still using it. Is comparing an enterprise platform like .NET to the zomg-web-two-dot-oh Ruby on Rails platform really fair? Could you make the same argument for .NET vs. Java EE? I'm not saying that .NET is bad (I've used it, it's solid but rigid IMO), but I think that making a serious comparison between .NET and RoR makes you look silly.

Fact checking please? Do we really think it's possible that a lawsuit against a drink cup manufacturer can equate roughly 3/4ths of the GDP of the United States economy?

I have an E6400 with the Nvidia option; how can I test to see if my laptop is throttling the CPU too low? (I run linux)

Oblig: http://xkcd.com/605/

Would you like to suggest one?

Reality suggests exactly the opposite. Adblock, Noscript, and whatever other browser plugins you use, in addition to most of the UI code on web pages, is written in JavaScript. Browser speed, and particularly JS execution speed, does matter. In fact, since you are running these applications, which run Javascript to customize your viewing experience, you probably depend on speed more than you think.

I use vim and jrunscript for testing and syntax checking. JSUnit does unit testing. vim has code completion and syntax highlighting for every language anyway, including javascript.

E.g. did the students have to really learn long division in school? That's their first exposure to a rigorous CS-style algorithm. How was the student's algebra education? That's the introduction to the abstraction of variables. The computer scientist who doesn't deeply grok abstraction gets precisely nowhere.

You sound like you haven't been in school for awhile, so let me remind you of something: HIGH SCHOOLERS ARE IDIOTS. I know, I was there 3 years ago. As to the "innate ability" argument, I convinced 3 of my friends (all took AP calc, one is a math major at W&M) to take AP Comp Sci with me, and none of them did well. They just didn't "get it". The asian kid who is now majoring in math did the worst. It really seems that you don't have the slightest clue of what you're talking about. NOT everyone can learn CS if they want to.

TAOCP? Computer Org? Are you kidding? I'm a 3rd year CS student, and most people who went to my high school, probably including myself, could never get through ten pages of Knuth. The math background to start out with theory just isn't in place in high school, where the highest level math class available was entry-level Calculus. I learned C++ on my own in middle school without ever having heard of "Discrete Math", and learned Java in high school before I even knew what a register was. But once I knew how the high level stuff worked, I could then delve deeper into another level and learn a little more, and then a little more. You have to learn incrementally, not by starting a HIGH SCHOOL kid with the hardest (albeit "fundamental") stuff and working your way from there. That's like learning trig simply by giving the students a bunch of proofs to look at before they know how the mechanics work.

I did a google search on this topic but I can't really determine the significance of what a 'half-node' processor is. Is there something inherently special about it? Can someone more knowledgeable about processors explain this?