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Education

Submission + - Could you pass Harvard's entrance exam from 1869? (nytimes.com) 3

Submitted by
erfnet
erfnet writes: "The New York Times remembers back to when "college was a buyer's bazaar" and digs up 19th-century classified ads from Columbia, Harvard, Yale, and others. In competitive efforts to attract students from the limited pool of qualified candidates, applications were taken as late as September for an October freshman class. Vassar offered lush room accommodations. The expectations were high: Latin, Greek, Virgil, Caesar's Commentaries; Harvard's entrance exam from 1869 is posted (PDF): http://graphics8.nytimes.com/packages/pdf/education/harvardexam.pdf. Could any of us pass the exam today?"

Submission + - My Social Security Number, should I give it up? 2

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: I've recently gone through hell with my ISP and everytime I call them up they want the last 4 digits of my SSN. WHY? Do they think someone is impersonating me to falsely report that my modem is getting no signal from Comcast?

This drove me mad enough that I called Qwest to set up DSL service, I thought they were charging too much, but I was willing to give it a try just so I could tell Comcast to pound salt. But they wanted my SSN too. I said no and the customer rep said he could try to get it approved without a SSN. After waiting about 10 minutes he came back and said I couldn't get DSL from Qwest without a SSN. This is despite the fact that I offered to pre-pay with a credit card. He said I might be a deadbeat who had skipped out on Qwest in the past.

The point here is that denying your SSN to private enterprises will likely result in you being unable to obtain these services.

If I'm offering cash in hand, or credit which is backed up by Visa/MasterCard or whoever, but refuse to give up my SSN why would you turn down my money?

Comment Re:MS Notepad (Score 1) 391

by Bake (#33847088) Attached to: Word Processors — One Writer's Further Retreat

and mostly keys that are easy to press (like :w to save, instead of Alt+F, S).

How on earth do you come to the conclusion that hitting Esc, :w to save is somehow easier to press than Alt-F,S or Ctrl-S for that matter?

Typing :w may be easy enough but in order to get to the command mode you have to hit Esc which means that unless your fingers are like E.T.'s fingers you have to move your hand from its normal typing position.

Comment Re:Yay! Sandboxes! (Score 3, Informative) 95

by Bake (#31799058) Attached to: WebKit2 API Layer Brings Split-Process Model

I actually have seen something similar since I started to use Chrome. It usually happens when I fire up many tabs from one tab (in my case it happens when I open what I deem fit for further reading from my Google Reader, which can reach up to 30-40 tabs). What appears to happen is that the tabs opened from another tab share the same tab process as the parent tab.

Under other circumstances this might not be a problem, but given the nature of Google Reader when you're scrolling through your unread items list (i.e. it "appends" newer and newer RSS items to the bottom of the list frame itself) it starts to take up a fair amount of ram that isn't freed up when you reload the originating tab (all in the name of caching no doubt).

This has happened less often now that I have Flashblock installed, but still happens occasionally. It also helps that I now open fewer tabs from the Google Reader tab and simply close and reopen it when I'm done reading the tabs that I opened from within the GR tab. This kills the ram eating process and starts a new one.

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