My G4-800 iBook has lasted at least six hours, perhaps longer.
I'm curious what you use your iBook G4 for and how you get such times. I only use my six month-old iBook G4 800MHz as a wireless terminal (Firefox as the browser and iTerm/ssh for everything else), and from the beginning I've consistently reached a maximum of 4-4.5 hours when using Airport Extreme and seven brightness levels.
My Junghans Carbon radio-controlled watch served me reasonably well for almost four years (and three watchbands and two batteries) before dying. That, plus a recent bonus, are my excuses for looking at new watches. Here's what I'm looking for, with attributes categorized by priority:
MUST HAVE * Analog hands *and* a digital display * Solar * Backlight * Radio-controlled time sync
IMPORTANT * Rugged manufacture (steel or titanium) * Waterproof * Syncs to US and either/both of European and Japanese time signals
WOULD BE NICE * Big, gaudy, Rolex chronograph-like look (lots of mini dials with spinning hands, bezel that turns, etc.) [1] * Leather band [2]
[1] As a six-footer I can wear a big watch if necessary. [2] Yes, I know this likely contradicts my desire for a rugged watch.
So far it looks like some variant of the Japanese-only MRG-2000DJ is the current biggest and baddest Casio Wave Ceptor model, and also fits the above bill. Any other suggestions, whether more or less expensive? And as any contestants will almost certainly be Japan-only models, suggestions on the best way for a non-Japanese speaker to buy one barring having a friend pick one up in Japan? Are there watch equivalents of Dynamism and its imported ultra-small laptops? I'm not afraid of an invalid warranty.
I have a different perspective on Bluetooth phones than the other posters here.
I have a seven month-old Sony Ericsson T610 that T-Mobile *paid* me $100 to take once I signed up for a one-year plan. I moved from Sprint PCS because, as others have mentioned here, Sprint offers pretty much zip in terms of Bluetooth phones *or* affordable data plans. T-Mobile, on the other hand, offers *free, unlimited* GPRS data service with their voice plans, with certain limitations. That's right; as long as you are OK with only having access to ports 80, 110, and some others (443 opened up in the past few months), there is *no need* to pay $20 for the T-Mobile Internet service.
Since then I've happily used the combination of my T610, my Sony Clie UX50, and my iBook G4, all Bluetooth-enabled to get online from pretty much anywhere there's phone service. More than a gimmick, I've used GPRS as my only Internet connection for days at a time. With throughput between 24Kbps and 32Kbps--about as fast or just a little slower than a 33.6K dialup modem--it's of course much slower than Wi-Fi or even a modern 56K dialup connection, but it works and it's free. It's pretty darn neat to be able to SSH into my home Linux box from my Clie, thanks to pssh, a GPLed Palm OS 5-based client, without having to take the phone out of my pocket; it's so small I can keep it there all day, even when I keep my wallet and keys in a desk drawer. (Since port 22 isn't available, I simply tell sshd to also listen to port 110 since I don't run a POP3 server on my machine.) I got a free Jabra Bluetooth headset with the phone and that has worked well enough in the few times I've tried it (like another poster I keep it in my car).
I wish I could say as nice things about the other aspects of the phone. I've had two T610s, and they both drop voice calls like crazy. The first unit would actually *crash and reboot* multiple times per call; the second unit "only" crashes sometimes but still drops calls. Overall I find call quality meaningfully inferior to the vintage Sanyo 4500 I used through Sprint PCS's CDMA network. I don't know whether the fault lies in the phone or the intrinsically inferior GSM network technology; quite possibly some combination of both. Some stupendously obvious features just don't exist; for example, I was astounded recently, when trying to listen to a corporate conference call on a busy street without annoying others, to realize that there is no way to *mute* a call without putting it on hold!
The other benefits of Bluetooth on this phone haven't impressed me very much either. I use jpilot on my Linux box to sync over Wi-Fi with my Clie. I tried using iSync on my iBook instead, but found using Bluetooth as the transport mechanism to be stupendously, agonizingly, painfully slow. Also, three-way synching between the phone, computer, and PDA was a bust because the phone can only hold 500 or so contacts, despite having the memory for many more, and I have 2400 in my Clie. What I do instead is identify the 20 or so contacts I most need on my phone, put them in a "Phone" category on the Clie, then every so often infrared (faster than Bluetooth) beam them over to the phone, overwriting any existing entries. While this works, I then have to recreate any voice dial recordings I've attached to the phone's entries.
Verdict: I love the GPRS and Bluetooth service, but I'd prefer to enjoy such features on a more reliable network and/or phone.
I just started an internship with USGS. I probably would have been laughed at if I asked them to install FireFox.
I'm more fortunate; although the Windows 2000-computers are locked down at the large investment bank I just started at, I was nonetheless able to install Firefox. But since I don't have administrative privileges, I can't install a JRE, and Firefox doesn't know that Flash is on the machine. Suggestions?
About 10-15 years ago, I lived for a summer in San Fransisco. I bought a "muni-pass" which gave me unlimited BART and SF/Metro for ~ $20/month anywhere in SF.(I was a minor at the time - 17 Y.O.)
This was for the buses trolleys, and BART trains.
Nowadays, an adult version of the above pass costs $45/month, and still provides unlimited Muni/BART rides within San Francisco proper. I still think it's something of a ripoff compared to NYC's Metrocard, which provides unlimited rides within a *much* larger geographic bus/subway transit system for only 50% greater cost.
Regularly:
- Reason - Linux Journal - Linux Magazine - Economist - FP
If I happen to be in a bookstore and think about it: - Q - Fortune / Forbes / Money - Liberty
Not a bad list. Mine: * Linux Journal (subscriber since 1996; have a near-complete collection all the way back to issue #2) * The New Yorker (since 1994) * New York magazine (since 2001; keeps me in touch with my home town) * The Economist (off and on, currently on, over the past five years)
Curiously, it doesn't seem to work that way. Once you get past a certain level, geeks end up fitting in without any problems.
For some reason, the cliche comic-book-store hygiene-less tech is never actually all that skilled - second- or third-tier at best.
Amen. I attended a high school that has produced five Nobel Prize winners in the 65 years it's been around. Although I didn't know him well, my class' valedictorian was by all accounts a quite normal guy who dated one of the school's most gorgeous girls even while finishing with a 99/100 GPA. The salutatorian ran track and played drums and had a "mere" 98/100. Obviously, these guys were truly outstanding in every single field. By comparison, the school's contingent of pocket protector-wearing, fashion-disaster, greasy-hair dweebs may each have excelled in a field, perhaps two, but certainly did not do so across the board.
In my experience, the truly exceptionally brilliant are smart enough to realize that social attributes are just as much a part of intelligence as anything else, and have applied their brainpower to develop them.
For those who use the very useful SSH agent sshLogin, I found that I needed to reinstall it after the upgrade, in contrast to the many other OS security updates I've installed since February.
I have running:
SSHd trafic shaping with iptroute2+tc custome firewall script no-ip client tcpdump network syslogd
cnf, can you go into more detail on how are you doing the above with OpenWRT? Especially the traffic shaping. As I've written elsewhere the two issues I had with the firmware was 1) the lack of documentation and 2) a traffic shaping package like Wondershaper.
> Check on ebay, there's plently floating around. > I just got mine last month. Upgraded from a 9500 > to 8500.:)
All kidding aside, is this true? That is, are Radeon 8500s really faster than Radeon 9500s? I have a Radeon 9500 Pro, and if getting my hands on a 8500 would mean better performance than the 2400fps I'm getting with glxgears and 350fps on fgl_glxgears (and, of course, the benefits of a fully open-source driver integrated into Xorg), then I'd bite. In such a case the only thing I'd be giving up is compatibility with DirectX 9, right?
(I've also posted this to wrt54g@yahoogroups.com and alt.internet.wireless.)
I've had a WRT54g v2 since February, and have tried several third-party firmware offerings over the past few months. I have a Comcast 3000/256 cable modem connection, and have been 100% Linux at home for almost nine years. Here's my quick impressions of each:
Sveasoft Samadhi2 - Certainly the most famous alternative. Unfortunately I could *never* get, after repeated tries on multiple occasions, to get either the static DNS or bandwidth management, two of the three primary reasons for using a third-party to work. Static DNS (having the router's DNS server proffer the static DHCP settings as internal IP addresses for machines on my network) works for about 15-30 seconds after a reboot but then suddenly stops. Bandwidth management has never, ever worked for me (and, yes, I'm aware of the bug in at least one Sveasoft version in which the upload and download values got swapped). And of course there's that ridiculous bug that corrupts static DHCP entries. I have no interest in paying Sveasoft for later firmware versions in which I presume these features actually work as advertised; without restarting the disputes on the subject, I am very dubious about the legalities of what James Ewing is doing with GPL code.
Enterprise WRT 0.2 beta1 - Based on the Sveasoft Samadhi2 source code and also integrating the NoCatSplash authentication portal, which I don't need. Same results as with Samadhi2 regarding (non)functionality of bandwidth management or static DNS and the static DHCP bug.
OpenWRT b4 - Got errors in the compilation process (not the make not being able to find two tarfiles; I downloaded those manually) so used a binary I found online. Promising, and the package system is quite elegant, but the the lack of substantial documentation and (more important) the lack of a bandwidth management package also made it a nonstarter.
Wifi-Box 2.00.8.1pre6-i - The firmware I use now. Static DHCP and static DNS work right and work well. SNMP support is useful. No bandwidth management, but then it doesn't promise it or anything else it can't deliver. Having the source code on SourceForge offers at least the promise of future improvements by someone, if not the incommunicado-at-present author.
I tried the experiment myself, and Dr. Deutsch is right! Through the holes, I saw images from many parallel universes, worlds in which Columbus discovered Europe, Lincoln shot President Booth, and Germany and Japan saved the world from Nazi America and Fascist Britain in WWII. (However, Michael Jackson is a disfigured weirdo pervert in every parallel world. Must be a fundamental physical law, like the speed of light.)
> any-country-in-the-world-ian: "Tell me, what do > Americans *really* think of ?" > american: "we don't".
And that, of course, is nonsense. We thought a lot about Germany and Japan during WWII. We thought a lot about Korea, Vietnam, NATO, China, and the Soviet Union during the Cold War. Today we think a lot about Iraq, North Korea, Germany, France, Britain, Japan, and a whole bunch of other countries.
By comparison, Canada doesn't matter. Let me repeat that. Canada. Doesn't. Matter. And that rankles Canadians much more than it would if we merely disliked them like North Korea. Once again: Canada. Doesn't. Matter.
PS - Any reply to this posting that mentions "UN peacekeepers" or "#1 rated country in UN survey" ipso facto proves my point.
SubtleNuance wrote: > Canada *dosnt have* an "inferitority complex" as > much as USAians are incapable of seeing us > WITHOUT *their* Superiority Complex -- get it? > The USAians are projecting... and it speaks more > to your hubris than our opinion of the world -- > get it?
The silly comment quoted above reminds me of my favorite Canadian joke:
Canadian to American: "Tell me, what do Americans *really* think of Canada?"
American to Canadian: "We don't."
> I ran the online version of TurboTax just fine > on my Gentoo box running Firebird/fox
Ditto. I've used TurboTax online for the past four years, always from a Linux box. Other than how the price jumped $10 from the $59.90 of last year, I have no complaints. In fact, this time around the application works without any hitches under Firebird/fox, unlike the odd occasional hitches of the past.
I've done my taxes by hand before; as others note, it's really not that hard. That said, it'd have been tough to finish the entire return, federal and state, in 90 minutes flat as I did last night without a computer.
Speaking of which, here's how to ease the pain of tax season:
At the start of each year, go to a stationary store and buy one of those accordion file folders. Label it with the year. Also write down your car's beginning-of-year mileage somewhere, perhaps on the folder itself.
Put everything relevant (sales receipts, charity receipts, bill stubs, pay stubs, product refunds, uncashed checks, etc., etc.) into the folder, either chrologically or by category.
When the year is up don't stick the folder in the closet yet; keep it around a few more months, because now you'll have to file the incoming W-2s, 1099-INTs, 1099-DIVs, and other such forms from your bank, brokerage, employer, and favorite charities. Many credit card companies will also send end-of-year statements categorizing everything you've used the card for.
At tax time, pull everything you need out from the folder. By being organized you'll be done a lot sooner than you might think.
Stick a copy of the completed returns in the folder. Now stick the folder in the closet.
The above steps are of course not revolutionary, but it's remarkable how so few people will actually follow them and thus self-inflict enormous pain every April.
Every Sunday, it's time for church. As a dedicated sleeping-iner, it's always been tough for me to get up and out of bed on Sundays, but it always proves worthwhile.
Since I bought my iBook G4 in February I've been using it a lot more than my Linux server. That said, I still run everything except Firebird/Firefox on the server and use the iBook as a SSH-based wireless remote terminal (GNU Screen is, like, the greatest tool ever), so I can't quite call it my "primary" machine per se.
While y'all are arguing about the merits of manned space travel, let me just brag about my and Prof. Weinberg's common alma mater, The Bronx High School of Science. Prof. Weinberg is one of five Nobelists in the school's 65-year history, more than most colleges (and, more importantly, three more than Stuyvesant). In fact, both Weinberg and Sheldon Glashow are members of the class of '50, making that graduating class possibly unique in world history. I wonder if their classmates had any idea they were in the presence of future greatness?
Speaking as a former semifinalist from the silicon valley, the reason why California doesn't have the kind of showing that states like NY have is that basically, no one, not the students, teachers, nor the potential mentors in the local universities (i.e. Stanford & Berkeley) know about or care about the competition.
Yep. Just today asked a friend at church who teaches biology at Palo Alto HS (and who has taught AP Biology in the past) whether she'd ever heard of the STS. Not a clue.
Here's a slightly rewritten version of a posting I made on Slate's Fray forum about the article in question.
------
Although I never competed myself, I did graduate from Bronx Science, one of the several schools--Stuyvesant and lately Ward Melville on Long Island are the others--that have historically dominated the Intel (formerly Westinghouse) Science Talent Search.
New York State dominates the contest because of two key reasons:
Awareness. Most of the country outside the New York metro area is barely aware of the Intel contest, although it is unquestionably the closest thing to a Nobel Prize or Rhodes Scholarship for high school students. That includes the most competitive non-New York City public schools around, such as Palo Alto and Gunn High Schools (CA), Princeton HS (NJ), and Thomas Jefferson (VA). (Thanks to affirmative action, Boston Latin (MA) simply isn't as elite as it used to be.) Most of the non-New York metro schools represented this year won't have another entry for years, if ever; for example, the finalist this year from Redwood City CA (where I happen to live, actually), who didn't finish in the top ten, is the first northern California finalist in three years! Science, Stuy, and (again, lately) Ward Melvile make sure they have solid competitors every single year.
Scale. Science and Stuy each have 2500-3000 students. The elite Northeastern and other private schools--whose student bodies are perhaps of the Science/Stuy caliber--are by comparison simply far too small to consistently produce competitive entries; the Nightingale-Bamford (NY) Intel finalist of a few years back won't be repeated anytime soon. Also, many of them are located too far away from the research universities that often provide the necessary facilities and mentorship.
Science was the most competitive environment I've ever experienced, and that includes the Ivy League school I graduated from and the bulge bracket investment bank I joined after college. There's a reason why in a little more than 60 years it has produced five Nobel winners, more than most colleges.
Two comets? No problem. We'll just send the Messiah ion spacecraft to destroy one of them, and the Freedom and Independence experimental space shuttles after the other.
It could very well be that you make it through the coding that has been difficult for you and emerge with a CS degree. If so, all the better.
But as many of the other replies here have said, there absolutely are alternatives to a CS degree if you like computers but don't necessarily like computers "in that way." I majored in history and Spanish in college while working my way through school as an employee of the university's computing group (and knew more about the nuts and bolts of Solaris and Linux than the actual CS majors that were my friends and colleagues).
Ever since college I've worked as an investment banker, specializing in the software industry. I can't tell you how helpful it's been to have known ahead of time what a JVM is (especially during the two years I covered BEA Systems).
I wrote earlier: > The lack of same is the main reason why I chose to > go for a Sony Clie UX50 as my fourth Palm OS PDA > in seven years.
That picture linked elsewhere of the guy sshing away on his Zaurus reminded me that there are decent ssh apps for Palm OS nowadays, namely pssh, which is open source, and TuSSH, which is not.
Each has advantages and disadvantages, and both certainly are quite inferior in terms of functionality and the underlying OS versus real OpenSSH on a Zaurus, but the bottom line is that with my UX50 and Bluetooth-enabled T-Mobile phone I can now securely log into my home Linux box from anywhere in the US there's T-Mobile phone service or a Wi-Fi hotspot, for just the price of a voice plan. How cool is that?
Slashdot Mirror
I'm curious what you use your iBook G4 for and how you get such times. I only use my six month-old iBook G4 800MHz as a wireless terminal (Firefox as the browser and iTerm/ssh for everything else), and from the beginning I've consistently reached a maximum of 4-4.5 hours when using Airport Extreme and seven brightness levels.
My Junghans Carbon radio-controlled watch served me reasonably well for almost four years (and three watchbands and two batteries) before dying. That, plus a recent bonus, are my excuses for looking at new watches. Here's what I'm looking for, with attributes categorized by priority:
MUST HAVE
* Analog hands *and* a digital display
* Solar
* Backlight
* Radio-controlled time sync
IMPORTANT
* Rugged manufacture (steel or titanium)
* Waterproof
* Syncs to US and either/both of European and Japanese time signals
WOULD BE NICE
* Big, gaudy, Rolex chronograph-like look (lots of mini dials with spinning hands, bezel that turns, etc.) [1]
* Leather band [2]
[1] As a six-footer I can wear a big watch if necessary.
[2] Yes, I know this likely contradicts my desire for a rugged watch.
So far it looks like some variant of the Japanese-only MRG-2000DJ is the current biggest and baddest Casio Wave Ceptor model, and also fits the above bill. Any other suggestions, whether more or less expensive? And as any contestants will almost certainly be Japan-only models, suggestions on the best way for a non-Japanese speaker to buy one barring having a friend pick one up in Japan? Are there watch equivalents of Dynamism and its imported ultra-small laptops? I'm not afraid of an invalid warranty.
I have a different perspective on Bluetooth phones than the other posters here.
I have a seven month-old Sony Ericsson T610 that T-Mobile *paid* me $100 to take once I signed up for a one-year plan. I moved from Sprint PCS because, as others have mentioned here, Sprint offers pretty much zip in terms of Bluetooth phones *or* affordable data plans. T-Mobile, on the other hand, offers *free, unlimited* GPRS data service with their voice plans, with certain limitations. That's right; as long as you are OK with only having access to ports 80, 110, and some others (443 opened up in the past few months), there is *no need* to pay $20 for the T-Mobile Internet service.
Since then I've happily used the combination of my T610, my Sony Clie UX50, and my iBook G4, all Bluetooth-enabled to get online from pretty much anywhere there's phone service. More than a gimmick, I've used GPRS as my only Internet connection for days at a time. With throughput between 24Kbps and 32Kbps--about as fast or just a little slower than a 33.6K dialup modem--it's of course much slower than Wi-Fi or even a modern 56K dialup connection, but it works and it's free. It's pretty darn neat to be able to SSH into my home Linux box from my Clie, thanks to pssh, a GPLed Palm OS 5-based client, without having to take the phone out of my pocket; it's so small I can keep it there all day, even when I keep my wallet and keys in a desk drawer. (Since port 22 isn't available, I simply tell sshd to also listen to port 110 since I don't run a POP3 server on my machine.) I got a free Jabra Bluetooth headset with the phone and that has worked well enough in the few times I've tried it (like another poster I keep it in my car).
I wish I could say as nice things about the other aspects of the phone. I've had two T610s, and they both drop voice calls like crazy. The first unit would actually *crash and reboot* multiple times per call; the second unit "only" crashes sometimes but still drops calls. Overall I find call quality meaningfully inferior to the vintage Sanyo 4500 I used through Sprint PCS's CDMA network. I don't know whether the fault lies in the phone or the intrinsically inferior GSM network technology; quite possibly some combination of both. Some stupendously obvious features just don't exist; for example, I was astounded recently, when trying to listen to a corporate conference call on a busy street without annoying others, to realize that there is no way to *mute* a call without putting it on hold!
The other benefits of Bluetooth on this phone haven't impressed me very much either. I use jpilot on my Linux box to sync over Wi-Fi with my Clie. I tried using iSync on my iBook instead, but found using Bluetooth as the transport mechanism to be stupendously, agonizingly, painfully slow. Also, three-way synching between the phone, computer, and PDA was a bust because the phone can only hold 500 or so contacts, despite having the memory for many more, and I have 2400 in my Clie. What I do instead is identify the 20 or so contacts I most need on my phone, put them in a "Phone" category on the Clie, then every so often infrared (faster than Bluetooth) beam them over to the phone, overwriting any existing entries. While this works, I then have to recreate any voice dial recordings I've attached to the phone's entries.
Verdict: I love the GPRS and Bluetooth service, but I'd prefer to enjoy such features on a more reliable network and/or phone.
I'm more fortunate; although the Windows 2000-computers are locked down at the large investment bank I just started at, I was nonetheless able to install Firefox. But since I don't have administrative privileges, I can't install a JRE, and Firefox doesn't know that Flash is on the machine. Suggestions?
Nowadays, an adult version of the above pass costs $45/month, and still provides unlimited Muni/BART rides within San Francisco proper. I still think it's something of a ripoff compared to NYC's Metrocard, which provides unlimited rides within a *much* larger geographic bus/subway transit system for only 50% greater cost.
Not a bad list. Mine:
* Linux Journal (subscriber since 1996; have a near-complete collection all the way back to issue #2)
* The New Yorker (since 1994)
* New York magazine (since 2001; keeps me in touch with my home town)
* The Economist (off and on, currently on, over the past five years)
Amen. I attended a high school that has produced five Nobel Prize winners in the 65 years it's been around. Although I didn't know him well, my class' valedictorian was by all accounts a quite normal guy who dated one of the school's most gorgeous girls even while finishing with a 99/100 GPA. The salutatorian ran track and played drums and had a "mere" 98/100. Obviously, these guys were truly outstanding in every single field. By comparison, the school's contingent of pocket protector-wearing, fashion-disaster, greasy-hair dweebs may each have excelled in a field, perhaps two, but certainly did not do so across the board.
In my experience, the truly exceptionally brilliant are smart enough to realize that social attributes are just as much a part of intelligence as anything else, and have applied their brainpower to develop them.
For those who use the very useful SSH agent sshLogin, I found that I needed to reinstall it after the upgrade, in contrast to the many other OS security updates I've installed since February.
cnf, can you go into more detail on how are you doing the above with OpenWRT? Especially the traffic shaping. As I've written elsewhere the two issues I had with the firmware was 1) the lack of documentation and 2) a traffic shaping package like Wondershaper.
> Check on ebay, there's plently floating around. :)
> I just got mine last month. Upgraded from a 9500
> to 8500.
All kidding aside, is this true? That is, are Radeon 8500s really faster than Radeon 9500s? I have a Radeon 9500 Pro, and if getting my hands on a 8500 would mean better performance than the 2400fps I'm getting with glxgears and 350fps on fgl_glxgears (and, of course, the benefits of a fully open-source driver integrated into Xorg), then I'd bite. In such a case the only thing I'd be giving up is compatibility with DirectX 9, right?
I've had a WRT54g v2 since February, and have tried several third-party firmware offerings over the past few months. I have a Comcast 3000/256 cable modem connection, and have been 100% Linux at home for almost nine years. Here's my quick impressions of each:
I tried the experiment myself, and Dr. Deutsch is right! Through the holes, I saw images from many parallel universes, worlds in which Columbus discovered Europe, Lincoln shot President Booth, and Germany and Japan saved the world from Nazi America and Fascist Britain in WWII. (However, Michael Jackson is a disfigured weirdo pervert in every parallel world. Must be a fundamental physical law, like the speed of light.)
> any-country-in-the-world-ian: "Tell me, what do
> Americans *really* think of ?"
> american: "we don't".
And that, of course, is nonsense. We thought a lot about Germany and Japan during WWII. We thought a lot about Korea, Vietnam, NATO, China, and the Soviet Union during the Cold War. Today we think a lot about Iraq, North Korea, Germany, France, Britain, Japan, and a whole bunch of other countries.
By comparison, Canada doesn't matter. Let me repeat that. Canada. Doesn't. Matter. And that rankles Canadians much more than it would if we merely disliked them like North Korea. Once again: Canada. Doesn't. Matter.
PS - Any reply to this posting that mentions "UN peacekeepers" or "#1 rated country in UN survey" ipso facto proves my point.
> Canada *dosnt have* an "inferitority complex" as
> much as USAians are incapable of seeing us
> WITHOUT *their* Superiority Complex -- get it?
> The USAians are projecting... and it speaks more
> to your hubris than our opinion of the world --
> get it?
The silly comment quoted above reminds me of my favorite Canadian joke:
> on my Gentoo box running Firebird/fox
Ditto. I've used TurboTax online for the past four years, always from a Linux box. Other than how the price jumped $10 from the $59.90 of last year, I have no complaints. In fact, this time around the application works without any hitches under Firebird/fox, unlike the odd occasional hitches of the past.
I've done my taxes by hand before; as others note, it's really not that hard. That said, it'd have been tough to finish the entire return, federal and state, in 90 minutes flat as I did last night without a computer.
Speaking of which, here's how to ease the pain of tax season:
The above steps are of course not revolutionary, but it's remarkable how so few people will actually follow them and thus self-inflict enormous pain every April.
Every Sunday, it's time for church. As a dedicated sleeping-iner, it's always been tough for me to get up and out of bed on Sundays, but it always proves worthwhile.
Since I bought my iBook G4 in February I've been using it a lot more than my Linux server. That said, I still run everything except Firebird/Firefox on the server and use the iBook as a SSH-based wireless remote terminal (GNU Screen is, like, the greatest tool ever), so I can't quite call it my "primary" machine per se.
While y'all are arguing about the merits of manned space travel, let me just brag about my and Prof. Weinberg's common alma mater, The Bronx High School of Science. Prof. Weinberg is one of five Nobelists in the school's 65-year history, more than most colleges (and, more importantly, three more than Stuyvesant). In fact, both Weinberg and Sheldon Glashow are members of the class of '50, making that graduating class possibly unique in world history. I wonder if their classmates had any idea they were in the presence of future greatness?
Yep. Just today asked a friend at church who teaches biology at Palo Alto HS (and who has taught AP Biology in the past) whether she'd ever heard of the STS. Not a clue.
------
Although I never competed myself, I did graduate from Bronx Science, one of the several schools--Stuyvesant and lately Ward Melville on Long Island are the others--that have historically dominated the Intel (formerly Westinghouse) Science Talent Search.
New York State dominates the contest because of two key reasons:
Science was the most competitive environment I've ever experienced, and that includes the Ivy League school I graduated from and the bulge bracket investment bank I joined after college. There's a reason why in a little more than 60 years it has produced five Nobel winners, more than most colleges.
So that's why I got less spam than usual on Friday!
I really hope this doesn't mean the Pentagon/CIA joint data mining operation to catch Osama isn't running on an AS/400.
Clearly, we need a Beowulf cluster in order to catch bin Laden.
Two comets? No problem. We'll just send the Messiah ion spacecraft to destroy one of them, and the Freedom and Independence experimental space shuttles after the other.
It could very well be that you make it through the coding that has been difficult for you and emerge with a CS degree. If so, all the better.
But as many of the other replies here have said, there absolutely are alternatives to a CS degree if you like computers but don't necessarily like computers "in that way." I majored in history and Spanish in college while working my way through school as an employee of the university's computing group (and knew more about the nuts and bolts of Solaris and Linux than the actual CS majors that were my friends and colleagues).
Ever since college I've worked as an investment banker, specializing in the software industry. I can't tell you how helpful it's been to have known ahead of time what a JVM is (especially during the two years I covered BEA Systems).
I wrote earlier:
> The lack of same is the main reason why I chose to
> go for a Sony Clie UX50 as my fourth Palm OS PDA
> in seven years.
That picture linked elsewhere of the guy sshing away on his Zaurus reminded me that there are decent ssh apps for Palm OS nowadays, namely pssh, which is open source, and TuSSH, which is not.
Each has advantages and disadvantages, and both certainly are quite inferior in terms of functionality and the underlying OS versus real OpenSSH on a Zaurus, but the bottom line is that with my UX50 and Bluetooth-enabled T-Mobile phone I can now securely log into my home Linux box from anywhere in the US there's T-Mobile phone service or a Wi-Fi hotspot, for just the price of a voice plan. How cool is that?