Pirates should get updates as much as they get support from any other product they stole: Zero.
Software updates are a *support* function. So I mostly agree with that statement.
However, I feel that *security* updates (and only security updates) should be free for all, regardless, packaged into as many possible methods of delivery as possible (including *easy* download/install). Things like functionality fixes/updates should indeed be limited to non-pirate users.
However, a lot of folks runnning pirated versions of windows (if they know), won't even *visit* WindowsUpdate anyway... so it's kind of a moot point.
2048x1536!?!? My god. I have yet to see a coded page be able to flex and still fit what the designer had in mind.
But in reality, people who run higher resolutions (1280x768 and up) don't run the browser as a maximized windows. Instead, they start to size the browser window like a sheet of paper, a bit tall and thin. On my 15" 1400x1050 display, Firefox only covers about 2/3 of the screen width (or about 1000pix wide). Same with looking at stuff on my 19" 1600x1200 display, the browser width ends up around 1000pix wide.
The reason for that is the same reason that newspaper text doesn't stretch across the entire width of the sheet. It's too difficult to read long blocks of text that are wider then 40-60 (75?) characters. Beyond a certain width, your eyes start losing their place as they jump back to the start of the next line. Hence, a newspaper (and news magazines) divide the page into multiple columns to make it easier to read.
(Personally, I'm still looking for a 15" desktop LCD monitor with a dpi over 120, at 19" monitor at 2048x1536 has a dpi of 146.)
Slashdot is more of a forum where anyone is allowed to come and discuss any topics.
Ha ha ha ha! Seriously, you must be new here? (Hell yeah I'm burning karma on this... no offense)
Slashdot and discussion do not fit into the same page. It's more of a soapbox-style comment system then a discussion forum. The user-interface has serious issues that interfere with having anything akin to a discussion. Discussion/forum software would allow a person to track threads that are interesting and easily check back to see if anything new has been added to those interesting threads. Slashdot doesn't allow you to do that (unless you manually bookmark stuff, or feel like constantly re-reading everything). In fact, any suggestions to that effect to the programmers gets either shot down, or "well, we don't want to it that way (some simple method), instead we're waiting to write some huge complex system (which will never get written)". (Case in point: adding another drop-down to the filter bar to only show posts within the last 1/2/4/8/12/24/48 hours.)
While it may not be a blog, calling it a forum is even farther off-the-mark.
... The only distributed task I contribute to is folding@home because all others don't seem worth the extra energy and heat my PC will put out.
Tell you what, when you pay for my PC and my electricity bill, then you can decide what distributed tasks I contribute CPU time to.
Yes, that's a bit of a rant, but it is up to the individual to make their own choices about which projects they contribute to. (Does this mean you also complained about all of those screensavers that burned CPU cycles displaying flying toasters instead of putting the machine to sleep?)
heh I had to learn this lesson the hard way. I formatted my computer after installing XP, and as my windows updates were downloading, BAM I got hit by a more than a few worms. I copied the ZoneAlarm installer to my other HD, re-formatted (with my cable modem disconnected), installed the firewall, and then got my updates. From now on, its "paranoid installs" for me:)
Wait... you have a cable modem but don't have a hardware firewall between your PC and the cable modem?
Just how cheap is your time anyway?
The only techies who have an excuse not to use a hardware-based router/firewall/NAT are those on dial-up. And there are even hardware-based router/firewall/NAT devices that will do dial up.
Is this the case with Ghost these days? I know when I used Ghost years ago it had both options, either copy the files it saw on a disk to an image file, or copy the entire disk to an image without caring what the filesystem was. I used to have to do exactly that before Ghost supported NTFS natively, and you could also tell it whether or not you wanted to do that with something it did support, like FAT.
It still does both (just used Ghost2003 a few days ago). Sorry, don't remember the command line flags to do it...
Base O/S bootup for WinXP for me is around 300MB, that includes the corporate IM client, GPGShell, Anti-virus, Second Copy 2000. Then I have the applications that are almost always open. Firefox is eating 86-122MB at the moment, Outlook 33-64MB, FTP Voyager 9-17MB, SourceOffSite 8-19MB, HomeSite 6-32MB, MSAccess 10-20MB.
My normal working memory varies between 450MB and 600MB. Firing up my USENET newsreader can eat up 200MB (yes, it's a pig but I like my Gravity News). Add another 50MB if I fire up Thunderbird to check my other e-mail accounts. Oh, and opening up MSWord and Excel eats up another few dozen MB, along with Ultraedit, a few Terminal Services sessions, JASC PaintShop Pro, etc. as needed.
Sounds crowded, but since it's a laptop with an attached monitor, I'm able to use the external monitor as a 2nd desktop area to toss secondary windows. The main screen also runs at 1400x1050 while the external monitor runs at 1280x1024.
Boosting this the rest of the way to 1GB is only going to cost me $160 or so. Cheap upgrade.
Considering that the last time I bought RAM, I paid $1/MB, current RAM prices could quadruple, and I'd still be happy. Besides, what kind of apps do you need more than say, 256MB RAM? Hell, most machines I see these days ship with 512MB, which is more than I need.
It's not one app that requires all that memory, it's multiple apps which are all open at the same time that require all that memory.
It's call multi-tasking...
(I'm sitting here considering upgrading from 768Mb on the laptop to 1Gb in the next month or two... I keep hitting 700Mb in use. And the fact that Firefox 0.8 seems to eat twice the memory as Firebird 0.7 did isn't helping matters.)
Many people seem to suggest reburning data every few years. But each time you do this, are you not risking corrupting a small number of files? I know OSs and hardware have error correction, but when you're dealing with gigabytes of data isn't there a risk that eventually an error will go through uncaught?
Not if you use CRC/MD5/etc tools that make a record of what the information in the file should be. Even better, by using something like QuickPar (which uses MD5), if you do happen to find data corruption, you'll be able to fix it using the recovery data that you also stored in the folder with your data files.
When I have something to send somewhere, and I have to be sure it works, I just make 3 copies of it in directories 'copy1' 'copy2' and 'copy3' on the CD. A while ago I would lose copies of Windows98 on CDs because of the messy environment and (temp + humidity), so I'd burn multiple copies on the same disk. Almost 9 years on, I found a disk containing Quake2, the first and third directory were bad, and the second directory had just one file that was bad. I found a good copy of that file in the third directory. The CD didnt look like one byte could be read from it.
Bit wasteful of space... (I've done it too with floppies in the past). Another alternative would've been to add 20% recovery data to the disc using QuickPar. Then you could've simply repaired the damaged files. You can even do things like rip the entire disc to an ISO file (including the damaged sectors) and QuickPar will extract all of the file information and do the repair. (The fixed files get written out the to current directory.)
Blank CDs in bulk are cheap. For archival stuff I make a new copy every 5 years. I have a bunch of scanned photos I don't want to lose, so I re-copied them all onto new CDs.
You should be adding recovery data (e.g. using QuickPar) to those archival CDs.
The big advantage is that it extends the time window during which you can recover all of your data. Without PAR2 files, once you find fatal corruption of a file, you're done and the data is gone. With recovery data, you can repair the damage as long as you have enough recovery blocks.
(PAR2 also makes for a good, quick, verification tool that you can run against the content of your disc to verify everything is still correct.)
So the Mozilla 1.x line has better IMAP support then the Thunderbird 0.x line?
I may have to switch back to Moz 1.x instead of using Firefox/Thunderbird. Originally, I switched from Moz 1.4 to Firebird 0.7 / Thunderbird 0.4 because Moz 1.4 was a memory hog. However, Firefox 0.8 is using about twice the amount of memory that Firefox 0.7 did.
I've tried IMAP with Thunderbirrd 0.4 and FuseMail.com...
I wasn't impressed. I was hoping for a Outlook/Exchange type setup where I could work seamlessly off-line, periodically synchronizing with my IMAP folders up on the FuseMail server. Instead, I found the following bugs:
- going off-line, loading a bunch of messages into a folder, and then syncronizing with the IMAP server resulted in a loss of those messages. I had to be online with the IMAP server in order to load new messages into the folder.
- threading on an IMAP folder is horrid. Everything was out of order or highlighted incorrectly (as opposed to a regular POP3 mailbox folder which works 99% fine).
Good Lord! These are 'random' commuters. I find it quite hard to believe that a significant portion of them have have 20 logins let alone an AVERAGE of 20 online logins to keep track of. Especially considering that only one respondent (allegedly) had a total of 40 logins.
Lessee...
1. Telephone bill web site
2. Power bill web site
3. Amazon.com
4. JCPenneys.com
5. ISP E-mail
6. AIM password
7-12. half-a-dozen other online stores
13. Bank account web site.
14. Investment account web site
15. Work web-mail or intranet
16-18. a few credit account web sites
19. News web site
20. Game site
Hell, that wasn't even hard... at last count, I have 80 sets of passwords that I keep track of with regards to websites. (Most of those use unique username/password combinations.)
Or just create a seperate text file for each password and use PGP/GPG to encrypt the contents. Easily backed up, simple decryption, allows you to put all of the other information in the text file along with the password. No need to keep the file in a secure location since the contents are encrypted.
So long as nobody cracks my PGP password (a very long phrase), I'm not very worried.
(Additional bonus that we can post the encrypted password blocks on a public web page... since we encrypt to multiple recipients at the same time, any one of the dev group can get the password they need.)
However, I see Nextel on the horizon about to kill dead the 2.5G, 3G, and maybe even 4G networks with their new technology, Mobile-Fi (IEEE 802.20). They are in beta with it in the RTP, NC area. This stuff is up to 16Mbps with an round-trip latency of 35ms (I think they are even going to put SLA's on it) and you can use it at speeds of up to 200mph. The equipment provider is Novini.
Back when Ricochet still looked viable, and the skies were sunny over the economy, we would've loved to have had Ricochet during our monthly business trips to NY. To have a moderately high-speed internet connection on the 3 hour train ride would've been extremely useful. (Plus the additional 90 minutes worth spent getting to our final destination in the NYC area.) Unfortunately, their product wasn't any good at speeds above 80mph (trains between Philadelphia and NYC run closer to 110-115 in spots) and they never finished build-out on the east coast.
16Mbps sounds very intriguing, especially if they manage to allow you to access it while moving. (Got any links? Roll-out schedule?)
However, with the explosion of WiFi hot-spots and addition of WiFi to trains/airplanes, seems like the potential market for Nextel is going to be a lot smaller then a few years ago. Four years ago, 128kbps Ricochet was barely worth the $80/mo. Today, I'd put the price limit at more like $50/mo and even then it's going to be a limited market.
What usually happens in that scenario is that the subsequent songs are even worse and you begin to panic! I'm sure there must be at least one other slashdotter who does this. Right guys? Guys?
That's just an indication to me that I need to remove some MP3s from that particular CD and add some that fit better. (Or, if you're a playlist user, it's time to edit your playlists.) Any MP3 CD that I find myself skipping ahead more then once every 10 tracks is one that headed for the "redo" stack.
So if you record the shows for later, is that kosher? Because I think I can talk my wife into this, but she's certainly in the "But I'll miss Friends!" camp. Heaven forbid she shouldn't find out if Ross and Monica are finally going to get together.
Generally speaking, anyone who uses a PVR to pick-n-choose is already ahead of the game because you've put yourself back in control of your schedule. And you're not sitting there veg'd in front of the TV watching 4 hours straight as you channel surf in an attempt to find something to watch.
The real question is what do you do when you don't have anything recorded? Do you channel surf?
This whole campaign rests on the assumption that there is something bad or wrong with watching a lot of TV. I say that watching as much TV as you want is perfectly fine.
You're missing the point.
The point of National TV Turn Off week is to break the behavoir pattern where all you do when you come home is flop on the couch and turn on the TV for the entire evening and watch whatever happens to be on. Pure escapism, especially if you're not addressing other pressing needs. Some escapism is okay, probably even healthy, but too much avoiding of issues just leaves problems to fester and make things worse down the road.
Then there are the people who schedule their lives around shows, making themselves slaves of the TV schedule. Remember the slogans "must-see TV" and the like?
Same old story as a bunch of other vices. Moderation is okay, addiction isn't. But a lot of people live in denial about their addictions and trying to go cold-turkey for a weeks is a good way to determine whether you're in control or your addiction is in control.
I've switched it around a bit... you'll never catch me zonked out in front of the tube for hours on end watching whatever happens to be on. The only TV in the house with an antenae is on the 3rd floor, more so I can verify that the TV reception is good enough to feed into the VCRs. Before I bothered setting that up, I went for 5 years or so without any OTA or cable TV in the house.
Anything that I want to watch gets put on S-VHS tape and then played on a downstairs VCR. If it isn't worth the effort of setting up the recording schedule, it's not worth watching.
I end up watching anywhere from 3-6 hours per week, depending on how much the broadcast company mucks with the schedule or plays repeats. Some episodes get dumped straight to DVD on the off-chance that I'll watch them later. If I upgrade my TV antenae to get a few more stations cleanly, I might up that to 6-12 hours per week.
Slashdot Mirror
Pirates should get updates as much as they get support from any other product they stole: Zero.
Software updates are a *support* function. So I mostly agree with that statement.
However, I feel that *security* updates (and only security updates) should be free for all, regardless, packaged into as many possible methods of delivery as possible (including *easy* download/install). Things like functionality fixes/updates should indeed be limited to non-pirate users.
However, a lot of folks runnning pirated versions of windows (if they know), won't even *visit* WindowsUpdate anyway... so it's kind of a moot point.
2048x1536!?!? My god. I have yet to see a coded page be able to flex and still fit what the designer had in mind.
But in reality, people who run higher resolutions (1280x768 and up) don't run the browser as a maximized windows. Instead, they start to size the browser window like a sheet of paper, a bit tall and thin. On my 15" 1400x1050 display, Firefox only covers about 2/3 of the screen width (or about 1000pix wide). Same with looking at stuff on my 19" 1600x1200 display, the browser width ends up around 1000pix wide.
The reason for that is the same reason that newspaper text doesn't stretch across the entire width of the sheet. It's too difficult to read long blocks of text that are wider then 40-60 (75?) characters. Beyond a certain width, your eyes start losing their place as they jump back to the start of the next line. Hence, a newspaper (and news magazines) divide the page into multiple columns to make it easier to read.
(Personally, I'm still looking for a 15" desktop LCD monitor with a dpi over 120, at 19" monitor at 2048x1536 has a dpi of 146.)
So did they fix the IMAP folder thread display issue? (Where messages display out of order, and threads are horribly mangled.)
Does 0.6 allow you to move messages into an IMAP folder while off-line, then sync up with the server?
(Just two bugs that forced me to ditch trying to use IMAP with FuseMail.)
Slashdot is more of a forum where anyone is allowed to come and discuss any topics.
Ha ha ha ha! Seriously, you must be new here? (Hell yeah I'm burning karma on this... no offense)
Slashdot and discussion do not fit into the same page. It's more of a soapbox-style comment system then a discussion forum. The user-interface has serious issues that interfere with having anything akin to a discussion. Discussion/forum software would allow a person to track threads that are interesting and easily check back to see if anything new has been added to those interesting threads. Slashdot doesn't allow you to do that (unless you manually bookmark stuff, or feel like constantly re-reading everything). In fact, any suggestions to that effect to the programmers gets either shot down, or "well, we don't want to it that way (some simple method), instead we're waiting to write some huge complex system (which will never get written)". (Case in point: adding another drop-down to the filter bar to only show posts within the last 1/2/4/8/12/24/48 hours.)
While it may not be a blog, calling it a forum is even farther off-the-mark.
... The only distributed task I contribute to is folding@home because all others don't seem worth the extra energy and heat my PC will put out.
Tell you what, when you pay for my PC and my electricity bill, then you can decide what distributed tasks I contribute CPU time to.
Yes, that's a bit of a rant, but it is up to the individual to make their own choices about which projects they contribute to. (Does this mean you also complained about all of those screensavers that burned CPU cycles displaying flying toasters instead of putting the machine to sleep?)
heh I had to learn this lesson the hard way. I formatted my computer after installing XP, and as my windows updates were downloading, BAM I got hit by a more than a few worms. I copied the ZoneAlarm installer to my other HD, re-formatted (with my cable modem disconnected), installed the firewall, and then got my updates. From now on, its "paranoid installs" for me :)
Wait... you have a cable modem but don't have a hardware firewall between your PC and the cable modem?
Just how cheap is your time anyway?
The only techies who have an excuse not to use a hardware-based router/firewall/NAT are those on dial-up. And there are even hardware-based router/firewall/NAT devices that will do dial up.
Is this the case with Ghost these days? I know when I used Ghost years ago it had both options, either copy the files it saw on a disk to an image file, or copy the entire disk to an image without caring what the filesystem was. I used to have to do exactly that before Ghost supported NTFS natively, and you could also tell it whether or not you wanted to do that with something it did support, like FAT.
It still does both (just used Ghost2003 a few days ago). Sorry, don't remember the command line flags to do it...
Er, which film scanner are you using? (You seem to have left out that one tiny detail.)
Base O/S bootup for WinXP for me is around 300MB, that includes the corporate IM client, GPGShell, Anti-virus, Second Copy 2000. Then I have the applications that are almost always open. Firefox is eating 86-122MB at the moment, Outlook 33-64MB, FTP Voyager 9-17MB, SourceOffSite 8-19MB, HomeSite 6-32MB, MSAccess 10-20MB.
My normal working memory varies between 450MB and 600MB. Firing up my USENET newsreader can eat up 200MB (yes, it's a pig but I like my Gravity News). Add another 50MB if I fire up Thunderbird to check my other e-mail accounts. Oh, and opening up MSWord and Excel eats up another few dozen MB, along with Ultraedit, a few Terminal Services sessions, JASC PaintShop Pro, etc. as needed.
Sounds crowded, but since it's a laptop with an attached monitor, I'm able to use the external monitor as a 2nd desktop area to toss secondary windows. The main screen also runs at 1400x1050 while the external monitor runs at 1280x1024.
Boosting this the rest of the way to 1GB is only going to cost me $160 or so. Cheap upgrade.
Considering that the last time I bought RAM, I paid $1/MB, current RAM prices could quadruple, and I'd still be happy. Besides, what kind of apps do you need more than say, 256MB RAM? Hell, most machines I see these days ship with 512MB, which is more than I need.
It's not one app that requires all that memory, it's multiple apps which are all open at the same time that require all that memory.
It's call multi-tasking...
(I'm sitting here considering upgrading from 768Mb on the laptop to 1Gb in the next month or two... I keep hitting 700Mb in use. And the fact that Firefox 0.8 seems to eat twice the memory as Firebird 0.7 did isn't helping matters.)
Many people seem to suggest reburning data every few years. But each time you do this, are you not risking corrupting a small number of files? I know OSs and hardware have error correction, but when you're dealing with gigabytes of data isn't there a risk that eventually an error will go through uncaught?
Not if you use CRC/MD5/etc tools that make a record of what the information in the file should be. Even better, by using something like QuickPar (which uses MD5), if you do happen to find data corruption, you'll be able to fix it using the recovery data that you also stored in the folder with your data files.
When I have something to send somewhere, and I have to be sure it works, I just make 3 copies of it in directories 'copy1' 'copy2' and 'copy3' on the CD. A while ago I would lose copies of Windows98 on CDs because of the messy environment and (temp + humidity), so I'd burn multiple copies on the same disk. Almost 9 years on, I found a disk containing Quake2, the first and third directory were bad, and the second directory had just one file that was bad. I found a good copy of that file in the third directory. The CD didnt look like one byte could be read from it.
Bit wasteful of space... (I've done it too with floppies in the past). Another alternative would've been to add 20% recovery data to the disc using QuickPar. Then you could've simply repaired the damaged files. You can even do things like rip the entire disc to an ISO file (including the damaged sectors) and QuickPar will extract all of the file information and do the repair. (The fixed files get written out the to current directory.)
Blank CDs in bulk are cheap. For archival stuff I make a new copy every 5 years. I have a bunch of scanned photos I don't want to lose, so I re-copied them all onto new CDs.
You should be adding recovery data (e.g. using QuickPar) to those archival CDs.
The big advantage is that it extends the time window during which you can recover all of your data. Without PAR2 files, once you find fatal corruption of a file, you're done and the data is gone. With recovery data, you can repair the damage as long as you have enough recovery blocks.
(PAR2 also makes for a good, quick, verification tool that you can run against the content of your disc to verify everything is still correct.)
So the Mozilla 1.x line has better IMAP support then the Thunderbird 0.x line?
I may have to switch back to Moz 1.x instead of using Firefox/Thunderbird. Originally, I switched from Moz 1.4 to Firebird 0.7 / Thunderbird 0.4 because Moz 1.4 was a memory hog. However, Firefox 0.8 is using about twice the amount of memory that Firefox 0.7 did.
I've tried IMAP with Thunderbirrd 0.4 and FuseMail.com...
I wasn't impressed. I was hoping for a Outlook/Exchange type setup where I could work seamlessly off-line, periodically synchronizing with my IMAP folders up on the FuseMail server. Instead, I found the following bugs:
- going off-line, loading a bunch of messages into a folder, and then syncronizing with the IMAP server resulted in a loss of those messages. I had to be online with the IMAP server in order to load new messages into the folder.
- threading on an IMAP folder is horrid. Everything was out of order or highlighted incorrectly (as opposed to a regular POP3 mailbox folder which works 99% fine).
So I'm a bit gun-shy of IMAP at the moment.
About the only thing that it lacks (for free) is decent clustering/replication capability - and you can buy that fairly easily in the form of patches.
It also lacks (the last time I looked) the ability to run on a Win32 box.
Which means that as much as I'd like to take it for a test drive, I can't do so without building a unix/linux box. (Another thing on my wish list.)
With optical mice why would anyone need a mouse pad?
Ergonomics... mouse pads are considerably softer then the hard table top. Would you prefer a few hours of resting your wrist on a rock or a pillow?
Good Lord! These are 'random' commuters. I find it quite hard to believe that a significant portion of them have have 20 logins let alone an AVERAGE of 20 online logins to keep track of. Especially considering that only one respondent (allegedly) had a total of 40 logins.
Lessee...
1. Telephone bill web site
2. Power bill web site
3. Amazon.com
4. JCPenneys.com
5. ISP E-mail
6. AIM password
7-12. half-a-dozen other online stores
13. Bank account web site.
14. Investment account web site
15. Work web-mail or intranet
16-18. a few credit account web sites
19. News web site
20. Game site
Hell, that wasn't even hard... at last count, I have 80 sets of passwords that I keep track of with regards to websites. (Most of those use unique username/password combinations.)
Or just create a seperate text file for each password and use PGP/GPG to encrypt the contents. Easily backed up, simple decryption, allows you to put all of the other information in the text file along with the password. No need to keep the file in a secure location since the contents are encrypted.
So long as nobody cracks my PGP password (a very long phrase), I'm not very worried.
(Additional bonus that we can post the encrypted password blocks on a public web page... since we encrypt to multiple recipients at the same time, any one of the dev group can get the password they need.)
However, I see Nextel on the horizon about to kill dead the 2.5G, 3G, and maybe even 4G networks with their new technology, Mobile-Fi (IEEE 802.20). They are in beta with it in the RTP, NC area. This stuff is up to 16Mbps with an round-trip latency of 35ms (I think they are even going to put SLA's on it) and you can use it at speeds of up to 200mph. The equipment provider is Novini.
Back when Ricochet still looked viable, and the skies were sunny over the economy, we would've loved to have had Ricochet during our monthly business trips to NY. To have a moderately high-speed internet connection on the 3 hour train ride would've been extremely useful. (Plus the additional 90 minutes worth spent getting to our final destination in the NYC area.) Unfortunately, their product wasn't any good at speeds above 80mph (trains between Philadelphia and NYC run closer to 110-115 in spots) and they never finished build-out on the east coast.
16Mbps sounds very intriguing, especially if they manage to allow you to access it while moving. (Got any links? Roll-out schedule?)
However, with the explosion of WiFi hot-spots and addition of WiFi to trains/airplanes, seems like the potential market for Nextel is going to be a lot smaller then a few years ago. Four years ago, 128kbps Ricochet was barely worth the $80/mo. Today, I'd put the price limit at more like $50/mo and even then it's going to be a limited market.
What usually happens in that scenario is that the subsequent songs are even worse and you begin to panic! I'm sure there must be at least one other slashdotter who does this. Right guys? Guys?
That's just an indication to me that I need to remove some MP3s from that particular CD and add some that fit better. (Or, if you're a playlist user, it's time to edit your playlists.) Any MP3 CD that I find myself skipping ahead more then once every 10 tracks is one that headed for the "redo" stack.
But, oh no, I'm reading and therefore it must be better than watching TV.
In a world that works on the basis of the written word (contracts, e-mail, etc.), being literate is better then only being fluent.
You don't practice literacy by watching TV.
So if you record the shows for later, is that kosher? Because I think I can talk my wife into this, but she's certainly in the "But I'll miss Friends!" camp. Heaven forbid she shouldn't find out if Ross and Monica are finally going to get together.
Generally speaking, anyone who uses a PVR to pick-n-choose is already ahead of the game because you've put yourself back in control of your schedule. And you're not sitting there veg'd in front of the TV watching 4 hours straight as you channel surf in an attempt to find something to watch.
The real question is what do you do when you don't have anything recorded? Do you channel surf?
This whole campaign rests on the assumption that there is something bad or wrong with watching a lot of TV. I say that watching as much TV as you want is perfectly fine.
You're missing the point.
The point of National TV Turn Off week is to break the behavoir pattern where all you do when you come home is flop on the couch and turn on the TV for the entire evening and watch whatever happens to be on. Pure escapism, especially if you're not addressing other pressing needs. Some escapism is okay, probably even healthy, but too much avoiding of issues just leaves problems to fester and make things worse down the road.
Then there are the people who schedule their lives around shows, making themselves slaves of the TV schedule. Remember the slogans "must-see TV" and the like?
Same old story as a bunch of other vices. Moderation is okay, addiction isn't. But a lot of people live in denial about their addictions and trying to go cold-turkey for a weeks is a good way to determine whether you're in control or your addiction is in control.
I've switched it around a bit... you'll never catch me zonked out in front of the tube for hours on end watching whatever happens to be on. The only TV in the house with an antenae is on the 3rd floor, more so I can verify that the TV reception is good enough to feed into the VCRs. Before I bothered setting that up, I went for 5 years or so without any OTA or cable TV in the house.
Anything that I want to watch gets put on S-VHS tape and then played on a downstairs VCR. If it isn't worth the effort of setting up the recording schedule, it's not worth watching.
I end up watching anywhere from 3-6 hours per week, depending on how much the broadcast company mucks with the schedule or plays repeats. Some episodes get dumped straight to DVD on the off-chance that I'll watch them later. If I upgrade my TV antenae to get a few more stations cleanly, I might up that to 6-12 hours per week.