My apartment is visible on Google Street View, which I found a bit unsettling because the street it's off isn't really a street. But Google drove down it and took pictures. It was on Google Maps, after all. Thankfully my blinds were down that day so you can't see inside, but you can see the outside.
On the other hand, that's one instant of time a good year or so ago. It's not constantly updating. It's not like there are cameras inside my apartment constantly watching me. It's not exactly dystopian, just somewhat unsettling.
Now if it were constantly updating, allowing people to follow my car around, then I would be worried. Otherwise I don't really care.
On the other hand, for the most part, Google Street View is mostly useless. It doesn't really offer any information that you can't get from the satellite view. I frequently go over unknown routes using Google Maps (or Google Earth - same diff) but I have never really found street view to be that useful. There are probably someexceptions, though.
(The second one is actually worse than it appears on street view, since it used to be a rotary, and they haven't made a complete circuit. Go ahead, try and guess which lane is which from the satellite image.)
I wonder if it's malice or just standard procedure. Here's a possible scenario: the customer service rep was asked to make sure that he received the original Xbox 360 back and not a refurbished one. So the tech support guy said "sure" and marked that in the repair order. And, just as requested, he in fact got the original Xbox 360 back.
Now, since the default is to refurbish the Xbox 360s, it would make sense that part of the standard repair would be to clean the case. It's entirely possible that the customer service rep had no idea that the case would be cleaned. In hindsight, it makes perfect sense for part of the standard refurbishing process to include cleaning the case. But I'd never have thought of that.
So the breakdown occurred because the customer service rep didn't indicate that the case shouldn't be cleaned. Not out of malice, but because he had no idea that he should even do so in the first place.
Then the repair center took the Xbox 360 and ran it through the standard checklist. Since there was no indication that they shouldn't clean the case, they cleaned it as normal. They then sent it back to the shipping center, who then looks up the repair order and sees that the Xbox 360 is earmarked for a certain customer and ships it out.
No malice required: just lack a simple lack of knowledge.
On an offtopic note: is the parent post I'm responding to coming up with an apparent starting score of -2 to anyone else? It apparently had a starting score of -1 for some reason, then was modded up at least twice to reach 0. That seems... broken.
Slashdot has added a URL field in the story submission form. (My guess is that this URL is intended for automated dupe checking.) This link gets displayed in the Firehose entry after the article.
It would appear it doesn't get displayed should the story get accepted. I guess the theory was that the editors would edit the link in. Something that, in practice, it would appear they frequently forget.
So that's my guess as to why it's missing in the article. It's not that CmdrTaco removed it, just that he forgot to add it to the story text.
Well, I know a lot of people with laptops that have displays capable of at least 720p. Sound quality may not be great, but they can show a high-def movie in an honestly OK quality.
I don't know quite so many people that own HDTVs. (Actually, I haven't asked in most cases, so I could be underestimating, but you get the idea.)
The penetration rate for something that can display a high-def movie via download is much higher than HDTVs. Granted the experience won't be as great, but it's a place to start. Once people have downloaded movies, things like TiVo or Apple TV can be used to display them in a home theater.
So in that aspect, I can see downloads as being much more accessible than Blu-ray.
The remaining unsolved problem being download speeds.
I dunno what's started it, but I've had Firefox routinely hit 300MB of memory on my work laptop under Windows XP with about 10 tabs open in a single window.
To put that in perspective, that's more than Eclipse 3.4M4 WTP uses - which is a Java-based IDE with the web tools added in. In this case I've also added the database tools to that Eclipse install. In short - that Eclipse is a memory hog.
It still uses less memory than Firefox, and that's with NoScript installed...
On the other hand, on my Linux laptop, Firefox is up to only 100MB of memory. To establish some sort of baseline, the system monitor utility itself claims 5MB, so as much as 5MB of that are shared X and GTK+ libraries.
The memory leak isn't made up. I have to routinely restart Firefox several times a day to make sure that Windows doesn't start paging out Eclipse...
The problem is that several major XML libraries don't just default to no DTD/schema cache - they don't even implement a cache or local catalog. Implementing such a thing is left to the developers using the library.
For example, the XML libraries that come with Sun's Java rely on java.net.URL for downloading resources. I just checked my 1.6 Java install, and by default, it has no cache. In looking up how the java.net cache works, I discovered it wasn't even added until Java 1.5. So prior to Java 1.5, most Java libraries wouldn't cache responses at all because the included library didn't support caching. 'Course, even in Java 1.6, there's no default implementation, so each Java application would have to implement their own cache[1].
The included Java libraries also offer no internal DTD/schema catalog. You can create one (implement org.xml.sax.EntityResolver[2]) but by default they're off to the Internet to download any DTD they run across.
It's really not hard to see how these libraries could result in millions of hits a day - most people using them probably don't even realize that they're hitting the W3C's servers since it happens transparently. And fixing it is unfortunately not just setting configuration files and saving the DTDs locally: it's implementing a bunch of classes.
[1] And for added fun, the stub that is provided appears to be insufficient to support conditional requests - either the cache says "I have it!" and the cached response is used, or the server has to send a new copy. There's no way to do offer up an "If-Modified-Since:" request via the cache class.
[2] Noting that this can't be set for all parsers, it's set on a per-parser object basis. So if you use a third-party library that parses XML after creating its own parser object, you can't make it use your local DTD catalog.
Well, yeah, that's the real answer. Plus my current iPod still has quite a bit of life in it. When it finally does die, though, at least I have something to replace it with. With luck, the price will have gone down by then too.
But the original intention was more of a joke about all the people (myself included) who posted about how they didn't want an iPhone when it was originally introduced.
Actually it's not quite as dumb as it sounds. They're not simple static pictures, they're actually vector graphics, and with Silverlight you can view them fullscreen, without any stretching or distortion. (Guess who had to install Silverlight at work?)
It works in Firefox under Windows, by the way. (Word of warning: Silverlight and FlashBlock do NOT work together. However, Silverlight, NoScript, AdBlock Plus, and Firebug all work fine together.)
Now if only there were an open scalable vector graphics format that they could have used instead... if only...
I was originally going to say it would be the GameBoy Advance SP, but then I remembered that the DS can play GameBoy Advance games too.
It's a nicely-sized portable, which I've found means that I can actually play the game instead of requiring a TV. Many of the great SNES games were re-released for the GBA (like The Legend of Zelda: Link to the Past, basically all the Final Fantasy games before VII, Super Mario Bros. 3, and Donkey Kong Country 2).
Unfortunately Nintendo took the time to screw with some of them (Link shouldn't be yelling "Ha!" all the time in Link to the Past!), and not all of them translated quite as well as I might like (the music in Final Fantasy VI Advance was screwed up in some places, but on the plus side the bugs were fixed).
Add in original DS games and other original GBA games, and you've got a very nice portable handheld console, which in my mind at least makes it the Best Game Console of All Time, So Far.
Of course, that's probably because I'm getting older and have less free time to play games. It's easier to sneak some game time when you can just drop the console in your pocket or man-purs-- I mean, laptop bag. It's a laptop bag.
I'm on Sprint too. I pay $0.20 for text message, send or receive.
Sprint is fairly good about grandfathering in plans. Your current plan must not charge for receiving messages, but believe me, current ones do.
However, as far as I can tell, they never tell you this anywhere on their site, and their service agreement sure as hell doesn't make it clear. The only reason I know is because I tried it.
One of the features of my new phone is "Voice SMS."
Think about that for a moment. It's like a text message, but it's voice. On a phone.
According to Sprint, the reason this is better than a normal voice mail message is that you're guaranteed to leave a message and not actually reach the person you're calling (which comes up how often?) and that the text message UI is easier to deal with than the voice mail system. (Then why not offer a voice mail UI?)
And, of course, it wastes both a text message and data transfer. So instead of leaving a voice mail message, which uses normal minutes and during off-peak hours is free, you get to pay extra for this feature. (Oh, I get it, improving the voice mail experience would be too hard to monetize, so it's just not worth it. The iPhone must be an illusion.)
In case you're new at this: a torrent file can contain more than one file, organized unto subdirectories. There's no need for any encapsulation.
Sure there is. Ignoring the way BitTorrent actually encodes the information, and assuming that somehow every file name could be stored as one byte (ignoring the obvious flaw with that), by keeping all of them at the torrent level you'd require "more than 560,000" bytes just devoted to file names. Since the general rule of thumb is to keep the actual.torrent file around 100KB, give or take, that's right out.
Now, throwing in the way the.torrent file actually stores the list of file names, you're looking at at least 21 bytes per file. Assuming 560,000 files, that bloats the.torrent file to over 11.2MB - and that's still not realistic, because it requires every file to be less than 10 bytes in size and all of them to have empty path names. (Which is obviously not valid.)
Throw in realistic constraints, and you're adding another 15 bytes, bringing us to a total of 36 bytes per file - bloating the.torrent to 19.2MB, just for file names.
So, in short, the reason to place them in a ZIP file and not use the multi-file feature is because using the multiple file feature would massively bloat the.torrent file. Now the final.ZIP file has similar requirements per file in the ZIP file, but that becomes payload as part of the BitTorrent download and not something that has to be downloaded via non-BitTorrent means first.
Finally, for an explanation of where those numbers above come from, the "smallest possible" form for a file would be:
"d6:lengthi0e4:pathlee" (21 bytes)
The "more realistic constraints" brings that to:
"d6:lengthi100000e4:pathl8:0000.JPGee" (36 bytes)
Yes, the.torrent file is essentially "plain text" although the piece hashes are stored as binary strings. It's encoded using "Bencoding" - which isn't the most compact of formats.
Enough people did complain, so they moved the required virus scan from 1PM to 1AM, and from daily to weekly. And now we have to leave the machine running overnight.
There appear to be two political groups working with IT - the actual sys admins, and then the "security" people, who require all the firewalls and virus scans and inventory checks. The sys admins want to make things work for their users, while the security people want to make everything as secure as possible, without regard to how it affects how people work.
It's the classical "ease of use versus security" problem, played out with corporate policies.
In any cases, I always leave my computer (a laptop) on during the week. I shut it off on weekends, but due to the software inventory tracker and the required anti-virus scans, I always leave the machine on during the week so that I can actually use it during the day.
The real problem is that the anti-virus scan is so slow that it takes a good three hours. The inventory scan is somewhat better, and only takes about an hour. In both cases, the machine drags to near unusable levels while the scan is running. Given that it's a dual-core machine, this is really a testament to just how screwed up Window's I/O scheduling is - both involve lots of file reads, which apparently causes Windows to drag to a crawl.
Not to mention that hibernate and to a lesser degree suspend appear to not work well with certain drivers on my system. Using hibernate kills the wireless drivers, which isn't a horribly big deal when I can physically plug the system in but it does mean that I just shut the thing off when roaming about, since I'll have to reboot anyway.
But it's that three-hour IT required virus scan that keeps me leaving the machine running nights. That's a real productivity killer during the day. Fortunately it's only scheduled to run once a week.
The inventory app, on the other hand, runs daily for some reason.
Can I ask what's wrong with something like a TiVo HD?
If all you're interested in is recording a show and watching it later, any HD DVR should work fine.
If you want to watch the shows on your laptop or something like that, with a TiVo HD you can always use TiVoToGo (which is annoyingly well hidden on their website, and doesn't make any mention of HD support - I suppose I'll have to try it later). There's even support for burning to DVD through a computer, although that requires Roxio.
(And, uh, I've been told that if you look long enough on Google, you can find ways to remove the TiVo DRM.)
I haven't really done the math, but I expect that the cost of the monthly fee would easily match the cost of blank DVD-Rs beyond a certain point.
Now it's not the most "Free software" friendly solution in the world, but it does meet the ease-of-use requirement. Use the guide, select the show, hit record, and it will record it later. To an extent it's even easier since you can skip the "insert blank" step and, if you're using season passes, even the "choose channel, hit 'Record'" steps.:)
I'm honestly curious, why wouldn't a TiVo HD (or similar HD DVR, if you can find any) meet your requirements?
Good lord, you actually have content there. Sweet Zombie Jesus, it's like if MySpace was irradiated with XML-Rays and mutated into a complete XML-based social network specification, which requires everyone to write their own specifications and hand-edit XML files.
They weren't just asked if space exploration is worthwhile, they were asked why it is worthwhile.
So, yes, it's not surprising that they all said "yes," but their reasons why are still worth reading. And that's what the story is about, reasons in support of space exploration.
Some version of Top Gear (with parts edited out, mostly to squeeze in the US standard amount of advertising) is broadcast about a year out of date in the US on BBC America. It's on several times during the week. (Currently Mondays at 8PM ET and again on Saturday at some time that TiVo knows and I don't.)
So if you're in the US and you get BBC America, watch it, it may be the funniest show on TV! The only issue might be minor differences between US and British English, but anyone who can't figure that out probably was spawned by human/vegetable interbreeding.
There's also a rumor that the a mildly edited version of the original Top Gear might be picked up by the Discovery Channel, which is more widely available than BBC America. But so far, nothing on that front.
The numpad is far better than the numbers at the top for entering lots of numbers. Which, I'll admit, doesn't come up that often. Generally the only time I use them is when populating a spreadsheet. They're also very useful for doing a bunch of quick calculations with a calculator app.
Obviously I don't play old DOS games that often, so I have no idea how they control. But the old DOS games I did play did work with multiple arrow keys, but they may be newer than the ones you're thinking of. (Early 90s versus later 80s.)
I'm confused by this statement. First, there's the obvious answer: press two arrows at once.
Secondly, you can't move diagonally with the numeric keypad with numlock off. 7 is Home, 1 is End, 9 is Page Up, and 3 is Page Down. So pressing diagonally will either take you to the start/end, or up/down a page. It won't move diagonally.
In one of the responses you mentioned video games, but the only game I can think of that actually uses movement like that is Civ 4, and it supports using the number keys on the numeric keypad regardless of Numlock's state. I would hope that most games that support the numpad will work in both states.
I've never felt the need to pop off numlock (I've never accidentally hit it) but it still is fairly useless - why would I ever want to turn the numpad into a duplicate of the keys to its immediate left? (I'm aware of its historical use, on keyboards without the navigation keys. But on modern keyboards it's pretty useless.)
Slashdot Mirror
My apartment is visible on Google Street View, which I found a bit unsettling because the street it's off isn't really a street. But Google drove down it and took pictures. It was on Google Maps, after all. Thankfully my blinds were down that day so you can't see inside, but you can see the outside.
On the other hand, that's one instant of time a good year or so ago. It's not constantly updating. It's not like there are cameras inside my apartment constantly watching me. It's not exactly dystopian, just somewhat unsettling.
Now if it were constantly updating, allowing people to follow my car around, then I would be worried. Otherwise I don't really care.
On the other hand, for the most part, Google Street View is mostly useless. It doesn't really offer any information that you can't get from the satellite view. I frequently go over unknown routes using Google Maps (or Google Earth - same diff) but I have never really found street view to be that useful. There are probably some exceptions, though.
(The second one is actually worse than it appears on street view, since it used to be a rotary, and they haven't made a complete circuit. Go ahead, try and guess which lane is which from the satellite image.)
I wonder if it's malice or just standard procedure. Here's a possible scenario: the customer service rep was asked to make sure that he received the original Xbox 360 back and not a refurbished one. So the tech support guy said "sure" and marked that in the repair order. And, just as requested, he in fact got the original Xbox 360 back.
Now, since the default is to refurbish the Xbox 360s, it would make sense that part of the standard repair would be to clean the case. It's entirely possible that the customer service rep had no idea that the case would be cleaned. In hindsight, it makes perfect sense for part of the standard refurbishing process to include cleaning the case. But I'd never have thought of that.
So the breakdown occurred because the customer service rep didn't indicate that the case shouldn't be cleaned. Not out of malice, but because he had no idea that he should even do so in the first place.
Then the repair center took the Xbox 360 and ran it through the standard checklist. Since there was no indication that they shouldn't clean the case, they cleaned it as normal. They then sent it back to the shipping center, who then looks up the repair order and sees that the Xbox 360 is earmarked for a certain customer and ships it out.
No malice required: just lack a simple lack of knowledge.
On an offtopic note: is the parent post I'm responding to coming up with an apparent starting score of -2 to anyone else? It apparently had a starting score of -1 for some reason, then was modded up at least twice to reach 0. That seems... broken.
Slashdot has added a URL field in the story submission form. (My guess is that this URL is intended for automated dupe checking.) This link gets displayed in the Firehose entry after the article.
It would appear it doesn't get displayed should the story get accepted. I guess the theory was that the editors would edit the link in. Something that, in practice, it would appear they frequently forget.
So that's my guess as to why it's missing in the article. It's not that CmdrTaco removed it, just that he forgot to add it to the story text.
Well, I know a lot of people with laptops that have displays capable of at least 720p. Sound quality may not be great, but they can show a high-def movie in an honestly OK quality.
I don't know quite so many people that own HDTVs. (Actually, I haven't asked in most cases, so I could be underestimating, but you get the idea.)
The penetration rate for something that can display a high-def movie via download is much higher than HDTVs. Granted the experience won't be as great, but it's a place to start. Once people have downloaded movies, things like TiVo or Apple TV can be used to display them in a home theater.
So in that aspect, I can see downloads as being much more accessible than Blu-ray.
The remaining unsolved problem being download speeds.
Either:
1. Stop visiting idle.slashdot.org. They're all like this.
OR
2. Add "-idle" to your filter on the Firehose.
And for Slashdot: please fix your CSS! My text input box here is a little on the excessively tiny size.
Plus my post is made up of <p>aragraphs. On preview at least, there is no space between them. Fix your CSS!
And if only they could find a reason to delay the release date until a year from today, they'd hit the 200th anniversary of Darwin's birth!
Wait, no, bad, I don't want to give them an excuse to delay further...
Maybe they can delay the PS3 version until 2009. PS3 owners are used to getting late versions of games anyway.
I dunno what's started it, but I've had Firefox routinely hit 300MB of memory on my work laptop under Windows XP with about 10 tabs open in a single window.
To put that in perspective, that's more than Eclipse 3.4M4 WTP uses - which is a Java-based IDE with the web tools added in. In this case I've also added the database tools to that Eclipse install. In short - that Eclipse is a memory hog.
It still uses less memory than Firefox, and that's with NoScript installed...
On the other hand, on my Linux laptop, Firefox is up to only 100MB of memory. To establish some sort of baseline, the system monitor utility itself claims 5MB, so as much as 5MB of that are shared X and GTK+ libraries.
The memory leak isn't made up. I have to routinely restart Firefox several times a day to make sure that Windows doesn't start paging out Eclipse...
The problem is that several major XML libraries don't just default to no DTD/schema cache - they don't even implement a cache or local catalog. Implementing such a thing is left to the developers using the library.
For example, the XML libraries that come with Sun's Java rely on java.net.URL for downloading resources. I just checked my 1.6 Java install, and by default, it has no cache. In looking up how the java.net cache works, I discovered it wasn't even added until Java 1.5. So prior to Java 1.5, most Java libraries wouldn't cache responses at all because the included library didn't support caching. 'Course, even in Java 1.6, there's no default implementation, so each Java application would have to implement their own cache[1].
The included Java libraries also offer no internal DTD/schema catalog. You can create one (implement org.xml.sax.EntityResolver[2]) but by default they're off to the Internet to download any DTD they run across.
It's really not hard to see how these libraries could result in millions of hits a day - most people using them probably don't even realize that they're hitting the W3C's servers since it happens transparently. And fixing it is unfortunately not just setting configuration files and saving the DTDs locally: it's implementing a bunch of classes.
[1] And for added fun, the stub that is provided appears to be insufficient to support conditional requests - either the cache says "I have it!" and the cached response is used, or the server has to send a new copy. There's no way to do offer up an "If-Modified-Since:" request via the cache class.
[2] Noting that this can't be set for all parsers, it's set on a per-parser object basis. So if you use a third-party library that parses XML after creating its own parser object, you can't make it use your local DTD catalog.
Well, yeah, that's the real answer. Plus my current iPod still has quite a bit of life in it. When it finally does die, though, at least I have something to replace it with. With luck, the price will have gone down by then too.
But the original intention was more of a joke about all the people (myself included) who posted about how they didn't want an iPhone when it was originally introduced.
Dammit, I had said that I didn't want an iPhone, but would like a device that was like the iPhone without the phone part.
Then Apple released the iPod Touch.
So I updated my excuse to be that it didn't have enough storage space, that I wanted at least 30GB of space before I'd make the leap.
And now they've released a 32GB version.
Now I need a new excuse explaining why I'm not going to get one...
(Seriously, though, I do intend to grab one eventually - it sounds like exactly something I'd want - but not quite yet.)
Actually it's not quite as dumb as it sounds. They're not simple static pictures, they're actually vector graphics, and with Silverlight you can view them fullscreen, without any stretching or distortion. (Guess who had to install Silverlight at work?)
It works in Firefox under Windows, by the way. (Word of warning: Silverlight and FlashBlock do NOT work together. However, Silverlight, NoScript, AdBlock Plus, and Firebug all work fine together.)
Now if only there were an open scalable vector graphics format that they could have used instead... if only...
I was originally going to say it would be the GameBoy Advance SP, but then I remembered that the DS can play GameBoy Advance games too.
It's a nicely-sized portable, which I've found means that I can actually play the game instead of requiring a TV. Many of the great SNES games were re-released for the GBA (like The Legend of Zelda: Link to the Past, basically all the Final Fantasy games before VII, Super Mario Bros. 3, and Donkey Kong Country 2).
Unfortunately Nintendo took the time to screw with some of them (Link shouldn't be yelling "Ha!" all the time in Link to the Past!), and not all of them translated quite as well as I might like (the music in Final Fantasy VI Advance was screwed up in some places, but on the plus side the bugs were fixed).
Add in original DS games and other original GBA games, and you've got a very nice portable handheld console, which in my mind at least makes it the Best Game Console of All Time, So Far.
Of course, that's probably because I'm getting older and have less free time to play games. It's easier to sneak some game time when you can just drop the console in your pocket or man-purs-- I mean, laptop bag. It's a laptop bag.
I'm on Sprint too. I pay $0.20 for text message, send or receive.
Sprint is fairly good about grandfathering in plans. Your current plan must not charge for receiving messages, but believe me, current ones do.
However, as far as I can tell, they never tell you this anywhere on their site, and their service agreement sure as hell doesn't make it clear. The only reason I know is because I tried it.
One of the features of my new phone is "Voice SMS."
Think about that for a moment. It's like a text message, but it's voice. On a phone.
According to Sprint, the reason this is better than a normal voice mail message is that you're guaranteed to leave a message and not actually reach the person you're calling (which comes up how often?) and that the text message UI is easier to deal with than the voice mail system. (Then why not offer a voice mail UI?)
And, of course, it wastes both a text message and data transfer. So instead of leaving a voice mail message, which uses normal minutes and during off-peak hours is free, you get to pay extra for this feature. (Oh, I get it, improving the voice mail experience would be too hard to monetize, so it's just not worth it. The iPhone must be an illusion.)
Sure there is. Ignoring the way BitTorrent actually encodes the information, and assuming that somehow every file name could be stored as one byte (ignoring the obvious flaw with that), by keeping all of them at the torrent level you'd require "more than 560,000" bytes just devoted to file names. Since the general rule of thumb is to keep the actual .torrent file around 100KB, give or take, that's right out.
Now, throwing in the way the .torrent file actually stores the list of file names, you're looking at at least 21 bytes per file. Assuming 560,000 files, that bloats the .torrent file to over 11.2MB - and that's still not realistic, because it requires every file to be less than 10 bytes in size and all of them to have empty path names. (Which is obviously not valid.)
Throw in realistic constraints, and you're adding another 15 bytes, bringing us to a total of 36 bytes per file - bloating the .torrent to 19.2MB, just for file names.
So, in short, the reason to place them in a ZIP file and not use the multi-file feature is because using the multiple file feature would massively bloat the .torrent file. Now the final .ZIP file has similar requirements per file in the ZIP file, but that becomes payload as part of the BitTorrent download and not something that has to be downloaded via non-BitTorrent means first.
Finally, for an explanation of where those numbers above come from, the "smallest possible" form for a file would be:
"d6:lengthi0e4:pathlee" (21 bytes)
The "more realistic constraints" brings that to:
"d6:lengthi100000e4:pathl8:0000.JPGee" (36 bytes)
Yes, the .torrent file is essentially "plain text" although the piece hashes are stored as binary strings. It's encoded using "Bencoding" - which isn't the most compact of formats.
I know that was a joke, but the answer is no, it uses a standard HTML tag.
Which is used to add a non-standard HTTP header, "X-UA-Compatible". Standard HTML, non-standard HTTP.
Which leads to the great possibility of a webpage looking different on the local computer compared to the server it was originally downloaded from...
Enough people did complain, so they moved the required virus scan from 1PM to 1AM, and from daily to weekly. And now we have to leave the machine running overnight.
There appear to be two political groups working with IT - the actual sys admins, and then the "security" people, who require all the firewalls and virus scans and inventory checks. The sys admins want to make things work for their users, while the security people want to make everything as secure as possible, without regard to how it affects how people work.
It's the classical "ease of use versus security" problem, played out with corporate policies.
Me too!
In any cases, I always leave my computer (a laptop) on during the week. I shut it off on weekends, but due to the software inventory tracker and the required anti-virus scans, I always leave the machine on during the week so that I can actually use it during the day.
The real problem is that the anti-virus scan is so slow that it takes a good three hours. The inventory scan is somewhat better, and only takes about an hour. In both cases, the machine drags to near unusable levels while the scan is running. Given that it's a dual-core machine, this is really a testament to just how screwed up Window's I/O scheduling is - both involve lots of file reads, which apparently causes Windows to drag to a crawl.
Not to mention that hibernate and to a lesser degree suspend appear to not work well with certain drivers on my system. Using hibernate kills the wireless drivers, which isn't a horribly big deal when I can physically plug the system in but it does mean that I just shut the thing off when roaming about, since I'll have to reboot anyway.
But it's that three-hour IT required virus scan that keeps me leaving the machine running nights. That's a real productivity killer during the day. Fortunately it's only scheduled to run once a week.
The inventory app, on the other hand, runs daily for some reason.
Can I ask what's wrong with something like a TiVo HD?
If all you're interested in is recording a show and watching it later, any HD DVR should work fine.
If you want to watch the shows on your laptop or something like that, with a TiVo HD you can always use TiVoToGo (which is annoyingly well hidden on their website, and doesn't make any mention of HD support - I suppose I'll have to try it later). There's even support for burning to DVD through a computer, although that requires Roxio.
(And, uh, I've been told that if you look long enough on Google, you can find ways to remove the TiVo DRM.)
I haven't really done the math, but I expect that the cost of the monthly fee would easily match the cost of blank DVD-Rs beyond a certain point.
Now it's not the most "Free software" friendly solution in the world, but it does meet the ease-of-use requirement. Use the guide, select the show, hit record, and it will record it later. To an extent it's even easier since you can skip the "insert blank" step and, if you're using season passes, even the "choose channel, hit 'Record'" steps. :)
I'm honestly curious, why wouldn't a TiVo HD (or similar HD DVR, if you can find any) meet your requirements?
Good lord, you actually have content there. Sweet Zombie Jesus, it's like if MySpace was irradiated with XML-Rays and mutated into a complete XML-based social network specification, which requires everyone to write their own specifications and hand-edit XML files.
That's just ... scary.
They weren't just asked if space exploration is worthwhile, they were asked why it is worthwhile.
So, yes, it's not surprising that they all said "yes," but their reasons why are still worth reading. And that's what the story is about, reasons in support of space exploration.
Some version of Top Gear (with parts edited out, mostly to squeeze in the US standard amount of advertising) is broadcast about a year out of date in the US on BBC America. It's on several times during the week. (Currently Mondays at 8PM ET and again on Saturday at some time that TiVo knows and I don't.)
So if you're in the US and you get BBC America, watch it, it may be the funniest show on TV! The only issue might be minor differences between US and British English, but anyone who can't figure that out probably was spawned by human/vegetable interbreeding.
There's also a rumor that the a mildly edited version of the original Top Gear might be picked up by the Discovery Channel, which is more widely available than BBC America. But so far, nothing on that front.
Identity theft - how hard can it be?
(And if you don't get it, watch Top Gear.)
The numpad is far better than the numbers at the top for entering lots of numbers. Which, I'll admit, doesn't come up that often. Generally the only time I use them is when populating a spreadsheet. They're also very useful for doing a bunch of quick calculations with a calculator app.
Obviously I don't play old DOS games that often, so I have no idea how they control. But the old DOS games I did play did work with multiple arrow keys, but they may be newer than the ones you're thinking of. (Early 90s versus later 80s.)
I'm confused by this statement. First, there's the obvious answer: press two arrows at once.
Secondly, you can't move diagonally with the numeric keypad with numlock off. 7 is Home, 1 is End, 9 is Page Up, and 3 is Page Down. So pressing diagonally will either take you to the start/end, or up/down a page. It won't move diagonally.
In one of the responses you mentioned video games, but the only game I can think of that actually uses movement like that is Civ 4, and it supports using the number keys on the numeric keypad regardless of Numlock's state. I would hope that most games that support the numpad will work in both states.
I've never felt the need to pop off numlock (I've never accidentally hit it) but it still is fairly useless - why would I ever want to turn the numpad into a duplicate of the keys to its immediate left? (I'm aware of its historical use, on keyboards without the navigation keys. But on modern keyboards it's pretty useless.)