I disagree with Notjarvis heavily. I have a passion for programming, currently I am not employed as a programmer. I go to work, do my job, spend a day on the weekend programming. When I was getting paid to program however, I went to work with joy (do that with my current job too). Loved solving the problems and creating the solutions. I left it at work. I go home and I engage in other things. Sometimes that results in a brilliant idea that I write down. Maybe half of the time that made into code, the other half I realised I was being dumb, because my focus was divided with my book/show/game/whatever. Or you go out with friends. Whatever. You can be passionate about your job without being your job. Some people do not understand that until it is too late. I will admit, I have sometimes done submits after hours, but it was rare... and when that happens, that means I dont show the next morning.

Any info on performance? A lot of larger forums stick with old s/w because it is the only one that reliable stays up without constant time outs.

"people are the source of, and solution to, all the problems you'll run into when building social software" All software, not just social. If it has a user interface and users, then they create problems while giving you solutions to scenarios you did not think of. If youre software development isnt like this, then I am sorry.

I would call them and tell them to stop ending me BS charts... BTW, standby of devices eats power like flys eat hot.

I went to the pop up store in West Ed... yeah, not sure we were using the same keyboard. I tried both. They are awful. I will gladly carry a large mech around with me instead.

I dont keep a todo list... I just add stuff to my calendar for when it deadlines and remove it as I get it done. I have far too many things that are far too important and completely outside of work to not do this. Things I miss the date on get thrown out. Nothing is ever extended, that is how these lists work and become effective. It has left me with a lot of unfinished sw projects, but its ok, I obviously took the idea as far as I could with the time I had. I try and do a month of important stuff in advance in a day and then I have free time to do whatever I want, including the projects I deadline (quite generously) myself. If the list is stressing you out, then you are not prioritising correctly.

Phones, tablets... those are devices used to consume content, not create it. I see myself do it and most of my friends. Im in my early 20s. We look at these things on our mobile devvices and then beam the contents to the laptop or desktop for later. I do it so much. I will read my forums and then write my reponses at home, on my keyboard evven though it is broken. Motorola is ahead of the game. They saw this trend coming, but the problem is that no one wants to carry that stuff around. That the phone doesnt really switch into a desktop mode that operates differently in any way. This part of the device would just need to be publicly available at cafes and hotels and such, but even then, the multitasking we are used to is still not great on these devices. Bottom line, I work retail and sure I sell more cell phones than laptops and desktops (and one phones makes the store more profit than all pcs combined), but they arent going away, people are buying them for creation, some even for consumption. But yes, basic specs were good enough a few years ago. Now it is all about responsiveness.

Iphone 5? Ugh... that thing sucks. That is my professional opinion as someone who gets paid to sell them.

@Chrisdunn 03: Everyone is always playing catch up when it comes to programming. That is how it is when you work in an ever-evolving field. The fact that the curriculum doesnt get updated every year i the bad part. Some schools still teach with pascal!

I couldnt get the files to play. Just loaded forever. I will admit that on most equipment I use I will not be able to hear a difference after the 160VBR (differs from track to track), but on my desktop I will. More importantly though, if you are getting rid of your CDs, please rip to FLAC. You can change that into anything and not lose anything. Also MP3 is pretty crap, it creates artefacts by itself.

That Deli example? That is what we call condescending in the rest of the world. This may work with some children (definitely not my niece, she is too smart to fall for this), but doing this to an adult, you would be called a knob. Then again, maybe I am just expecting intelligence to be higher than it really is. I work retail and the number one way to sell is to repeat what the customer said and then recommend a product that matches. It is illy, but if you do not repeat what they said, they do not take your recommendation seriously.

Holy fucking coincidence Batman! I just watched that episode of TinTin with my niece this morning! Also, "readable" is bad, horrible English and you should be ashamed of yourself. The word you are looking for is legible. Just because Americans decide to create a word, doesnt mean it is correct.

Richardathome has it right. Programming is not about code. It is about critical thinking, the process, more than anything. Now if we restructured other subjects (specifically maths and/or physics) we could perhaps get kids to do what I get paid to do. Solve problems. Sometimes it takes just talking, other times code, a few times even just retraining staff to do it right... But that analysing is what they should be learning. Maybe there even needs to be a problem solving course where you present kids with obscure problems and they have to solve them within certain limitations. They are told the problem, they have to probe it and find the reasons for the problem. Explain those. Try and find solutions within certain constraints. Hell, even through in trick problems. Personally I would love it if people understood better how computers work. I do which is why people always ask for my help. There are things I see when looking at a problem that others dont because I look and think what would I have done to solve this and go from there.

I buy insurance on certain things and you should too... Got it on my monitor. One month in, line of dead pixels. Get it replaced, cost me 80 at purchase and I still have nearly four years. Headphones. Always, always get the replacement plan. SSDs... For 20-50 dollars I can get it replaced when I inevitably burn it out.

I tend to be honest most of the time, withholding what could be insulting. If I was radically honest I would lose my job, quite easily. Think of the movie Yes Man and the conclusion there, be open, but think for yourself. Same applies to telling the truth / lying.

I just wish they operated in Canada. Right now I use kijiji to achieve similar goals, but there arent always results.

I know the third crd doesnt do much for the frames, but it does something else. It rids you of the horrible micro-stutter.

Preface: I've been advising, building, testing and fixing builds for a long time. Just a hobby, but I've learnt a lot along the way. I can even fix certain motherboard hw defects. A few things (it started with two): - Fractal Design Define R3 would've given you a great case with sound dampening built in. - Sound dampening does raise the overall temperature, so be ware of that. - Your cooler is facing the wrong way. Maybe this one is different, but typically they suck air in, so you want the fan on the right or bottom to grab cooler air and push it towards the rear or top exhausts. Currently physics says you are hampering airflow by having the fan blow into the case against the cool draft coming from the intakes. As far as I am aware, you cannot flip that fan to move the air the opposite direction. - You always want positive or negative airflow. Positive means more intakes meaning hot air will be forced out of the case. Often times people find it leads to less/more focused dust. Negative is more exhausts. Most people do this by default. Moving the hot air out causes air to be sucked in regardless of intake. Creating a perfect equilibrium between the two often creates stagnant air, depsite wht you would expect.

Sorry, but you have to be some sort of stupid if you don't realise that you are hellbanned/slowbanned/errorbanned. These things are incredibly simple to figure out and work around. That said, at sites like SO I find it easy to ignore the fools, because the good answers are voted up by real users.

And yet I still much prefer Opera in every single way because of the control it affords me without hiding it. The one thing I hate about Chrome most of all is not being able to determine the install location. My stuff is organised and that breaks it. I really think we should start hiding version numbers though. They aren't important to the end user. Updates, no matter how small should be intelligently pushed to the user immediately. Give them an option to disable auto-updates and you're done. I think the reason live updating doesn't work is likely a Windows "issue" (possibly even safety measure). I don't know how Chrome functions specifically, but the only way I could think of doing it would be to create a new component (creates a small overhead) and choosing to now load those while the program is running and then next time the browser is started, replace the old ones with the new ones. Pretty expensive though and I'm not even sure if it can work as I've never even thought about it. P.S.: Word filters are dumb.

Pretty much anyone that wants to use their front audio ports will want a sound card. I have never had a motherboard with which the front port audio properly worked. Back audio has been fine, but not as great as a dedicated sound card. I honestly believe that everyone should spend the thirty needed on the sound card. Even with relatively cheap headphones, it will sound better. Sony MDR-V6 are pretty cheap nowadays and still pretty fucking fantastic.

I'm a programmer, but for a while all I did was web design which I left because most aren't programmers and the code they write was ugly, slow and overall the worst of worst practises. Any way, the first rule was to degrade gracefully. This however is only form the user side. So we build a basic HTML site that has all the elements we need. Then we had basic CSS. Jut things that are supported across pretty much all browsers, no hacks included. Then we start adding more advanced CSS and hacks to fix IE and pretty much only IE. Then we add JavaScript on top of that. Then we add more and more features which are increasingly complicated and likely to fail, built onto the previous. This way, from the top level down, whenever something fails, it doesn't really affect the site. If someone has JS completely disabled, that just means they get none of that magic. If someone visits with a pure text browser (like JAWS), everything is still there, it just doesn't look nice. Even if a few functions failed because the browser had a quirky JS engine issue we didn't know about, it didn't matter, a simple version existed. We did use PHP and I do know they built in redundancy in case a database couldn't be accessed and whatever else they do. Now back as a programmer, I adhere to this quite well. I do think it has made me a more thoughtful programmer. I consider things like calling a function with the wrong types which happens more often than not. What if a module cannot be accessed... all this stuff that really shouldn't go wrong, but can, especially when the app is accessing internal server farms to retrieve information.

@Zack Peterson: Just two. I have an older HTPC with an E something something 2 something ghz and I can notice a slow down with 1080p content while playing Blurays. Turning of media centre actually fixes that. I've ripped a few to MKVs and the 1080p ones don't work too well in VLC, but work alright played from within media centre. Which is weird as that never worked and all of a sudden it just did... no clue as to why, but I'll take that over using PotPlayer any day. I'm wondering though, do you know if these processors have the same BS issues as the last i3s? Not being able to play framerates correctly? Mentioned in this thread, basically it's that movies play at 23.976 fps and the i3 GPU converts it to 24.000 fps as it cannot do 24p natively. This causes a (to me) very noticeable skip over and over and over.

As much as I agree that communicating ideas are important, I have no issue discussing these things with other programmers. It's when you write the documents explaining everything to the people distributing the money that it becomes difficult, because most of the time, they don't know shit. They're just some dude with a cheque book and want to know why they should pay for an additional two weeks or why this does that and they want to know how it works... but no details? It can be very frustrating as a lot of these people also tend to be very tech illiterate. I actually had to tell someone that no, the computer cannot process the data if you turn it off, even if you started it before hand and even though that data is on the server.

"I can't take slow typists seriously as programmers." That seems rather silly. The speed of typing has nothing to do with programming. I've seen good programmers that use the two finger method of typing. Just because it takes them a bit longer to put down (even so, barely, apparently if you do it a lot, you become fast regardless), it doesn't affect the quality of their code. I consider myself quite fast, but I'm not super fast. I don't do a full ten finger type, I'm slower like that... and I prefer to look at the keyboard. Yet I was best in my class, which isn't saying that much since most of the competition was pretty weak.