To indicate that a record is somehow tainted, right?

To quote professor Frink, "Baseball is a game played by the dextrous, but only understood by the pointdexterous."

Unfortunately, I couldn't find a Youtube clip to link to. The episode is "MoneyBart" (Season 22, Episode 3).

It depends on the Zenbook. The earlier ones had bad keyboards and even worse trackpads. Apparently, ASUS was embarrassed enough by the reviews that they made a real effort on later models. I have a UX31A and it is just awesome. The backlit keyboard and trackpad are roughly equal in quality to a Macbook Air (which means they're better than everything else I've used) and the display is a wonderful 1080p IPS display with a matte finish that is the nicest 13" display I've ever seen. Throw in an i7 processor, 256GB SSD, and the Ultrabook form factor, and I just love this thing.

My only complaint is that it was limited to 4GB of RAM when I bought it. And the memory is not upgradable (not surprising for an Ultrabook) so I'm stuck at 4GB until I buy another notebook. That cuts its usable life somewhat, but I still have no regrets on the purchase.

I'm using the stock Windows 7 on it right now, but I'm hoping to get Linux Mint on it eventually. The only application keeping me on Windows in Netflix (yes, I know it can be made to run on Linux). And it seems that while Linux support is good, ASUS does something funky with power management and Linux or vanilla Windows 7 (without the ASUS drivers) gets about half (!) the usable battery time of the ASUS optimised Windows 7 install.

Destructive malware stopped being common simply because it is more profitable to keep the machine compromised. (And perhaps because with the death of DOS and Win9x, destruction became harder to do.) Unless you are a government or other political entity, most hacking is done for money or for lulz. For governments and terrorist organizations, destruction is still a valid goal.

Solar thermal isn't without its problems, mainly that it needs cooling. A proposal for a solar thermal plant here in Arizona was opposed because of its high water usage, and water is by far our biggest environmental concern (it's currently on hold for financial reasons). Dry cooling is possible, but it's much less efficient and therefore more expensive.

Other desert states like California and Nevada are also having problems with solar thermal. Some form of solar energy should be our future, but getting there hasn't been as easy as advertised.

http://green.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/10/27/water-use-by-solar-projects-intensifies/

I remember using tabs in Galeon on Linux before Opera had them. Opera has always had MDI, and it was the first mainstream browser to use tabs for MDI, but it wasn't the first browser with tabs. I don't think anyone really knows who did it first.

My HTC One S was seeing the scroll interpreted as click problem, but I didn't see any lag. Perhaps that is dependent on the hardware?

Overall, the main page sucks, but its okay for viewing articles. I'll stick with the desktop version and maybe try the mobile again in a few months.

And I agree with the complaints about the theme. Slashdot has a certain look to it that the mobile version lacks.

All these years, and I never realized that Slashdot is just a crowdsourcing tool for editing and peer reviewing news.

I feel used.

We'll just call it a "Royale with Cheese".

So one American is equivalent to approximately 1.5 metric people. Yes, we Americans know we are overweight compared to the rest of the world, but that doesn't mean you have the right to poke fun. We just made a "different life choice", that's all.

I actually once got disciplined as a kid for calling another kid fat. We can't help who we are and it isn't right to focus on peoples flaws as it prevents us from feeling good about ourselves. I wonder how much of our overweight problems and poor health is a direct result of all that PC garbage that was crammed down our throats as children.

Here is one that really bit me in the ass once. Daylight Savings Time happens on different days depending on which country you are in, and the operating system doesn't always know when this should be.

Back in 2007 I was deployed to Iraq supporting military systems. In Iraq, Daylight Savings happened on April 1st and October 1st, but Windows didn't know that. Using the Baghdad time zone Windows thought that daylight savings happened on the same days that it did in the US. So, for about a week, every computer on the domain had the wrong time. The administrators of the domain controller didn't think this was a big deal, and things will fix themselves soon, so why bother adjusting our clock? Normally that would be fine, since the military has standardized on Zulu (GMT) since forever, and all military systems were required to store and transmit dates in that format. But there was one system, which I won't name, that used local time for its database and then asked Windows to convert to Zulu time for the XML data transfer. It took several days before we found out that every date and time we were given from them was a lie. This caused us all sorts of problems and fixing all of the dates was a major pain.

After all the complaints, the meetings with developers, and so on, we naturally thought that the developers for this system had gotten their act together and fixed their problem so we wouldn't see it again. Nope. Sure enough, in October we had the exact same problem, except this time I was watching for it and modified our insert into SQL Server to adjust the time. (I'm not a fan of putting a lot of business logic in stored procedures, but it really helped that time.) I made sure that my replacement was aware of the situation before the next change in April, but apparently they finally fixed their database by then.

What I learned is that databases should always use GMT and you should never ask the system for the local time and then convert to GMT, as it may lie. Instead ask the system for the GMT time.

Why didn't you use MongoDB? MongoDB is web scale.

A few months ago I decided to do a complete replay of the entire Mass Effect trilogy with my 6900 series card, and I am seeing the occasional lag that didn't used to be there. I also revisited Skyrim when Dawnguard came out, and I'm seeing it there too. This machine didn't used to do this, and since I can't find anything else running that could cause the CPU to spike, I have been working on the assumption that some driver update (perhaps as far back as six months ago) has been to blame.

It's nice to see that others have been seeing this as well, and I hope something is done about it. The Radeon cards are awesome hardware, but AMD/ATI drivers have never been very good.

I'll be in my bunk.

I'll be in my bunk.