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LinuxBIOS Gets GUI
LWATCDR writes "Has a great write up on combining LinuxBios a Linux kernel, busybox, X, a window manager, and rxvt into a two meg flash chip. So what does get you? A six second boot time for one.
All sorts of uses come to mind. Terminals to use with the Linux Terminal server. A very fast booting embedded system like a Car computer. With every one pushing for multi-core cpus, mega gigabyte drives and many gigabytes of ram it is interesting to see how small you can go."
Explains a lot really :)
The creatures outside looked from Alt-Right to Antifa; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
I think you missed the point. It's running a fully graphical Linux in 2MB of solid-state memory. It just happens to be residing in the BIOS chip, which means no other hardware is necessary to get a functioning system. I think it's awfully cool.
I think the hard drive industry might disagree with you. Everyone says it's just a recent marketting gimmick to cheat people out of space, but every HD I have ever bought, since 20MB was "huge", was rated in decimal multiples.
Oh yeah, DVDs are measured in decimal multiples too. 4.7GB == 4700000000B.
You're just on the losing side of a very long argument. It probably won't be over until English is history, but it will end in our favor eventually.
You could be the idiot working on this project. You want additional hardware support? Join up and help produce it. People aren't idiots simply because they're not providing what you want. Alternatively you could also hire a developer for the period of time it takes to support your chosen hardware...
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
This has less to do with SI and more to do with a way to approximate the values in semi-easy-to-understand binary/hexadecimal representations. Since 1,024 was close to 1,000, the idea of 1024 bytes being a binary equivalent to a "kilo" was not a large leap and it's easier to remember 0x400 bytes equals a kilobyte than 0x3E8 bytes, or that 0x100000 bytes instead of 0xF4240 equals a meg. As programmers(or at least us low level language programmers) we live and breath in the binary world and rarely have to think in decimal terms comparatively.
What kills me is that I'm betting that a large majority of people who argue for the 1,000 byte kilobyte will gladly accept "ginormous", "omgwtfbbq" "aiiiggghttt"and "teh" and all the other language abuses and will see absolutely nothing wrong with their use. I'm sure that whoever dreamed up the "mebi" thing thinks they are making things easier but until us older programmers and hardware engineers die, that's not gonna take hold very well. Of course it speaks volumes that the term "mebi" is almost 10 years old now and still hasn't taken hold.
One might also note that memory is the reason we use these terms in the first place since hard drives and the like didn't come about for a long while so trying to make the language even more confusing, and garbled, because hard drive manufacturers want to skimp on drive size seems asinine, and they DO want to skimp on drive since formatting 160Gb, whether it's 160,000,000,000 bytes or 160x1024x1024x1024 bytes, only yields about 140,000,000,000 bytes.
0x09F911029D74E35BD84156C5635688C0
The whole world has moved on now that we've all figured out that our hard drives are going to be a tad bit smaller than we thought. Then again, the memory companies have helped to even things out. The last time I bought 1 gigabyte of RAM, I was pleasantly suprised to have received 73,741,824 extra bytes!
... well, and the fact that every single time you try to throw them into a general discussion somebody is going to call you on it. Every time. Every single time. It's patently obvious nerdiness, and somebody will always jump on it, and people like us will jump into the fray.
How about we all just pretend that we know what we're talking about when we say that our internet connection is "8 megs" or that our hard drive is "200 gigs" or that we have a "3 gig" processor. None of these statements are accurate, but we know what they mean and they're close enough for the sake of discussion.
There's nothing wrong with saying "mebibyte" or "gibibyte", aside from the potential for them to sound like a three year old trying to pronounce "megabyte" and "gigabyte."