Journal lingqi's Journal: Feburary 26th, 2003 6
Feburary 26th, 2003 (10pm)
Well, I was going to write this long and interesting thing about the current world outlook and it's relationship to Japan and all - but I have unfortunately been stuck here doing preliminary tax stuff, so that might have to wait until tomorrow.
Doing taxes while on a foreign assignment is more than any normal human can handle, and that's not even due to "fear of taxes." having to worry about US tax laws is bad enough, but when presented with US tax laws, appended US tax laws regarding expats, Japanese tax laws, and various international (including exclusively Japan-US) tax treaties, having my head try to wrap around this kind of like wrapping some a piece of chewed bubblegum around a basketball - or possibly wrapping the said bubblegum around kansas, since I am pretty sure that my entire day of reading and researching have touched on less than the "tip of the iceberg" and in fact there is no way I know how big this beast really is.
Worse yet, Japanese tax is due MARCH 15th!!! That gives me a whole two and half weeks to get this sorted out. However, to do taxes effectively (e.g. deciding to pay tax to which country, and taking tax credit from the other), you really need to have the US side mostly figured out as well. A small note on the US tax - Though the forms are due on June 15th with a two month automatic extension, taxes (the money) is still due on April, and anything unpaid costs you interest to Uncle Sam. Gotta love the system, eh?
On the other hand, I often wonder about taxes in, say, eurpean countries. In fact I heard that in Sweden taxes are some 70+%. Ouch. (Can anybody confirm that, anyway?)
Small Linux update. I tried Mandrake on my T21 because everybody said it was "easy to use," and I figured that I would give several distributions a try before "settling down" on one. Through all of this, I found out a few things (not about Mandrake, but linux in general):
1) No way my PS/2 intellimouse is going to work with the wheel, without massive tweaking
2) the hot-swap media bay is not hot-swappable under linux
3) working with PCMCIA cards is a tedious process (requires terminal commands like "eject," "powerdown," etc) - though I am sure this is intergratable into KDE / GNOME, why havn't people done it? (same thing with wireless config)
I mean, I know a lot of this are manufacture's fault, but I do have to wonder how does windoze get around all these problems? After all this I do start to have a small bit of respect for windoze to work (most of the time) with ALL these hardware.
Still not giving up, though.
linux.. (Score:3, Informative)
I have it working. Just takes a couple lines in your XF86Config-4 to map buttons 4 and 5 to the scroll wheel. Just make sure you have the "psaux" module loaded (or compiled into your kernel). The following config has worked for me with both a real MS Intellimouse and a Mitsui mouse that speaks the same protocol. 2) the hot-swap media bay is not hot-swappable under linux
I believe this is correct. Usually laptops connect CD-ROMs and floppies on the IDE bus (yes, that means it is an IDE floppy drive you have). Linux 2.4 doesn't support IDE hotplugging. I believe this is one of the things that is being worked on in Linux 2.5.
3) working with PCMCIA cards is a tedious process (requires terminal commands like "eject," "powerdown," etc) - though I am sure this is intergratable into KDE / GNOME, why havn't people done it? (same thing with wireless config)
Sorry, don't know anything about this.
Glad you're sticking with it. Laptops are tricky beasts.
-molo
hardware.. (Score:3, Insightful)
If mainstream manufactuers also developed linux drivers, there would be much broader support available.
Of course, then again, this wouldn't help with your ide hotplugging issue, which is a function of the linux kernel proper.
-molo
Re:hardware.. (Score:1)
So, anyways. I should have good news *sometimes*, though.
As for the hardware manufactures, I 100% agree, and have probably not expressed it correctly. I guess it's more like a realization how much smaller the linux driver development community is compared to all the hardware driver people, though. Of course, not having open info to their hardware definitely don't make things easier; though I do think hardware people are getting better at releasing linux drivers, though often are binary only.
Swedish taxes (Score:2, Insightful)
45-55% would be more exact. My father paid half a million swedish crowns in taxes last year, which would equate to roughly $59'000.
That's not counting our 25% sales tax on all items sold everywhere. Or the $4.50/gallon gas prices. Or the 30% employers tax that your employer has to pay in addition to the salary you receive (of which you lose ~50% before you get to touch the money). The Xbox didn't sell well here at launch, well, no wonder when the system was over $600 alone. The taxes scale up depending on how much money you make, the tax punishment for wealthier people is so harsh that many people and companies end up fleeing the country.
So yes, it is rough. We get a lot back though, the money doesn't just disappear into some black hole. Free health care. Free college. I've talked about this a few times with various Americans, and they all seem to prefer the Swedish way in the end. I for one don't know which system is the best, I'm simply not in a position to judge. I just know we pay a hell of a lot of taxes over here
/ V
Re:Swedish taxes (Score:1)
But enough ranting, I was wanting to say that while Australian's enjoy, for example, heavily subsided healthcare (free to the "disadvantaged"), very strong public education and a government operated Higher Education loans scheme, many Australians would probably prefer a more social democratic governance. It's often stated that we don't get enough in return from tax dollars.
Do you feel that Japanese residents get good value for money? Are the state run schools highly regarded? What about healthcare?
BTW, thanks for a great journal!
Managing PCMCIA cards (Score:1)
Linux seems to handle this gracefully, without doing anything special. I do have the card services daemon running though, which handles unloading the driver and such. I regularly switch between wireless and wired ethernet PC cards with no problems, though with debian I have to re-run "pump" to get a DHCP address on the new card after switching. I think it's possible to set up card services to run it on insert, but I haven't tried that. A
PCMCIA cards are made to be hot swappable. The only reason you'd want to power one down is to save battery power (or before suspending, but that's an issue unto itself...).
BTW, love your journal. I'm going to have to make it a point to visit Japan some day.