You understand you are a nerd when your friends ask you whether you are looking for jobs and you say you want his autograph on the label of your first 1980s Macintosh floppy diskette.

Some of my servers that don't have much to do contribute to GIMPS

Also do not forget that Debian currently seeks hardware donations.

For some time now all my storage needs are satisfied in their entirety by SSDs and I have no HDDs now. Certainly much better than my previous 10,000 RPM hard disks, so I think they are ready for the prime time.

I bet nVidia wants to make a x86 low-power CPU for mini laptops (like Acer Aspire One or Asus Eee).

If I write a paper, I'm going to just put it on my webpage, or maybe at arXiv as public domain or under a licence that allows other people to copy it, and in this way any journal that wants to print it can do so. I see no reason why I should submit my writings to anyone since now with the Internet we all can publish our papers on our servers/websites. People who search for papers will find them, whether they are on personal sites or journals, just as they already find whatever they look for now.

As for the CV factor, I think it's bad for science to try to make ourselves look better based on how prestigious a journals that accepted our writings is (and what is prestige anyway?). I prefer people to judge me from the quality of my work, rather than from shortcuts like which journal published me or such things.

Of course I am well-aware that there are many people who either don't have the time or don't have the ability to judge the quality of a paper from what it writes alone, and instead use shortcuts like where it was published and who wrote it in order to judge it. But I don't want this kind of people to judge me, so I don't care to find ways to impress them. If I write something good or discover something new in science I can feel happiness that people who really love science understood what I had to say and put it into good use. I don't think that people who make quick judgements based on external factors like where something was published are good for science.

That said, of course, I can understand people who are forced by societal customs to take the prestige of a journal into account because they need to give a good impression to people who are accustomed to think in this way. In that way, it's really not different than clothing. But if someone has no real need to do so, I think it's better to stay away from a rat race trying to find who can give the greatest meaningless impression to people who make quick judgements without realising the essence of a paper (or person).

I use Dvorak and I love it, I certainly see it as superior to QWERTY for typing English (but not other languages), because of its ergonomics, speed, and accuracy. I don't care what some journalist says, I trust my personal experience. You should, too: buy a Dvorak keyboard and try it. The one I use is the Typematrix, which is both Dvorak and QWERTY (useful if you are just now learning Dvorak, or if you change the keyboard between computers, or if you want to use Dvorak for English and QWERTY for another language as I do).

I don't think the concept of fight exists in free and open source software. Free software is free speech, and different projects exist because different people have different things to say. Nobody is fighting.

The perils of cheap storage...

Mediterranean isn't just at threat from ships cutting cables with their anchors, politics, wars, earthquakes, and volcanoes, but also from asteroids as powerful as two Little Boys. I guess there is no good cable defence against a big asteroid, is there?

The best strategy when evaluating work regimes is always to ask yourself: "will this help me to eventually set up my own business?".

If you believe the extra Friday off will enable you to pursue a self-employed career, then do it. If not, then you need to find another solution that would enable you to set up as self-employed, or do it immediatelly if you can.

There is no better way to avoid the personality test than not being in employment, ie to run your own business. There is no reason why a programmer should become an employee, since the production technology for software is well-distributed amongst the populace. If you already own a computer and you know how to program it, then you can become an entrepreneur immediately. I can understand why one would prefer to be an employee if their expertise was in nuclear reactors, considering that in our era nuclear reactors are more likely to be found in large organisations rather than in homes, but for programmers who already own personal computers there is no good reason not to be self-employed.

Stop thinking about jobs and start considering becoming an entrepreneur with your own business (and in the field of IT, particularly in software, there is really little or no need for startup capital). It is generally much better to create your own success rather than wait for someone else to feed you. You might be afraid of the risk, but with the lay-offs now the risk of being an employee is about the same as the risk of being an entrepreneur, plus you must know that life belongs to those who know how to take risks.

Even better is a virtualised server accessible through the internet or vpn. In this way you can access your work and show it to your clients everywhere there is an internet connection.

What file system comes with an SD card only matters if you use the card with a device like a digital camera. If you use it on a PC equipped with GNU/Linux, there is no reason to use any version of FAT. You are much better off formatting the card with a free GNU/Linux file system.