Hmm interesting. Admittedly I'm only 23 and am out of the whole IT thing now (used to intern in that...engineer now) but everyone I knew pronounced it Bee-ahs. Always said Mac-oh-ess and Sun-oh-ess though. Never knew what to do with HP-UX. At Northrop Grumman, everyone said "H-P-U-X". When I went to Agilent, everyone said "H-pucks". Previous places, everyone said "S-C-O". Now everyone I hang around says "sko". There's really no keeping track.
Help me understand: why do people want multitasking on their PDAs? I have a PocketPC and yeah, it has multitasking, but find it usually pisses me off more than it helps (ie by default, clicking the close "X" just minimizes and leaves everything in RAM)
The *one* thing I could think of is playing mp3s in the background.
Other than that, as long as apps maintain a reasonable level of state when exiting, what more do you really need?
I'm actually strongly thinking of ditching my PPC2003 device for a T3. I played with my brother's and the OS just seemed sooo much cleaner...
SMTP certainly can be authenticated. Hell, *all* of my SMTP servers now are. My ISP, the one I run for a few friends, my work, and both my old schools at the very least required a login to IMAP first or they needed a user/password.
The standards are there, the software support is there both for the servers and the clients. And if I could manage to hack something together to make it work with my god-awful, unmaintainable virtual domain setup then any competent IT person should be able to figure it out.
Yea we all pirated everything in school. Mostly justified it by saying we couldn't afford it so wouldn't buy it anyway. That's what I did...
Of course, after graduating and getting a job that line of reasoning didn't really work anymore. Found myself going legit just because I couldn't think of a good excuse anymore. $90 for an OEM Windows install isn't all that unreasonable.
Of course I haven't touched a word processor at home in well over a year (since I finished school), so I've got no need to buy *or* pirate Office...
Indeed. Progressive taxation for the benefit of the poor is all well and good but it utterly fails to take into account the fact that $1 is not worth the same from city to city.
On a flat tax the difference is much more negligible (whether in California or Iowa you pay 15% or something). But when you live in CA and make $75k and are equivilent to someone making $50k in the midwest and you pay 30% versus his 20% then suddenly things are uneven. With an equal amount of wealth, the guy in CA needs to pay more.
They say "well, progressive taxation helps the poor who need the money to live." Well, I hate to break it to you, but somethimes the guy with more dollars in the bank account is the poorer one from a practical standpoint.
(number pulled out of thin air, but the point remains...)
The details vary, I believe (i.e. some states you can park yourself in the left, just don't go slow, some you need to immediately move back, etc.) but I can't say I ever really looked.
Frankly, regardless of the law, it's just common courtesy to move over if you're going slow. Hell, even if you're a speeder (who isn't) at least move over for the nutjobs...
Though I'd say more imporant than that is to get out of the right lane around those merges. It's always full of people going like 50mph in the 65 and if you're merging you need to either:
a) Gun it and cut the guy off or
b) Come close to a full stop in the acceleration lane and *then* gun it to get in before the following guy. Either way someone's getting pissed and it gets ugly quick if someone's not paying attention.
Of course that leads me to another peeve: there's no reason to drop to 15 under the limit when your exit is 3/4 mile away! Usually there's adequate decelleration space at the exit. Ok, sometimes they toss you into a 15mph cloverleaf (Virginia, I'm looking in your direction with your crazy left exits merging into fast lanes), but still...
*sigh*
Stupid drivers piss me off. Just yesterday I'd just gotten out of my parked car with my coworkers for lunch. Some old guy backs out of his space and turns left to leave, coming dangerously close to hitting my rear bumper with his nose. We holler "stop", waving arms. He stops within inches. Waves at us. And proceeds to grind his way across the back of my car and heads for the exit till we chased him down and made him stop. It boggles the mind.
Ok, take firearms. LP generally says it's none of the government's business. I agree with that. But then I've got a problem with a guy down the street mounting a minigun on the top of his jeep. If I try to analyze the difference rationally, there's really no difference, but it just doesn't sit right.
So I find myself agreeing with the arguments and yet I have an arbitrary limit to how far I'll accept them that's difficult to rationalize. So clearly there's a contradiction there.
Similar thing with drugs, for example. I think marijuana should be able to be sold right next to the cigarettes. But I'd prefer they kept the heroin out. Again, an arbitrary line there.
Maybe "moderate" would've been a better term. I just don't like having beliefs that I can't fully justify.
Don't know how that's flamebait. Some of us really do find them both equally unqualified. I'm not registered as a democrat and so wasn't involved in their primaries, but it boggles my mind that the party had *one* job to do: find someone better than Bush. That should really shouldn't have been a difficult task...
Last election I was registered republican and was willing to give Bush the benefit of the doubt. He dropped the ball in my opinion (enough to make me distance myself from the party altoghether) And I've got a number of friends who feel the same way. Unfortunately the democrats did a piss poor job selecting a candidate that could attract us former republicans.
*sigh*
Now I'm registered libertarian, but find my beliefs a bit too hypocritical to fit well with them either...
And even if they were *good*, they were still the guys that had boxes at Fry's, $75 for a NIC next to a D-Link for $10. Never dealt with their enterprise gear other than some already purchased and installed switches, but their consumer grade stuff was so overpriced it wasn't even funny.
But their name sold. There were a number of times I had to tell people I saw in the store "Just grab the $10 OEM NE2000. It's a fraction of the cost and will work with everything."
Seriously. As they taught my dad in the military re people hopping fences into the SAC missile bases and he later taught me, "While you're shooting at his leg, he's shooting at your head. When you need to shoot at all, you shoot to kill. If you don't need to kill, you don't need to shoot."
Of course the key is to know when you need to shoot at all. Some asshat trying to steal my car isn't worth killing. The cops and insurance can handle that one. Some asshat coming thru my window with a gun? Well, he won't get as much sympathy.
But in any case, you never ever ever point the business end of a gun at something you wouldn't be willing to kill. Be it a thief, your dog, or your teenage kid sneaking in in the middle of the night.
Rant mode on... It boggles the mind how little people know about firearm safety. I mean it's not hard. The concept of someone who owns a gun actually thinking "well, I'll just shoot his hand and make him drop his gun" really gives all gun owners a bad name. Behind all the anti-/pro-gun rhetoric, a loaded gun in your house has only one purpose: to kill. I'd argue there are some (albeit very few) cases where that's morally justifiable. But if you're not comfortable with that concept, then you should think long and hard before putting that 9mm in your nightstand.
It's a shame they can't teach this stuff in school...
Even personal firearms? My dad had a couple, but we moved off base when I was like 4 and they would've been kept out of reach so maybe they were stored elsewhere. Could've sworn I saw them in the house a couple times though.
Of course I wouldn't expect solders to have their M-16s under their beds, but I don't think I've ever met any active or former military who didn't own a gun...(not to say all of them do - but enough that I sure wouldn't want to take the chance)
The ones I was on (as a dependent, dad's retired AF) seemed safe enough. Interestingly people even took traffic laws seriously. If that sign says "Speed Limit 10MPH" you don't do 25, 20, or 15. You do 10.
I think in general you see less crime becase 1) there's an extremely high probability that the house you break into has a firearm in it and 2) MPs are far more intimidating than your local PD.
Also anything you do gets stuck in the same record your employer sees. Not good.
Maybe. That said none of us were there, and none of us saw a mushroom cloud. I'm not saying it can't be a nuke, but for those of us sitting on our asses surfing/., given the evidence we have access to, a forest fire probably isn't any less likely than anything else.
They might just be sticking to understated blurbs until they hear something more definitive from the Pentagon.
Nobody wants to be the station that shouts "NUCLEAR BLAST SEEN OVER NORTH KOREA - 2 MILE WIDE MUSHROOM CLOUD" only to find that it was a LP tank that blew up and some farmer gave widely exagerated initial report.
*shrug* wait and see I guess. Now that it's starting to trickle out I imagine details will start to come out shortly.
Well no popular reasons. Don't forget oil and probably any number of things we don't know about. We went in to get something out of the deal, not just for the hell of it.
Now, we have a list of reasons to go into North Korea as well, but we all know that if we even gave the impression of attacking NK, Seoul would be a smoking crater in short order. Effective as Bush's spin docters are, no amount of PR could make that look good.
A lot of phones have been GPS-capable for a couple years. But the deadline to get the GPS signals converted to E911 ALI and sent to call centers isn't until 2006 and I think many carriers are trying to get that postponed. In fact, I'm not aware of any US wireless carrier that's actually implemented it at all (correct me if I'm wrong) regardless of the "Use GPS for 911" option in your cell phone menu. I wouldn't count on the dispatcher seeing anything but your phone number if you call from a cell phone.
Certainly the couple times I've had to call 911 from a cell they didn't have a clue where I was. They just got my number and knew I was on a cell phone.
Now the *obvious* solution is to buy a single landline phone and leave it plugged in without service. If there's no service on the line you can call two numbers: 1) your local telco to order service and 2) 911. As far as I know, if you have a dialtone then 911 will *always* work with all its ALI goodness.
Better conditions for the union members, everyone else be damned. I suppose I'm just ignorant, but most of my union experiences are something along the lines of this:
(At some random trade show) *Drive up with van to giant but empty unloading area of convention center - the big drive-thru thing in the front, not the loading dock in back..we know that's off-limits*
Security Guy: You can't come in here. Us: But it's the unloading area... Security: No it's a "loading area". No UNloading allowed. Union rules...
*park van in garage two blocks away, put all our crap on a cart to roll in, reach front door* Security Guy: Whoa, you can't bring that in. Us: Why? Security: Only union guys can push carts. If you can't hold it in your hands, you can't bring it in. Us: Uh ok, so can we get the union guys to take it in? Security: No. They can't do that. Us: Mmmkay...
*Spend next 45min using 3 guys to guard the piles over the two blocks between the garage and the convention center and as we take each item one by one across the whole convention center by hand*
Maybe it's just me, but that convention center thing happens every fucking time and it pisses me off to no end. I mean, I'm all for making sure the cart-pushers have their jobs. But what's the point of having unionized cart pushers if they won't push the goddamned carts????
Most of my other encounters are similarly pedantic (i.e. a picture falls off the wall, but nobody can put it back because only a unionized drywall worker is allowed to use a hammer on the wall and none is available for a week)
Thank you. It boggles my mind that people don't know this and assume that everything in a contract is enforcable.
There's so much crap in leases that's unenforcable it's ridiculous. The landlord just hopes you'll be scared of getting evicted and will abide anyway. But if you were to sue you could win. But nobody ever does.
It's the same as a landlord saying they'll only rent to girls. A landlord I tried to rent from with a group of guys in college had that policy under a "it's our property, we can do whatever we want" mentality. Boy were they wrong. We sued. We got a big check. They got bent over and took it from a legal cluestick. And since it was a willful violation, their insurance was terminated. And since they weren't an LLC or anything, it came straight out of the owners' pockets.
Normally I'd feel bad for them, but these are some of the worst people I've had the misfortune to encounter.
Am I the only one who actually *likes* XBox controllers? They're the only console controllers I've been able to stand to use for any length of time. The PS2 ones are so damn small that you have to hold them with your fingertips and sticking my fingers straight out to hit the L/R triggers just feels horribly unnatural. After 30 minutes of GTA, the tendons in my thumbs are in agony from working the poorly placed analog sticks.
The xbox ones (especially the big one) are *way* more comfortable for me. I can use my whole hand to hold the thing and play all day with no aches or pains...
It's just odd to me that/. seems to have no love for the things yet when friends played my xbox when we first got one, many of them commented on how much better the controller was than the other systems.
What about bootability? USB mass storage is pretty general, it's just SCSI over USB. It just returns the blocks asked for by the host and does all the other things a regular disk would do.
Most of the issues for bootability are silly things like forcing A-Z,0-9 serial numbers and stuff so crappy BIOSes won't freak out. But in general if the device follows the Mass Storage spec correctly it oughta be able to boot off a capable chipset.
Of course many many many USB keys don't correctly follow the spec...
I think what he may be talking about are the flashing tools themselves. You download the.exe file, run it and it says "please insert a disk into drive a:" and loads an image onto the disk making it a pain in the ass to get the tool onto a CD in the first place. Why oh why vendors don't just release ISOs of these things for those of us living in the 21st century is beyond me.
Of course, my MSI board has a windows firmware updater as well. No floppy or CD necessary. *That's* the way to go.
Too bad none of the knockoffs have season passes. That's the best feature of the tivo. Pause live tv? Why on earth do they all push that? With tivo, I never have to watch live TV at all. And when that show I like has a marathon or moves or something, it just knows and everything takes care of itself.
Other than pausing live TV, those other DVRs don't do anything I couldn't do with two VCRs...
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Hmm interesting. Admittedly I'm only 23 and am out of the whole IT thing now (used to intern in that...engineer now) but everyone I knew pronounced it Bee-ahs. Always said Mac-oh-ess and Sun-oh-ess though. Never knew what to do with HP-UX. At Northrop Grumman, everyone said "H-P-U-X". When I went to Agilent, everyone said "H-pucks". Previous places, everyone said "S-C-O". Now everyone I hang around says "sko". There's really no keeping track.
Help me understand: why do people want multitasking on their PDAs? I have a PocketPC and yeah, it has multitasking, but find it usually pisses me off more than it helps (ie by default, clicking the close "X" just minimizes and leaves everything in RAM)
The *one* thing I could think of is playing mp3s in the background.
Other than that, as long as apps maintain a reasonable level of state when exiting, what more do you really need?
I'm actually strongly thinking of ditching my PPC2003 device for a T3. I played with my brother's and the OS just seemed sooo much cleaner...
SMTP certainly can be authenticated. Hell, *all* of my SMTP servers now are. My ISP, the one I run for a few friends, my work, and both my old schools at the very least required a login to IMAP first or they needed a user/password.
The standards are there, the software support is there both for the servers and the clients. And if I could manage to hack something together to make it work with my god-awful, unmaintainable virtual domain setup then any competent IT person should be able to figure it out.
Yea we all pirated everything in school. Mostly justified it by saying we couldn't afford it so wouldn't buy it anyway. That's what I did...
Of course, after graduating and getting a job that line of reasoning didn't really work anymore. Found myself going legit just because I couldn't think of a good excuse anymore. $90 for an OEM Windows install isn't all that unreasonable.
Of course I haven't touched a word processor at home in well over a year (since I finished school), so I've got no need to buy *or* pirate Office...
Indeed. Progressive taxation for the benefit of the poor is all well and good but it utterly fails to take into account the fact that $1 is not worth the same from city to city.
On a flat tax the difference is much more negligible (whether in California or Iowa you pay 15% or something). But when you live in CA and make $75k and are equivilent to someone making $50k in the midwest and you pay 30% versus his 20% then suddenly things are uneven. With an equal amount of wealth, the guy in CA needs to pay more.
They say "well, progressive taxation helps the poor who need the money to live." Well, I hate to break it to you, but somethimes the guy with more dollars in the bank account is the poorer one from a practical standpoint.
(number pulled out of thin air, but the point remains...)
The details vary, I believe (i.e. some states you can park yourself in the left, just don't go slow, some you need to immediately move back, etc.) but I can't say I ever really looked.
Frankly, regardless of the law, it's just common courtesy to move over if you're going slow. Hell, even if you're a speeder (who isn't) at least move over for the nutjobs...
Though I'd say more imporant than that is to get out of the right lane around those merges. It's always full of people going like 50mph in the 65 and if you're merging you need to either:
a) Gun it and cut the guy off or
b) Come close to a full stop in the acceleration lane and *then* gun it to get in before the following guy. Either way someone's getting pissed and it gets ugly quick if someone's not paying attention.
Of course that leads me to another peeve: there's no reason to drop to 15 under the limit when your exit is 3/4 mile away! Usually there's adequate decelleration space at the exit. Ok, sometimes they toss you into a 15mph cloverleaf (Virginia, I'm looking in your direction with your crazy left exits merging into fast lanes), but still...
*sigh*
Stupid drivers piss me off. Just yesterday I'd just gotten out of my parked car with my coworkers for lunch. Some old guy backs out of his space and turns left to leave, coming dangerously close to hitting my rear bumper with his nose. We holler "stop", waving arms. He stops within inches. Waves at us. And proceeds to grind his way across the back of my car and heads for the exit till we chased him down and made him stop. It boggles the mind.
Great. Good luck getting those who own class A's to give them back....
Hmm probably not the best word....
Ok, take firearms. LP generally says it's none of the government's business. I agree with that. But then I've got a problem with a guy down the street mounting a minigun on the top of his jeep. If I try to analyze the difference rationally, there's really no difference, but it just doesn't sit right.
So I find myself agreeing with the arguments and yet I have an arbitrary limit to how far I'll accept them that's difficult to rationalize. So clearly there's a contradiction there.
Similar thing with drugs, for example. I think marijuana should be able to be sold right next to the cigarettes. But I'd prefer they kept the heroin out. Again, an arbitrary line there.
Maybe "moderate" would've been a better term. I just don't like having beliefs that I can't fully justify.
*shrug*
Don't know how that's flamebait. Some of us really do find them both equally unqualified. I'm not registered as a democrat and so wasn't involved in their primaries, but it boggles my mind that the party had *one* job to do: find someone better than Bush. That should really shouldn't have been a difficult task...
Last election I was registered republican and was willing to give Bush the benefit of the doubt. He dropped the ball in my opinion (enough to make me distance myself from the party altoghether) And I've got a number of friends who feel the same way. Unfortunately the democrats did a piss poor job selecting a candidate that could attract us former republicans.
*sigh*
Now I'm registered libertarian, but find my beliefs a bit too hypocritical to fit well with them either...
And even if they were *good*, they were still the guys that had boxes at Fry's, $75 for a NIC next to a D-Link for $10. Never dealt with their enterprise gear other than some already purchased and installed switches, but their consumer grade stuff was so overpriced it wasn't even funny.
But their name sold. There were a number of times I had to tell people I saw in the store "Just grab the $10 OEM NE2000. It's a fraction of the cost and will work with everything."
Seriously. As they taught my dad in the military re people hopping fences into the SAC missile bases and he later taught me, "While you're shooting at his leg, he's shooting at your head. When you need to shoot at all, you shoot to kill. If you don't need to kill, you don't need to shoot."
Of course the key is to know when you need to shoot at all. Some asshat trying to steal my car isn't worth killing. The cops and insurance can handle that one. Some asshat coming thru my window with a gun? Well, he won't get as much sympathy.
But in any case, you never ever ever point the business end of a gun at something you wouldn't be willing to kill. Be it a thief, your dog, or your teenage kid sneaking in in the middle of the night.
Rant mode on...
It boggles the mind how little people know about firearm safety. I mean it's not hard. The concept of someone who owns a gun actually thinking "well, I'll just shoot his hand and make him drop his gun" really gives all gun owners a bad name. Behind all the anti-/pro-gun rhetoric, a loaded gun in your house has only one purpose: to kill. I'd argue there are some (albeit very few) cases where that's morally justifiable. But if you're not comfortable with that concept, then you should think long and hard before putting that 9mm in your nightstand.
It's a shame they can't teach this stuff in school...
Rant mode off...
Even personal firearms? My dad had a couple, but we moved off base when I was like 4 and they would've been kept out of reach so maybe they were stored elsewhere. Could've sworn I saw them in the house a couple times though.
Of course I wouldn't expect solders to have their M-16s under their beds, but I don't think I've ever met any active or former military who didn't own a gun...(not to say all of them do - but enough that I sure wouldn't want to take the chance)
The ones I was on (as a dependent, dad's retired AF) seemed safe enough. Interestingly people even took traffic laws seriously. If that sign says "Speed Limit 10MPH" you don't do 25, 20, or 15. You do 10.
I think in general you see less crime becase 1) there's an extremely high probability that the house you break into has a firearm in it and 2) MPs are far more intimidating than your local PD.
Also anything you do gets stuck in the same record your employer sees. Not good.
Hmm, I'd only read one of the other reports, didn't see that article (or indeed the linked one) which only mentioned the cloud visible by satellite.
If the crater's visible, then yeah, I guess they do think we're pretty stupid (and if I'm any indication, I guess they were right)
Interesting. I stand corrected. Good to know not all carriers are just bitching and moaning about it.
Maybe. That said none of us were there, and none of us saw a mushroom cloud. I'm not saying it can't be a nuke, but for those of us sitting on our asses surfing /., given the evidence we have access to, a forest fire probably isn't any less likely than anything else.
They might just be sticking to understated blurbs until they hear something more definitive from the Pentagon.
Nobody wants to be the station that shouts "NUCLEAR BLAST SEEN OVER NORTH KOREA - 2 MILE WIDE MUSHROOM CLOUD" only to find that it was a LP tank that blew up and some farmer gave widely exagerated initial report.
*shrug* wait and see I guess. Now that it's starting to trickle out I imagine details will start to come out shortly.
Well no popular reasons. Don't forget oil and probably any number of things we don't know about. We went in to get something out of the deal, not just for the hell of it.
Now, we have a list of reasons to go into North Korea as well, but we all know that if we even gave the impression of attacking NK, Seoul would be a smoking crater in short order. Effective as Bush's spin docters are, no amount of PR could make that look good.
A lot of phones have been GPS-capable for a couple years. But the deadline to get the GPS signals converted to E911 ALI and sent to call centers isn't until 2006 and I think many carriers are trying to get that postponed. In fact, I'm not aware of any US wireless carrier that's actually implemented it at all (correct me if I'm wrong) regardless of the "Use GPS for 911" option in your cell phone menu. I wouldn't count on the dispatcher seeing anything but your phone number if you call from a cell phone.
Certainly the couple times I've had to call 911 from a cell they didn't have a clue where I was. They just got my number and knew I was on a cell phone.
Now the *obvious* solution is to buy a single landline phone and leave it plugged in without service. If there's no service on the line you can call two numbers: 1) your local telco to order service and 2) 911. As far as I know, if you have a dialtone then 911 will *always* work with all its ALI goodness.
Better conditions for the union members, everyone else be damned. I suppose I'm just ignorant, but most of my union experiences are something along the lines of this:
(At some random trade show)
*Drive up with van to giant but empty unloading area of convention center - the big drive-thru thing in the front, not the loading dock in back..we know that's off-limits*
Security Guy: You can't come in here.
Us: But it's the unloading area...
Security: No it's a "loading area". No UNloading allowed. Union rules...
*park van in garage two blocks away, put all our crap on a cart to roll in, reach front door*
Security Guy: Whoa, you can't bring that in.
Us: Why?
Security: Only union guys can push carts. If you can't hold it in your hands, you can't bring it in.
Us: Uh ok, so can we get the union guys to take it in?
Security: No. They can't do that.
Us: Mmmkay...
*Spend next 45min using 3 guys to guard the piles over the two blocks between the garage and the convention center and as we take each item one by one across the whole convention center by hand*
Maybe it's just me, but that convention center thing happens every fucking time and it pisses me off to no end. I mean, I'm all for making sure the cart-pushers have their jobs. But what's the point of having unionized cart pushers if they won't push the goddamned carts????
Most of my other encounters are similarly pedantic (i.e. a picture falls off the wall, but nobody can put it back because only a unionized drywall worker is allowed to use a hammer on the wall and none is available for a week)
Thank you. It boggles my mind that people don't know this and assume that everything in a contract is enforcable.
There's so much crap in leases that's unenforcable it's ridiculous. The landlord just hopes you'll be scared of getting evicted and will abide anyway. But if you were to sue you could win. But nobody ever does.
It's the same as a landlord saying they'll only rent to girls. A landlord I tried to rent from with a group of guys in college had that policy under a "it's our property, we can do whatever we want" mentality. Boy were they wrong. We sued. We got a big check. They got bent over and took it from a legal cluestick. And since it was a willful violation, their insurance was terminated. And since they weren't an LLC or anything, it came straight out of the owners' pockets.
Normally I'd feel bad for them, but these are some of the worst people I've had the misfortune to encounter.
Am I the only one who actually *likes* XBox controllers? They're the only console controllers I've been able to stand to use for any length of time. The PS2 ones are so damn small that you have to hold them with your fingertips and sticking my fingers straight out to hit the L/R triggers just feels horribly unnatural. After 30 minutes of GTA, the tendons in my thumbs are in agony from working the poorly placed analog sticks.
/. seems to have no love for the things yet when friends played my xbox when we first got one, many of them commented on how much better the controller was than the other systems.
The xbox ones (especially the big one) are *way* more comfortable for me. I can use my whole hand to hold the thing and play all day with no aches or pains...
It's just odd to me that
*shrug*
What about bootability? USB mass storage is pretty general, it's just SCSI over USB. It just returns the blocks asked for by the host and does all the other things a regular disk would do.
Most of the issues for bootability are silly things like forcing A-Z,0-9 serial numbers and stuff so crappy BIOSes won't freak out. But in general if the device follows the Mass Storage spec correctly it oughta be able to boot off a capable chipset.
Of course many many many USB keys don't correctly follow the spec...
I think what he may be talking about are the flashing tools themselves. You download the .exe file, run it and it says "please insert a disk into drive a:" and loads an image onto the disk making it a pain in the ass to get the tool onto a CD in the first place. Why oh why vendors don't just release ISOs of these things for those of us living in the 21st century is beyond me.
Of course, my MSI board has a windows firmware updater as well. No floppy or CD necessary. *That's* the way to go.
Too bad none of the knockoffs have season passes. That's the best feature of the tivo. Pause live tv? Why on earth do they all push that? With tivo, I never have to watch live TV at all. And when that show I like has a marathon or moves or something, it just knows and everything takes care of itself.
Other than pausing live TV, those other DVRs don't do anything I couldn't do with two VCRs...