In my case, I'm going back-packing for 5 days; we have paper maps and compasses, but I want to bring my phone along and see how it does. I have a small, portable solar charger that I'm bringing as well. Here's what I've discovered:
First, I'm taking my Nexus One. I have to take the phone with me anyway; I just won't leave it in the car when we hit the trail. With the screen off most of the time, but with the GPS on and a tracking application running, I got about 7 hours of continuous running before the battery hit critical. All wireless was off; theoretically, the only things running during that time were the CPU and the GPS chip. I used the display for maybe 20 minutes during that whole time. I expect that, with some coddling, this amount of time would be serviceable -- and it'd certainly be a fair emergency device.
The Nexus One compass -- the magnetic one -- is way accurate! I walked around a bunch with a Suunto Global magnetic compass, and the Nexus kept up admirably!
I think I tried every free or demo GPS map program in the market, and the one I settled on was OruxMaps. RMaps and Maveric are interesting and have useful features, but OruxMaps turned out to be the easiest to build up maps of my destination with, and it provided all of the basic features that I wanted. It has a built-in map builder which takes a little fiddling to figure out, but is pretty easy to use once you do. I did this all over Wifi (which is going to be faster than cell data, anyway), so no cell plan is required (although a WAP and internet access still is).
The display is the biggest battery drain, obviously. With that on constantly, you're not going to get more than an hour of battery out of it. However, the Nexus is smaller than any GPS with a color screen that I've seen; attach enough external battery pack (through USB cable) to make it as big as your average Garmin, and I think the battery life would be comparable. As others have said, the quickest and easiest thing to do is just buy a dedicated GPS; you'll get less for your money, but if that's all he wants to use it for, I don't think it's worth the extra effort to set an Android device up as a dedicated GPS.
I don't know about other people with 4 year CS degrees, but I took three years of calculus (in addition to numerous other math classes); is the poster suggesting that either vocational schools cram four years of math into a two year program, or that math isn't an important part of computer science? Probably the latter. Which would explain a lot of things I've seen in industry over the years, actually.
--- SER
I've been running a Transcend 64GB SSD (ca. $200, PATA -- not high-end, definitely) in my laptop for 10 months. It's on all the time, except when I suspend it for transportation. It is running Ubuntu, and I've got a current uptime of 30 days. I'm a software developer; I download and install betas of OpenOffice, I upgrade Netbeans and Eclipse regularly, update and build software (including one work project that's over 1GB built), and generally trash the hard drive. I haven't had any trouble with it, at all.
I also installed an OCZ 64GB SATA SSD in my wife's laptop since mid-June (so, 4.5 months). Hers is more often in sleep mode than in use, since she has a separate, work, laptop. She uses it for writing, homework, browsing, and so on -- light duty. No problems there, either.
Neither laptop is configured to run
I'm happy with mine. I don't notice the speed increase, if there is any; I mostly went this route to (a) reduce the heat, (b) reduce power consumption, and (c) reduce noise. My wife's Acer Timeline is particularly silent, as the CPU fan never comes on. I don't know if I'd put SSDs in my server; HDs are too ridiculously cheap, and I don't need extra speed for my modest music/file/web server uses. But, so far, I've been entirely satisfied with their reliability.
I do back both machines up nightly, just in case.
Unfortunately, when you install Girlfriend 1.0, there's always conflicts. Also, Wife 1.0
You installed Girlfriend 1.0 after Wife 1.0? What, was Wife 1.0 mail-order? No wonder you have problems.
GNU Screen is, of course, always an option if you can use a command line text editor like vim or emacs.
Gobby is pretty decent, although it's a bit more limited as an IDE.
I've always preferred NetBeans for this sort of thing, although nothing yet satisfies all of my peer programming requirements. I need an editor that lets one person follow another, and take turns editing, not something that just lets two people edit the same file at the same time. I'd argue whether the latter is of any use at all.
--- SER
Now, 5 years later I have a large collection of ogg files that are essentially useless. No one in the mainstream uses ogg, despite the superiority and price.
Weird. I started out the same, but I'm still ripping to Vorbis ogg. When I first started, I easily found the Cowon D2, which supported ogg. When I bought my Android G1, hey! Guess what? The native media player supported ogg, too. A quick Google search turns up this page, which lists no fewer than 59 flash based portable media players that will play oggs, and 38 hard-drive based portable media players that do, too. There are 5 smartphone platforms that support it (some of those through third-party apps for the phones). The last two DVD players I've bought have come with support for
There are many mainstream companies that support ogg. Some don't. "No one," however, is simply incorrect.
--- SER
Don't panic.