Don't you have a medical librarian for that sort of thing?

I'm a lawyer and I never once have regretted tossing out any piece of paper that can easily be located in the library or on Westlaw. If you save all that stuff, you will spend more time saving it than you spend using it and, even then, it will be harder to find it when you need it than it would be if you just went back to the library.

The most important knowledge winds up in your head or can be found in a few important reference works. For everything else, there are professionals who organize it and make it easy to find through databases and catalogs.

To the extent that you DO need to keep things, do keep it very simple. Anything too complicated goes unused. In this vein, the filesystem works well. It's hard to forget how it works, it's easily backed up, and it doesn't get obsolete.

It's pretty much impossible to come out of a store with a matte screen laptop. It seems most of the consumer models are glossy now. (A recent exception was the eeepc; I don't know if that's changed.)

I've bought five laptops for personal use. Four were matte. Only the oldest of those was marketed for consumers. The more recent three have been enterprise models because all the consumer models have been glossy.

The fifth laptop was a Macbook. I used it for a few months. OS X had its pluses and minuses, but the matte screen was such a failure from a usability standpoint that I sold the device on ebay. Last time I looked it seemed as though one has to pay $2000 to get a matte Macbook--that, or put on some aftermarket film. I'm thus priced out of Macs.

I noticed Lenovo is selling a new ultraportable Thinkpad, the X100e, and they're selling the matte screen as a feature. I laughed. Now it's a feature for a laptop to come with a screen that's actually usable.

Nope, I haven't been in that situation a single time. I saw how ridiculously expensive those cables are in the store, so I went online and found them at Monoprice. You can pick your color and exact length and it's shipped fast at a great price.

Honestly I can't see any difference between HDMI and the old 3-piece analog component cable, even for HD. HDMI is worth it only because it's easier to plug in. That, and my motherboard integrated graphics has HDMI out.

Any display manager can do this on Linux. Using good ol' xdm on Debian, just edit /etc/X11/xdm/Xservers and have xdm start an X server on multiple virtual terminals. Typically :1 will be ctrl-alt-F8; :2 will be F9, etc. If you start an xdm on multiple terminals and just switch to a new one when someone new needs to log in, you'll be covered. (What I don't know offhand is if there is a way to arbitrarily start a new X server by hitting a key, rather than having to configure a set number of servers ahead of time.)

In your home, if you have, say, 4 users, you can agree that each user has a particular vt.

On my desktop I have ctrl-alt-F12 load up a "guest" account with xfce. Once the guest logs out, root removes the home directory and drops in a clean new one. The guest automatically loads up firefox. It's great for visitors who get rather confused when they saw my old xmonad desktop. (my current awesome is a bit less confusing, at least.)

Often it seems that newer programs implement newer functionality, when really the old Unix programs were doing the same thing twenty years ago.

My IT department feels that way, but it does not stop with hardware upgrades. We are not to touch any of the software installed on the machine, period. We are warned that installing software or hooking up unauthorized equipment can subject us to disciplinary action.

Maybe the poster's IT department doesn't care if he installs stuff. If it does care, my advice is not to fiddle with the machine. My work computer has only IE 7. It's a piece of junk and makes it hard to do my job sometimes. That's not my problem. If my employer wants me to have a better browser, the IT people will install it. Otherwise, my productivity will suffer with IE 7. It's not my job to manage the computer, to install stuff on it, or to fix it when it breaks. Leave that to the computer people.

No, you pirate HBO's shows because you want something for nothing. They produce expensive content and you expect it to be on your Netflix which costs only $8 a month. You're just an unprincipled person who wants the fine entertainment HBO produces (obviously you like it or you wouldn't go to the trouble to obtain it illegally) yet you don't want to pay for it. Actually you like HBO, all while you are ranting FUCK YOU HBO. Well, I'm sure HBO has some choice words for you too.

I have no respect for sniveling people like you who want something that you think is valuable but that isn't necessary for life; you don't want to pay for it, and so you break the law to get it. Pay for your HBO, or get a life and stop watching HBO, but don't say FUCK YOU HBO while breaking the law to download the expensive fucking content from the company you claim to hate.

I too got a free pass (either for a year or for the rest of this year, I don't remember.) It was sponsored by some carmaker (Buick?) Between all the free and discounted subscriptions, I doubt very many are paying full price. If you're reading this and was thinking of paying full price, don't. They will always offer some sort of discount, at least.

"solid, basic laptop for Web surfing and document editing that won't be obsolete in two years?"

Good grief, machines that are already over three years old aren't obsolete for those uses. I have an old Dell Latitude D410 with 512 MB of RAM and maybe an 800 MHz Pentium 3m that is just fine for web surfing and document editing. That machine must be at least six years old! It's running Windows XP and it still works. The hinges busted right after the 3-year warranty ran out; I think it should have lasted longer but maybe I'm being unreasonable. At any rate I still keep it around for when I need a Windows machine. I just prop the screen up.

If all you need is a machine for basic uses, pick it out with respect for the prejudices of you and your wife. I hate glossy screens, so I avoid those. Maybe you don't care about that or maybe you like glossy. Maybe you want something cheap. Maybe you want a numeric keypad. Maybe you want a webcam. Maybe you like to go to the store and look at them. Maybe you hate going to the store so you just want to hit Amazon or Newegg. For basic Web surfing and MS Word no new machine will do you wrong so don't worry too much. Don't let the paradox of choice flummox you; all these machines have the same OS and the same software and processors that are way overpowered for what you're doing. Any "choice" you face is more like the choice between Post and Kellogg's raisin bran, not like the choice between Hoover Dam or Fukushima Daiichi or even like the choice between a cat or a dog.

NYTimes

I remember looking at the source for this package when I was in New York City to run the marathon. It was held the morning the clocks went back to standard time, and I was wondering if my computer was up to date. I looked at the source of the timezone data package and it was filled with all sorts of gems. For instance

The comments are very instructive and the rules are all in plain text so I could easily discern that, yes, my system was up to date so that it would switch back to standard time on the first Sunday in November. (I gave up though when I realized that I wasn't sure what my cron daemon would do!)

On Debian just do apt-get source tzdata.

Oh, another good place to look for the oddities that are buried in your Unix system is to go to "info date" and follow the "Date input formats" node.

Great easter eggs in Unix.

People often discuss whether Google is a monopoly in regards to its share of the search market. A more interesting question is whether Google has a monopoly in the search advertising market. Yeah, as a search engine user I can easily switch to Bing or Yahoo. As an advertiser, though, if I want to get in front of people who are doing searches before they buy online, I haven't got much choice but to advertise on Google.

4 years also isn't all that long.

I have a brand new motherboard that has an RS-232 serial port and a parallel port on the back panel. Even more surprising, I considered this a feature because I just bought a brand new device that hooks up via a serial port.

My keyboard still has Scroll Lock and SysRq. I think Scroll Lock might do something in Excel. I never had any idea what SysRq is for.

I still use Windows XP at work and it's the only Windows I have at home. My laptop is about a year old and that's what it shipped with.

Some things in tech do move fast, but other things move surprisingly slowly. I won't be surprised if today's wireless network speeds are considered adequate for years to come.

Why? Have you done the math on this? The problem with paying full price for the handset on ATT or Verizon is that it does not get you a discount on your monthly service. That monthly service fee is higher so that you pay for the discounted or "free" device you got at the outset. So in other words if you pay the full retail price you will pay for your device twice: when you buy it, and with the monthly service fee.

If you really hate the contract, you can do what I do and set aside the cost for the termination fee up front, just in case you have to pay it. Or you can get prepaid or Tmobile, where there are options so that your monthly fee is not jacked up to pay for "free" devices. But you only hurt yourself if you pay full price on ATT or Verizon. The only reason to do that is because you dropped your phone in a sewer and you aren't eligible for upgrade yet.

We get to see how functional entirely Free systems really are. Maybe you don't need the latest and greatest nVidia drivers to still have a machine that does what you need it to do.

This is actually worth a great deal. I recently did a new install of Debian and was surprised that Flash seemed to be working just fine. "This is Debian, there's no way there could be Flash on here, how is this working?" I asked myself. It was of course Gnash. After intentionally going to some Flash heavy websites I saw that while Gnash is not 100% Flash compatible it comes very close. This surprised me because I last looked at Gnash awhile ago and it was pretty much useless. I still get the proprietary Flash but thanks to Debian I saw that Gnash has come along a great deal. As it progresses I will be happy to use it, especially because doing security updates for Flash is a pain.

And, if that's not good enough, I recently built a computer to run MythTV. The motherboard had ATI graphics, which I assumed would be unusable with Linux so I bought an nVidia add-in card. It was cheap and had a ridiculously loud fan, so I sent it back. Having nothing to lose, I tried the built in ATI graphics. Debian of course does not have the non-free drivers in the main repository, but I got the open source driver working with minimal hassle (might have had to add non-free firmware.) The open source driver works very well, with full XVideo support which is essential for decent MythTV performance. I thought I would need the proprietary driver for that. So I have happily stuck with the open-source driver and have gladly dispelled my notions of all ATI support in Linux being terrible.

So, yes, the promotion of the open-source drivers and the exclusion of non-free firmware plays an important role. It shows people what open source is capable of and it gets more exposure for open source software and speeds its development. It encourages people who run Debian to look for hardware that is easy to use under Debian. This is much more than some dumb ideological move whose only consequence is to make Debian harder to install.

I don't know who started this dumb, inaccurate, and insulting "hacktivist" portmanteau. These people are simple criminals. They are doing nothing to support Wikileaks. To support Wikileaks, give it money. Give it hosting. MIrror its documents. Attacking MasterCard does absolutely nothing to support Wikileaks.

"Hacker" only means bad things to most people, so I give up on that part of this dumb word. But "activist"? That belongs to people like Liu Xiaobo, winner of the Peace Prize who can't even go to his ceremony because he's in jail. It belongs to people who are actually trying to advance good in the world. It doesn't belong to simple criminals who are engaged in the pointless, cowardly, and pseudo-anonymous destruction of commercial websites.

I don't know if "hacktivist" is some attempt to be cute, some attempt to stir sympathy for these criminals, or some attempt to look cool by using some hip new word invented on some blog or in Twitter, but there is a huge difference between activism of any kind and simple, cowardly, criminal vandalism.