The doctor has me on a severely restricted diet you insensitive clod!

I wish I had mod points. The parent is spot on.

What is effectively "more secure" is dependent on many, many variables that, ideally, should be mindfully evaluated by the end-user in real-time (and this includes accepting user-error as a risk--even the best fuck up on occasion).

Why be redundant? You already mentioned the source was Wikipedia.

1.42 stop bits? No wonder it was so slow, the poor computers were confused.

"They've probably got cable modems, which they'd have to give up if they got rid of cable.."

This is plain FUD! I have a cable modem with no cable television and have had it that way for years. Maybe some companies force a bundling but many do not. I'm not even sure that would be legal in the U.S. (but IANAL so maybe it is--still it's a bad business decision).

Sure I would get a discount if I bundled the two but I have had no interest in cable TV since the mid to late nineties. For a while I preferred satellite because the quality was much better (inexplicably--in theory the cable companies have a much larger tube into my house) but eventually the cost became a burden as I found myself going online more and more for content. Eventually the only thing I ever watched on satellite was NASCAR races (let the flaming begin) and there are only 12 races a year not shown for free in HD over-the-air. This worked out to be around $30-40 USD a race which isn't worth it (seriously, I got to where I never watched anything else on satellite).

These days I prefer a combination of Hulu and TVTorrents.com. My "television" is now a second display for my PC.

So, your issue is that their player doesn't do 720p content smoothly on your setup? What I want to know is where is this 720p content on Hulu? The best I can find is 480p and it works just fine for me.

Nice theory but it was persistent across reboots. This was a filesystem issue hands down.

I've been an SA for long enough (and had been way back then too--I'm no spring chicken) to know about stale file handles. Thanks for you advice though.

The rep didn't need convincing that this was causing us problems. His argument was simply that it was working as the code was written and thus the problem was ours and not the vendor's. He sure as hell had that right.

Newsflash: We don't care. That's your personal fear and issue that really is best left off the front page.

I used to manage Digital UNIX (later called Tru64) systems for a large, now bankrupt, telecom back around the turn of the millennium. The filesystem used, AdvFS, was pretty cool and advanced for the time but under the version of the OS we were running we found that free space would shrink at a faster rate than used space would grow. I had filesystems report full even though a df would show only 60% used.

It turned out that when small files were deleted all of the space wouldn't become free. My customer wrote thousands upon thousands of 150-200 byte files a day and deleted just as many. The entire team and my customer agreed this was clearly a bug.

When brought up with Compaq (who had recently aquired Digital) the technical rep investigated and reported "this is not a bug, the code is being executed exactly how it's written." Seriously, this was his response. I would have been more amused if he seriously argued it was a "feature."

I never could get a definition of what a "bug" really was from him. I became rather infuriated when he reported to me that this issue was "fixed" in the latest major release of the OS. If there was no bug, why was it fixed?

I never got a straight answer and was left on my own to find my own work-around which involved inserting a new volume into the filesystem thus growing it and then deleting an old volume. When this was done to all volumes in the filesystem, the problem was resolved for a few more months. This was an incredibly labor intensive and, as far as I'm concerned, incredibly risky to move data around like that on a hot system with insane uptime requirements. There was also a massive performance hit while this was happening and my customer's application was already VERY IO intensive.

I'm still just as angry about that conversation with the rep today as I was back then.

WTF is wrong with your wife? Surely she knows about your issues. This is akin to giving an alcoholic a 6-pack for Christmas.

What in the world would her motivation be in such a gift? To make you feel lousy about yourself? To get you to go away for a weekend so she can do her thing (she could just ask)?

If she doesn't know about your issues with gaming then you have a more serious problem than you realize.

I assure you, despite how this photo looks, they are not actually on the Sun.

I prefer to consume my coffee from a plastic bag connected to an IV drip.