My coworker picked up:
http://accessories.us.dell.com/sna/productdetail.aspx?c=us&l=en&cs=19&sku=224-9949&baynote_bnrank=7&baynote_irrank=0&~ck=baynoteSearch
This monitor looks rediculously crazy large, but absolutely awesome every time I walk by his desk.

I picked up an XPS 15 which supports mini-display port (which I dongled to DVI) and HDMI. At least with my video chip and Linux, I can run both external heads at the same time (not all three though, so I suppose only 2 internal DAC's). I think there's some inspirons that have dual headed docks, but I really haven't looked into it since getting mine. I'm pretty sure that Mini-display port can be dongled to VGA, but at least on linux it was always flaky for me.

A co-worker and I both bought XPS-15's at the same time. Mine was an I7 and his an I5. His comp took a dive after two days and mine has been fine. Anyways, for warantee, they made him pay for shipping to them (not sure if this is standard or not) and he'd have to wait until it was all repaired before getting it back. Since he was actually using the laptop for real work and all, he just returned it and decided to buy something local.

Really, almost all of those pre-requisites are mitigated with a system with a good dock and a healthy set of peripherals. If I want a portable laptop (not really much a concern for most developers who work in a cube 99% of the time) I'd at least like a dock so that I can easily leave the crap behind. My big MUST in a computer is at least decent dual monitor support and enough RAM / horsepower so that I don't feel bogged down doing day to day work.

I've got an XPS-15 and it has a great 1980x1080 panel. If you're seriously considering a non-trivial outlay, it may be worth your time. The only thing is the laptop isn't super light, so not the best traveller.

Um, how about an XPS 15? I bought my pre-sandbridge fully loaded last Feb 2011

Core I7
8GB ram
500MB (non-sata)
2GB unshared discrete Nvidia video (dual external tuners) -- 1980x1080 native panel screen (gloss, but oh well)
Price: $1600cad Price now is probably closer to $1000
Running Fedora 15/16 (17 soon) and besides a small niggle with the video (doesn't boot two external heads, so I need to turn one of them on when I'm in X)

I've since upgraded to a 160 SATA, but the rest is great.

The thing works very well, and is quite comparable to my co-worker's $3000 (new) sandybridge enabled Macbook Pro.

robots.txt grumpy, if you don't want to join the link economy.

Google, apple, or any company, organization, etc.. If API's are implicitely copyrighted by definition, all open standards are suspect, all transparency, who the hell knows what happens with the concept of fair use.

The other thought was that Google's web page has never has been an API. Its an end user access mechanism to their service (which hosts a collection of useful information). If you want to use their service, you abide by their TOS which specifically forbits scraping. I've never signed an NDA for using a programming language, but it bet if I did, I'd be just as liable for breaking the terms of use as any Google scraper would be for abusing Google's service.

I'm sure you're more or less correct in regards to smart pointers, but with one caveat. In Java, circular dependencies (regardless of how nested) will always be GC'd eventually unless they're hard linked to a heap object hard-linked to a working area on a live thread. We don't care about crazy inter-dependencies that would normally cause reference counter based pointers to leak.

In Java, you really really don't care about how memory gets allocated and removed unless you're doing very non-trivial performance sensitive work, which is generally not the case when one chooses Java as a starting platform to work in. That said, More vetrain programmers will be able to mitigate most bottlenecks relating to object construction/deconstruction with various techniques (constants, reusable 'hold' objects, weak references for well behaved caching, only allocating objects when they're really going to be used, etc..). Nothing here is specific to java, but you just have fewer avenues as a developer to micro-optimize or shoot your foot off, which has and always will be the Java tradeoff.

I forget if it ever got implemented or not yet (maybe in Java 8) they were removing method scoped variables from the heap allocation which makes a billion little heap allocations (and hence fewer and simpler GC's) events a lot more tolerable.

Plus, coming from a long time convert to Java, once you've coded Java for a while, you have to be pretty off your rocker to make actual memory leaks. I mean really really off your rocker. There are times that caches stick around much longer, or you have an engrossing singleton floating around because a newbie doesn't understand anti-patterns but by and large that is a NON-PROBLEM. I've spent maybe 10 minutes this year thinking about memory management, firstly because I don't have the same performance pressure that most C/C++ programs seems to require (you guys are all nuts or game/embedded developers), and second because it is soo hard to actually cause hard-links to data you expected to throw away.

"You can call your implementation of the Java language Java if you comply with the specification."
And get it tested with the TCK, which was the original cluster F*CK with Apache and the JCP to begin with, because they would only allow the software to be tested if they signed field of use restrictions which Apache wasn't/couldn't abide by.