I do need todo lists for what some people above mentioned: groceries, paying bills, filling out a form, generating a data export for someone, ... Things I can safely say I'll do, but that I put off to the last minute anyway so might as well put them on a todo list with a date attached and forget about it. Things that definitely don't work is stuff like implementing features or getting documents written up or the like. Some days I'm really productive (or rather, motivated), some days I'm not. So todo lists usually only make me feel guilty, or trivialize the amount of work I just did with a single checkbox. I think it's solid advice to forget about tracking that sort of thing (or rather, not with a todo list).

@Roman it's worth a read if a bit hard to get (even if you understand a lot of the basics). It mainly just points out that most hardware doesn't have such a wide frequency range and is not perfect, so some of that (inaudible) higher frequency signal is going to bleed into the audible range and cause distortion, actually making the experience worse. I'm skipping all the details here. Also 24 bit is unnecessary because psychoacoustics and proper encoders. So it just wastes space.

For once, I think you are way off mark. Should everybody know how to write a system driver or the middleware to Amazon.com? Of course not. Should they know how to write a small macro or script to massage their data when they need it? Absolutely. This can benefit basically everyone with an office job, from secretary to mayor. Remember also that for many people simply knowing how to use the functions in Excel is also "knowing how to code". Perhaps learning javascript isn't the fastest shortcut, but anything that demystifies the whole process and teaches people "hey, it really isn't rocket science", will help out in the end.

Oh come on people, the algorithms aphorism is a funny little quip that obviously doesn't hold 100% of the time. But there are a great many algorithms out there you can still use, but where it would be cheaper (in terms of total power draw) to just load it into memory and do it there. For instance a sort of a large dataset. If you don't have the RAM available to do it, fine you'll use some sort of external sort, involving at least a few trips back and forth to tertiary memory. If you do have the RAM though, it'll be faster to just do it in there. Yes, this doesn't hold 100% of the time. That I need to explain this is kind of sad.

The whole use of your (Belgian) eID for online shopping and whatever idea has always been enormously short-sighted and needs to die in a fire. I'm Belgian and while giving the cops my eID is one thing (for them, it really is the same as a driver's license), handing private entities a singular tracking identifier of me is something I will never submit to. Not that using it for tracking would be legal, but when did that ever stop anyone? It's a similar problem with OpenID. Usually when I post something somewhere with OpenID, you can follow it back to that identity. It's not just the owner of the blog that can see who I am (or at least one identity of me), it's whoever cares to crawl back down the link to my identity page. Which makes it a really good way to create targeted marketing user profiles. Now @Aaron, there really is very little chance Belgian cops could get at much more information than American cops could using your driver's license. The data collected from your eID, i.e. an identifier used to log you into that forum, lives in a private database that they simply don't have access to. Even their access to government owned databases is in theory heavily regulated. I've heard of at least one example of a guy getting a not-so-friendly visit by the FBI after some anonymous comments on a forum, so you might want to watch what you say either way. Especially now that anti-terror laws mean you can be put away for years for what are basically thought crimes. In practice, cops do often violate the restrictions based on them (most common example, opening up the files on celebrities that commit suicide). At least we know about it (access is logged meticulously), but unfortunately we don't really do anything about it, which is a cautionary tale for anyone supporting giving the government (any government) more access to your data.

The problem I have with routers is that I prefer the adsl/router combo (because buying two devices seems silly), but the product lines in that area seem a lot more crappy, for some reason. Oh, and don't buy anything from Linksys. I've got some of their stuff and it is some of the worst hardware I've used so far.

Related to Mecki's comment about OS X's menu bar, one of the things I always miss when using windows is the alt-click to move a window thing you have in gnome-based UIs (not so sure about KDE, but there's probably an analogue). I move windows around all the time and when you press alt you just have to drag the window, not go hunt the comparably smallish title bar. Saves a lot of effort when working in a dual head setup.

I suppose people with a computer science background have sort of a bias to some problems, such as finding primes of a number, that might look "hard" to anyone with a more trade schooly education. I think, though, if a programmer thinks that's too mathy, there's plenty of problems they're going to run into in their jobs that will give them grief. It might "just" be business programming but that doesn't excuse you from not knowing how to solve one of the very most basic calculation problems an interviewer could ask. If you phrase the problem as such: Make a function that returns false if the number is divisible by any other (natural) number than 1 or itself. You're not seriously suggesting a competent programmer shouldn't be able to do this right?