@Sean - Avatars are something users demand, not developers. Tell users they can't have something they want, and watch your killer app be ignored. All forum software that has avatars has ways for cantankerous individual users to disable seeing avatars (and images, markup, and other "chrome"), which is far preferable to telling the majority that want it to go screw off.

My only problem with it is that the threading is abjectly terrible. When people reply to a post, it gives nothing but the poster's name, with no hint of which post or what content until you click on it. Even the first line of post would be a massive improvement and job the memory more than enough. For people who quote a whole post unmodified, I'd argue that should get the same treatment: Collapse to the first line, allow click to full post. Only edited quote should be shown. I've come to appreciate the way my email client collapses all lines from a previous poster, but if you're doing more than skimming, that's not good. This is a point where everyone is going to want different things; I like things collapsed, others will like to see point-by-point arguments and rebuttals. So it goes; design sucks.

@DanM, It's really not hard to create a 4:3 region in a 16:9 monitor, with a spare chunk of screen for something else, using something like GridMove: http://jgpaiva.dcmembers.com/gridmove.html (My favorite template is axrusik's, with most windows at positions 4 and 6.) Fortunately, software developers are (finally) getting the idea to get rid of excess top and bottom chrome and either move information to the side or separate it into new windows - browser vendors pushing the hardest. With any luck, Office suites will move into the widescreen world in, oh, five years or so. Sigh.

@Christopher, thanks. The extra cost is definitely worth being able to take it back if something's wrong, without shipping it across the world. The particular model they have is DVI/HDMI only, but I hope they get one with a built-in DP (converter cables are so expensive), because DVI is rapidly going the way of the Dodo. I have seen that older HDMI can drive it at full size at sub-30Hz, and current Ivy Bridge HDMI can drive it at full 60+Hz, if the monitor uses HDMI 1.4. I've really been itching to get one of these, but I can't settle on an exact model until I decide on a particular laptop, so I know which inputs to get. @DarkImmortal, pretty much anything LED backlit looks nearly that good these days. We're a long way from the dark ages when CCFL bled through every corner and contrast ratios of 600:1 were awesome; now that's the absolute minimum and I see monitors with 10,000:1 coming out. These ones are about 1000:1 typically. The main downside instead is color calibration, if you need that.

It's pretty awesome to see the PicoPSU being used for serious tasks, since so much video decoding can be done via GPU now. My next big project is going to be finding the most powerful video card I can fit into 80 or 120 W (the other PicoPSU options) since I like to lightly game as well. I'll probably give up quad-core and go back to dual, I've never used my HT/Game PC for serious encoding and that would actually give me more headroom for my main tasks. Man, I wish there was a way to flag all this comment spam above.

Some of you guys are pretty serious about the Church of the Holy Algorithm. Which is better for you and your clients: writing software that costs $1000 but requires a $500 hardware upgrade, or writing software that requires no upgrade but costs $4000 because you spent four times as long to wring that last 10% of optimization out of it? Remember, you could have spent that extra 75% overhead on improving the product in more tangible ways or creating new software. Pride is good, but pragmatism is better. Now, that doesn't explain those companies that charge $10,000 more than the old version for something that requires $4,000 in hardware upgrades, despite having outsourced their entire development staff and fired their testers. Some companies are just too dumb to live, and yet somehow keep making money.

You can use multiple classes in a class attribute, separated by a space, in order to achieve a certain level of separation. But when it comes to things like colors, rounded corners, and the like, unless you want to keep the overall theme the same for each set of widgets across every style, you can't just tag them with a class representing that. Sort of what CSS was supposed to get rid of.