Now I can understand that the BBC felt the need to fill the article with stupid comparisons, but why can't the summary here just replace them with ellipses for the sake of the presumably more technical readership here? One would think that the typical slashdot reader would understand 600 Mrpm just fine and wouldn't need such twaddle as "This spin speed is half a million times faster than a domestic washing machine and more than a thousand times faster than a dental drill" for edification.

Yeah, yeah, I know. I'm just old and bitter. Now get off of my lawn.

If you can't follow a simple style guideline, what does that say about the rest of your code? When reviewing code, if I start to see a pattern of not adhering to the coding standards, I'll kick it back immediately. Why? Well, if you can't figure that out, then I don't expect you can figure out whatever algorithm you're working on either.

Coding standards are in place to enforce consistency throughout a code base and to save developer time. When reading code, you shouldn't have to be scanning for how things are indented or whether or not a bug is caused by a dangling else, you should be able to focus on the code. Looking through inconsistently formatted code takes additional time and effort - not much, but scale to a few thousand developers over a period of years, and that's a serious amount of wasted effort.

As others have said, if you want to write code your way, do it on your own time.

The low-tech kind. When learning Russian I was able to memorize a new wordlist (40-50 words) in 10-20 minutes after having written them all out on flash cards. The writing itself was a major part of the learning process. As for retention once learned, a lot of practice is really the only way. Reading out loud is actually fairly helpful, and conversation is the very best.

Maybe my brain has been drained, too, but, if all the educated people are leaving the US, wouldn't that be a good old regular brain drain and not a reverse brain drain?

...is to use the md5 sum (expressed in sexagesimal, of course) of the MAC address of the secondary NIC, prepended with an "n" for legibility. Simple, logical, and useful.

...in the middle of summer with a broken air conditioner and a RAID whose power supply kept beeping loudly because it was sensitive to the fluctuations in voltage provided by our loud diesel generator parked just outside. I was coding up an interface to an Access '97 database on stripped down Win2k running on a very dirty laptop (mud made from the very fine dust I was breathing combined with the sweat dripping off my fingers would occasionally cause a key to stop working) in Perl using OLE, with *no* internet access and little documentation. Funny thing was, I actually was having a pretty good time.

That's one of the cool things about virtual machines: physical addresses in a VM are, in fact, virtual addresses. And anyways, I'm not sure about Xen and friends, but vmware has its own BIOS and own SMM code, and taking control of one VM's SMM (which none of these exploits can do, so it's a moot point) wouldn't affect the rest of of the host system at all.

for those who don't want to RTFA: http://www.cdsmodel.com/