If you cannot save what you drew, it's worthless. Paper is inexpensive and you get colors too - provided you have colored pens.

I agree. http://www.pygame.org/ is a cool lib to create games (which could be a huge motivation for a 12 YO).

Write your notes on blank paper (not lined and as white as possible) with a dark pen. Take a picture afterwards and throw the paper away (or do some origami [1]).

Works for me, could work for you.

The fastest way electronically is ASCIIMathML, that was mentioned by anidiot [2].

[1] http://www.origami-instructions.com/
[2] http://hardware.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1423997&cid=29915877

- linux because you learn stuff about the thing (aka. operating system) you write code for
- bash because you get things done
- python because it's beautiful, fast and easy to learn (while remaining a complete OOP language)
- c to get to the essence of 37 years of programming

Of course, if they should become expendable, let them learn Java.
And if you want to lock them into some vendor's cage, give them Visual Studio and C#.

For *large files* (like Ubuntu images) I use http://www.krusader.org/ to make backups or copy them somewhere on demand, but for *small, hand-written files* like configs, notes and scripts, I use http://bazaar-vcs.org/.

An example of my workflow would look rather ugly in this comment, so have a look here instead: http://blag.felixhummel.de/junk/slashdot_2009-06-24.html

I hope Linux remains being a platform for "tinkerers" for a long time to come. Why go mainstream so fast? Let's keep building cool new features - from geeks for geeks.

If the average consumer can profit from it - good for him. But why put time and energy into compensating his "learning laziness"?

true

A simple 17" TFT monitor with a brightness of 300 cd/m^2 and a contrast of 2000:1.

The important thing is that it's matte...

1. Air; fresh air; that's why I work outside when I can
2. soothing background noise, i.e. (my favorite) music, birds singing, water flowing
3. no disruptions. ever.
4. Cherry keyboard.

Got it all nowadays. The reflecting-laptop-monitor-problem can be solved with an external monitor.

Back then I couldn't even move vim. It took me quite some time to get the :wq

But I did it - sharing 64 kB/s with two other guys through an old Pentium with a Fritz Card.

Those were the days...

Done. Where's the price?

Truth be told. In a nutshell:

Swap is used for idle processes freeing RAM for active processes and file caching.

My system has 4 GB RAM and *no* swap. It can hibernate (and actually wakes up again).

If this is about performance, try to widen the HDD-Bottleneck (say RAID). There's a difference you can *feel*.