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Comment by freehunter | Hacker News Reader

I've bought a handful of 17" laptops in the past and was dismayed to find all the ones I was considering lacked a numpad. Only one I've bought (15") had one. And I really want one.

It's really nice for working in computer networking, where you're often typing long strings of numbers with dots between them. The number row sucks for finding numbers and the dot is way far away.

For home or consumer use, though, I'm not sure why anyone would want a numpad bad enough to make that tradeoff.

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> It's really nice for working in computer networking, where you're often typing long strings of numbers with dots between them. The number row sucks for finding numbers and the dot is way far away.

Someone really needs to setup their own DNS server...

(That, or make a programmer's numpad that goes from 0 to 'f')

> Someone really needs to setup their own DNS server...

Or outsource some accounting work...

DNS doesn't work everywhere. If I'm filling out Cisco IOS configuration, not every device has a DNS name. It's gotta be the IP address. If I'm filling in the IPAM, it's gotta be the IP address. Putting addresses into the SIEM? Gotta be the IP address. Telling someone what IP address to use for a server they haven't set up yet? There's no server, so there's no DNS name. Gotta be an IP address.

Saying "you don't need IP addresses because you've got DNS" is like saying you don't need gears because it's an automatic transmission. A mechanic would disagree with you on that. DNS is an abstraction. Why is Linux written in C when we have Javascript?

DNS is an abstraction. A very useful one at that; it limits how many IP address I end up typing. No, I do still need to write some, but I went and found the largest laptop I could get without a number pad. To each their own though.

> ... is like saying you don't need gears because it's an automatic transmission.

Just how many speeds is the transmission on a Tesla Model-S?

> ... Why is Linux written in C when we have Javascript?

Well, there's http://runtimejs.org/ but it's still in development.

I'm not really sure why you've decided that you need to attack someone just because they say they type a lot of IP addresses, but it's not very appreciated.

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