I love the GQ and Men's Health articles that show the outfits that you're supposed to wear. Suit - $3000, Shoes $750, watch - $8000. Yeah, sure.

As silly as it sounds, "putty" made Windows bearable for most admin tasks as I rarely need X Windows. It's probably been 10 years since I had a true linux desktop. Now if I want to run linux on my laptop, it's done as a vm which makes driver issues much easier. And I can run Netflix on the host OSX. IMHO, the only reason to run linux on a desktop/laptop is to get some life out of old hardware.

The TI-994a Extended Basic manual and "Cosmos" when I was a kid.

No books really stick out from college, I'd say it was more of a cumulative effect from the individual books.

"UNIX in a Nutshell" in the early 90's - sure it's just a dump of man pages, but I think I memorized everything between the pages and it got me started in UNIX.

"Learning Perl" - perl has paid the bills and let me go home at a decent hour. Thanks Larry!

...or am I the only one picturing Mario jumping up, hitting a block and then collecting the coins that shower down?

I was in a similar situation and I bought my kid a netbook at Target for something like $230. He takes it to school and if he loses it, I won't kill him. Added NetNanny and that keeps him away from most of the nasty stuff on the 'Net. It's not fast, it's not open source, but it works reasonably well. He can surf, email, and make documents for homework and it fits in his little back pack. It's held up for two years so far. No complaints here.

Watch it!!! ;-)

Every place I've worked we *want* women and have had very few apply. Sure, they have to be competent but having a female name on the resume definitely got you at least a call back.

Was this a 50 MPH speed limit or a 65MPH speed limit area? If you were doing 18MPH over, you probably deserve it. 3MPH over, I'll side with you.

At least 70% of my attempts to use Evi result in some version of a "unable to process your request" error.

They told everyone under 18 to go away, they're not going to return. Google+ had the worst launch of any product I've ever seen.

Jobs made an impact, Stallman just bitches and whines all the time. I talked to a guy that picked him up at the airport and Stallman bitched at the guy for using his credit card to fill up the tank instead of cash. They can track you with your credit card. Compare emacs with the shiny toys Jobs made and I think we see who comes out on top.

...it's the fear of the unknown. What if it's not as good as it looks? If you're making more money and gaining an hour and a half every day it's a no brainer.

I reconsider my hasty comment. They do allow use for internal development purposes. It's not free as in beer, but that's actually not too bad.

First there's Red Hat's "Linux by the pound" announcement and then this humdinger. I'm ready to learn .NET.

Sadly, I'm only half joking....

There hasn't been a lot of change in laptop design in the past fifteen years. With the success of the iPad I think we're about to see some major changes to the laptop interface. So companies are building out their IP portfolio as both offensive and defensive weapons for any future litigation.