Rumor has it, there is a large team of pretty well known penetration testers in there beating the crap out of it before they go live.
Hopefully that helps...
Yeah, they couldn't get quite everyone they'd hoped, though. Your mom, for instance, is a world-renowned penetration tester but I guess she was busy with other clients.
Society cannot work on ideologues; we need practicality.
That's fine, I agree. Perfect justice is unattainable, the best you can do is establish rules, try to make them clear-cut and reasonably consistent and at least somewhat fair - and these rules will step on someone's toes for sure but that's the price you pay for an ordered society.
I'm just saying, don't prop up an argument like that with "common sense". It's unreliable, highly-subjective rubbish.
(This is also common sense for most reasonable people.)
I'd be careful of "common sense" - "common sense" is that information which we take for granted and assume is true, whether it is or isn't.
Not having conducted any studies myself I'd say your arguments do make sense to me - but I think it's important to be clear about what's truly reliable information and what merely seems right.
Well, as soon as we get the Year of Linux on the Desktop out of the way I'm sure the whole world will adopt this model.
(insert obligatory snoot about "It's been on MY desktop since 199x!"):)
You must be really happy - you posted a really standard troll, and anticipated the easily-predictable response. Wow, you've really got an amazing understanding of Slashdot.
I can see the 3D effects, but they are really underwhelming to me. I have the same problem with 3D movies. My depth perception isn't very good. To me, the 3DS looks like Nintendo trying to get me to cough up $250 for N64-era graphics.
N64-era? Come on. I think you have somewhat unrealistic ideas of what the N64 was capable of..
You would think that Virtual Boy would have taught them the dangers of making 3D your main gimmick. Guess not.
Yeah, but, 3D was hardly the cause of that failure, I'd say.
I mean, it was a quasi-portable goggles-system with red monochrome video. It was riding the late-90s "virtual reality" craze but didn't deliver the real deal. You had to set it up on a little tripod and crane your neck into position to play it. It had 3-D, but the execution really wasn't so great.
It's possible the 3DS is no winner, either - but both the product and the timing of it are much better than the Virtual Boy. Instead of the "virtual reality" crazy that fueled the Virtual Boy (and carried all kinds of expectations like head tracking and immersion which the Virtual Boy couldn't deliver) it's simply "3-D" - and while it can be problematic staying in the "sweet spot" for that 3D effect, it's still a much more natural, much less demanding experience to look at a parallax-barrier screen for the 3-D effect rather than looking into those goggles. It's a much better experience, fueled by a "craze" that's much better suited to the limitations of the system.
I couldn't tell you whether the 3DS will be successful in the end - but I think saying it will fail because the Virtual Boy failed is a little ridiculous. When you look at all you had to go through with Virtual Boy - the system was really just a giant mess. 3DS is flawed but nowhere near as critically flawed, IMO.
The battery life is far better than 2-3 hours. I have over 50 hours of gameplay on mine on 3ds games, and easily another 50 hours on DS games. I have NEVER once seen my battery indicator drop more than one bar, and I have played it for 2+ hours at times. At a reasonable brightness level, you get 4+ hours with 3ds games, and 6-8+ with DS games.
Its incredibly easy to just throw the 3ds on the charging dock when not in use. And its probably not healthy to play any game for more than 4 hours straight, anyways.
"4 hours straight" is not the issue. "4 hours total playtime between recharges" is the issue. The whole idea of a portable system is to be able to take it places.
Really? Is it that atrocious compared to what else is out there?
The PSP claims 4.5-7 hours. The 3DS claims 3-5 for 3D, 5-8 for normal DS use.
Sure, the other DS handhelds have done much better in this regard (the DS Lite wins here, with 9-15 hours), but it's a rare thing that I would be playing even 5 hours straight without having access to power.
It's more a matter of convenience than a matter of necessarily playing the thing for 5 hours straight. If you have a device with, say, a solid (actual) 5 hours of battery life (i.e. outrageous manufacturer claims of 9 hour battery life) - then at any given time you can pick it up and have a pretty good shot at being able to get an hour or two out of it, regardless of whether you remembered to charge it after last time. The battery life is long enough that you mostly don't need to worry about it.
That's how it is with my DS, with my phone (a sorry-looking old Treo), with my EEE laptop - it's very handy to be able to rely on my devices in this way, particularly since I'm prone to losing chargers or forgetting to put them on the charger. When I travel, or go to anime cons or whatever, I'm in good shape even if I don't have a good opportunity for a recharge.
The 3DS battery life is significantly less. It could be fine if you're really good about keeping it charged, or playing it with the charger attached. I'm sure some people would be fine with that - but I'm not. It doesn't suit me. So I'll wait until there's a 3DS with decent battery life.
As a previously happy PS3 user, I'm infuriated at their shoddy handling of this whole thing. The delay in notifying customers was inexcusable, and I still don't understand how passwords could have been compromised... I refuse to believe that even Sony would have stored them in plaintext.
Even if you one-way cipher the passwords, getting access to the password database gives the attacker the ability to attack the database offline via brute-force attacks. (Attempting to brute-force without access to the database system would mean you'd have to do it via the login system - which wouldn't work so well if the login system is built to guard against brute force attacks, for instance by limiting the frequency of login attempts to a single account.) So if somebody gets the password database it's safest to assume they've got the passwords in it.
PSN has taken down PS3 netflix too. That's pretty shitty. There's no need for PSN authentication for running the netflix software.
No, Netflix still works. When you run Netflix, it'll ask you to log in to PSN. Attempt to do so, the attempt will fail with the maintenance message, but Netflix will run anyway.
If the XBox is the 'other thing' that had to be found because you no longer had access to your 'normal thing', which you chose when you had the ability to chose between both, then it's pretty obvious that the 'other thing' isn't better, it's just a sufficiently good substitute.
Either that or your initial evaluation of which was better (in which XBox was second choice) was ultimately proven the wrong one.
(It's just a logical nitpick. Your argument is based on the assumption that the initial decision was made correctly and that the new information has no bearing on whether that decision was correct.)
you might as well. The cognitive dissonance could be hilarious to watch!
I don't know, I wouldn't do it if you value him as a friend at all. A friend of mine is a big PS3 fan and I told him, look, there's no way PS3 can be the best when they have this sort of outage. It threw him into some kind of crazy logic-loop, and he started beeping and asking for someone named "Norman" to straighten things out for him...
They're not substantially. Nor are they preventing them from doing so. It does allow the better ones to spend more time writing songs once they are established though.
Not necessarily the better ones... A lot of it is a matter of exposure, rather than actual merit. I think shorter copyright terms (and hence lower stakes overall) could mean greater opportunities for artists in general: lower reward for someone who achieves huge success, but on the other hand, since the stakes are lower, the major players (record labels, etc.) won't throw as much money around trying to influence who becomes popular, which will make the business of making music more accessible.
Note: I really do believe that copyright is as bad as patents.
Copyright doesn't prevent you from doing anything that you'd be able to do if there was no copyright.
On a practical level, yes it does. The problem is that when you create a work (a film for instance) there's an added cost involved in "clearing" any copyrighted material that may be included in the work. One could respond by saying "so don't include anyone else's copyrighted material in your work" but that work is everywhere. It pervades our culture. From that perspective I would say that copyright is too powerful.
Would big budget movies get made at all without copyright? Would we see as many songs if songwriters couldn't support themselves through writing songs?
Personally my problem with copyright is the extent of its power, not the nature of it. 100 years is too much, IMO. Personally I believe that creating something with that kind of longevity is as much a matter of luck as of skill. Skill and hard work are very important, of course - but for every George Lucas of the world there are probably a hundred or a thousand others who worked just as hard, produced something just as good, but due to timing or chance or whatever just didn't manage to achieve a runaway success that they could leverage into a perpetual meal ticket. It's fair to profit from good fortune but there's no reason law should make it should be a free ride lasting for generations.
When a work strikes a chord with a generation of people, when it really takes off there's a boom of interest, which inevitably wanes as people move on to other things. Then, later, nostalgia kicks in and people look back at the work they enjoyed years ago, and there's a resurgence of interest. I think it would make sense to define copyright in terms of this period: copyright lasts through the initial wave of interest, but expires around the time of the nostalgia-driven "second shot". About 25 years, perhaps. If the original creators want to capitalize on that work some more, make more work (for instance, the Star Wars prequels, made about 20 years after the original films.) and latch on to another generation. But certain things have to be released at that point, too: in the case of Star Wars, exclusivity over distribution of the original films would no longer be protected by copyright, and story elements (like lightsabers, Jedi, etc.) would no longer be protected. I think that is quite reasonable: in this scenario the people who, by hard work and providence, have created this huge blockbuster have been able to profit from it through its first wave of popularity and well into its second: but that generation for whom the experience of that work is a shared cultural milestone will, in their lifetime, have the opportunity to build on that themselves if they like, and their ability to be recognized for that work will be based largely on merit. The original creator's best shot at retaining control over their creation would then be name recognition:"That's not real Star Wars canon because George Lucas wasn't involved".
Changing the length of copyright also changes the stakes: the potential reward for producing a lasting copyrighted work is much greater if you (or your heirs) can still profit from the work 100 years later. This means "intellectual property" is big business: everyone wants the next Star Wars or Beatles - they want to own the work that will "define a generation" and stick with them for life. So, yeah, long copyright terms are important if you want high-budget films. If the exclusivity of your return on investment into a film is "only" 20 years, you may not be able to justify sinking $300 million into it.
But personally I don't feel that it's worth it. I think by making the stakes so high, we've created an environment where it's difficult to take creative risks. Experimental work is marginalized because of the barriers to entry. With lower stakes (as defined by copyright)
I think illiterate posters make reading the site kind of painful sometimes, too. I think AC was kind of a jerk about it but I don't think it's wrong to expect that people learn to word things correctly.
Are you suggesting that hoarding information is morally equivalent to owning a human being?
Not equivalent, but I think it's certainly comparable.
The fact that one can own a word or an idea enslaves a little piece of us all.
It's a very whimsical way of putting it, of course, and I don't want to trivialize slavery, but maybe there's some truth to the analogy: that instead of taking away all of one person's rights and liberty, you've taken a smaller amount of these from a larger number of people.
But I'd like to address some of the other points as well: For instance, one point brought up was "if so many people are doing it, maybe it shouldn't be illegal". This is not a reasonable basis for determining what should be legal. Consider what's known as "the commons problem" - given a resource shared (without restriction) by a bunch of people, people will be inclined to treat this resource in a way that squanders it for their own benefit. Why? Because of the perception that if they don't, someone else will, and the only difference will be that in the end it's someone else who gets the benefit. (This could mean, for instance, over-farming, over-hunting, littering, whatever...) It's appropriate to strike a balance in law, between personal freedom and responsibility to society.
Copyright is a special privilege extended to those who create original works, to help them profit from those creations. But it has gone too far. Copyright terms are unreasonably long and there are inadequate provisions for fair use of copyrighted material.
About the length of my stride? A little bit more than half my height? Or if I need to fall back to the system I grew up with: "A bit more than a yard".
Then they'll understand Imperial Measurements perfectly!
The only reason America doesn't switch to the Metric System is because they're too stupid to learn something new.
Not too stupid - we just have the luxury of not needing to switch yet. Once we start seeing some major financial hurt (and no, we're not there yet - I mean financial hurt to the extent that we can no longer act as a world leader) then we may see some major changes in order to "make America competitive".
What's even funnier is that these metric superiority trolls will do a quick 180 (see, gasp, a non-metric unit again!) when it comes time for them to argue over whether customers are getting full value when marketing uses a Metric Gigabyte (1GB=1,000,000,000 bytes) instead of a "Real Gigabyte" (1Gibibyte=1,073,741,824 bytes) when stating the capacity of storage media.
I agree with most of what you said, however would argue that the "Real Gigabyte" is a metric unit in the computer realm. computers operate in base 2, you can't have half a bit so it makes most sense for the measuring units to be expressed in base 2.
That assertion mostly only makes sense in cases where you're saturating your address space.
For instance, if you've got 16-bit memory addresses, it makes sense to have an amount of memory that corresponds to that address space (64kiB, assuming no paging or other mechanisms to get more).
With hard drives and other secondary storage, it doesn't matter. Manufacturers offer a wide range of capacities, and whether they're measured in GB or GiB, they are very rarely at a power of two. (800GiB hard drives don't neatly fill a binary address space, right? So it doesn't matter if they say 800GiB or 860GB, so long as they're clear about which definition they're using.) The nature of a rotating disk (with different data density on outer sectors than on inner sectors) doesn't naturally yield a power of two either. And, of course, filesystems have long since learned to cope with the situation.
I can sympathize with those who feel that the traditional definitions of kB, MB, and GB (etc.) have been hijacked - but at the same time I appreciate that there's now a way forward that disambiguates the situation.
Slashdot Mirror
As coroner, I must confer, I've thoroughly examined her... and she's not only merely dead, she's really most sincerely dead!
Oh, it was a man? Well, I never said I was a particularly good coroner.
You know, one of the first things I thought of in response to this news was a "Wizard of Oz" reference, too... "Ding Dong, Bin Laden's Dead"...
"they're willing to take any sandpaper-wrapped anal raping that Sony will give them"
You seem to have some very interesting insider knowledge. Care to elaborate?
Ask your mom, she was one of the beta testers.
Rumor has it, there is a large team of pretty well known penetration testers in there beating the crap out of it before they go live.
Hopefully that helps...
Yeah, they couldn't get quite everyone they'd hoped, though. Your mom, for instance, is a world-renowned penetration tester but I guess she was busy with other clients.
Why is it that slashdotters hate MSFT with the fire of a thousand suns - except Xbox. In that case, Microsoft are the good guys?
Maybe because not everyone on Slashdot holds the same opinions, and different situations prompt different users to speak their mind about Microsoft?
Society cannot work on ideologues; we need practicality.
That's fine, I agree. Perfect justice is unattainable, the best you can do is establish rules, try to make them clear-cut and reasonably consistent and at least somewhat fair - and these rules will step on someone's toes for sure but that's the price you pay for an ordered society.
I'm just saying, don't prop up an argument like that with "common sense". It's unreliable, highly-subjective rubbish.
Mmmmm... BOP?
(This is also common sense for most reasonable people.)
I'd be careful of "common sense" - "common sense" is that information which we take for granted and assume is true, whether it is or isn't.
Not having conducted any studies myself I'd say your arguments do make sense to me - but I think it's important to be clear about what's truly reliable information and what merely seems right.
Well, as soon as we get the Year of Linux on the Desktop out of the way I'm sure the whole world will adopt this model.
(insert obligatory snoot about "It's been on MY desktop since 199x!") :)
You must be really happy - you posted a really standard troll, and anticipated the easily-predictable response. Wow, you've really got an amazing understanding of Slashdot.
I can see the 3D effects, but they are really underwhelming to me. I have the same problem with 3D movies. My depth perception isn't very good. To me, the 3DS looks like Nintendo trying to get me to cough up $250 for N64-era graphics.
N64-era? Come on. I think you have somewhat unrealistic ideas of what the N64 was capable of..
You would think that Virtual Boy would have taught them the dangers of making 3D your main gimmick. Guess not.
Yeah, but, 3D was hardly the cause of that failure, I'd say.
I mean, it was a quasi-portable goggles-system with red monochrome video. It was riding the late-90s "virtual reality" craze but didn't deliver the real deal. You had to set it up on a little tripod and crane your neck into position to play it. It had 3-D, but the execution really wasn't so great.
It's possible the 3DS is no winner, either - but both the product and the timing of it are much better than the Virtual Boy. Instead of the "virtual reality" crazy that fueled the Virtual Boy (and carried all kinds of expectations like head tracking and immersion which the Virtual Boy couldn't deliver) it's simply "3-D" - and while it can be problematic staying in the "sweet spot" for that 3D effect, it's still a much more natural, much less demanding experience to look at a parallax-barrier screen for the 3-D effect rather than looking into those goggles. It's a much better experience, fueled by a "craze" that's much better suited to the limitations of the system.
I couldn't tell you whether the 3DS will be successful in the end - but I think saying it will fail because the Virtual Boy failed is a little ridiculous. When you look at all you had to go through with Virtual Boy - the system was really just a giant mess. 3DS is flawed but nowhere near as critically flawed, IMO.
The battery life is far better than 2-3 hours.
I have over 50 hours of gameplay on mine on 3ds games, and easily another 50 hours on DS games. I have NEVER once seen my battery indicator drop more than one bar, and I have played it for 2+ hours at times.
At a reasonable brightness level, you get 4+ hours with 3ds games, and 6-8+ with DS games.
Its incredibly easy to just throw the 3ds on the charging dock when not in use.
And its probably not healthy to play any game for more than 4 hours straight, anyways.
"4 hours straight" is not the issue. "4 hours total playtime between recharges" is the issue. The whole idea of a portable system is to be able to take it places.
Really? Is it that atrocious compared to what else is out there?
The PSP claims 4.5-7 hours. The 3DS claims 3-5 for 3D, 5-8 for normal DS use.
Sure, the other DS handhelds have done much better in this regard (the DS Lite wins here, with 9-15 hours), but it's a rare thing that I would be playing even 5 hours straight without having access to power.
It's more a matter of convenience than a matter of necessarily playing the thing for 5 hours straight. If you have a device with, say, a solid (actual) 5 hours of battery life (i.e. outrageous manufacturer claims of 9 hour battery life) - then at any given time you can pick it up and have a pretty good shot at being able to get an hour or two out of it, regardless of whether you remembered to charge it after last time. The battery life is long enough that you mostly don't need to worry about it.
That's how it is with my DS, with my phone (a sorry-looking old Treo), with my EEE laptop - it's very handy to be able to rely on my devices in this way, particularly since I'm prone to losing chargers or forgetting to put them on the charger. When I travel, or go to anime cons or whatever, I'm in good shape even if I don't have a good opportunity for a recharge.
The 3DS battery life is significantly less. It could be fine if you're really good about keeping it charged, or playing it with the charger attached. I'm sure some people would be fine with that - but I'm not. It doesn't suit me. So I'll wait until there's a 3DS with decent battery life.
As a previously happy PS3 user, I'm infuriated at their shoddy handling of this whole thing. The delay in notifying customers was inexcusable, and I still don't understand how passwords could have been compromised... I refuse to believe that even Sony would have stored them in plaintext.
Even if you one-way cipher the passwords, getting access to the password database gives the attacker the ability to attack the database offline via brute-force attacks. (Attempting to brute-force without access to the database system would mean you'd have to do it via the login system - which wouldn't work so well if the login system is built to guard against brute force attacks, for instance by limiting the frequency of login attempts to a single account.) So if somebody gets the password database it's safest to assume they've got the passwords in it.
PSN has taken down PS3 netflix too. That's pretty shitty. There's no need for PSN authentication for running the netflix software.
No, Netflix still works. When you run Netflix, it'll ask you to log in to PSN. Attempt to do so, the attempt will fail with the maintenance message, but Netflix will run anyway.
If the XBox is the 'other thing' that had to be found because you no longer had access to your 'normal thing', which you chose when you had the ability to chose between both, then it's pretty obvious that the 'other thing' isn't better, it's just a sufficiently good substitute.
Either that or your initial evaluation of which was better (in which XBox was second choice) was ultimately proven the wrong one.
(It's just a logical nitpick. Your argument is based on the assumption that the initial decision was made correctly and that the new information has no bearing on whether that decision was correct.)
They also charge a monthly fee, just sayin'.
Their service also works, apparently.
you might as well. The cognitive dissonance could be hilarious to watch!
I don't know, I wouldn't do it if you value him as a friend at all. A friend of mine is a big PS3 fan and I told him, look, there's no way PS3 can be the best when they have this sort of outage. It threw him into some kind of crazy logic-loop, and he started beeping and asking for someone named "Norman" to straighten things out for him...
They're not substantially. Nor are they preventing them from doing so. It does allow the better ones to spend more time writing songs once they are established though.
Not necessarily the better ones... A lot of it is a matter of exposure, rather than actual merit. I think shorter copyright terms (and hence lower stakes overall) could mean greater opportunities for artists in general: lower reward for someone who achieves huge success, but on the other hand, since the stakes are lower, the major players (record labels, etc.) won't throw as much money around trying to influence who becomes popular, which will make the business of making music more accessible.
So goes the theory, anyway. :)
Note: I really do believe that copyright is as bad as patents.
Copyright doesn't prevent you from doing anything that you'd be able to do if there was no copyright.
On a practical level, yes it does. The problem is that when you create a work (a film for instance) there's an added cost involved in "clearing" any copyrighted material that may be included in the work. One could respond by saying "so don't include anyone else's copyrighted material in your work" but that work is everywhere. It pervades our culture. From that perspective I would say that copyright is too powerful.
Would big budget movies get made at all without copyright? Would we see as many songs if songwriters couldn't support themselves through writing songs?
Personally my problem with copyright is the extent of its power, not the nature of it. 100 years is too much, IMO. Personally I believe that creating something with that kind of longevity is as much a matter of luck as of skill. Skill and hard work are very important, of course - but for every George Lucas of the world there are probably a hundred or a thousand others who worked just as hard, produced something just as good, but due to timing or chance or whatever just didn't manage to achieve a runaway success that they could leverage into a perpetual meal ticket. It's fair to profit from good fortune but there's no reason law should make it should be a free ride lasting for generations.
When a work strikes a chord with a generation of people, when it really takes off there's a boom of interest, which inevitably wanes as people move on to other things. Then, later, nostalgia kicks in and people look back at the work they enjoyed years ago, and there's a resurgence of interest. I think it would make sense to define copyright in terms of this period: copyright lasts through the initial wave of interest, but expires around the time of the nostalgia-driven "second shot". About 25 years, perhaps. If the original creators want to capitalize on that work some more, make more work (for instance, the Star Wars prequels, made about 20 years after the original films.) and latch on to another generation. But certain things have to be released at that point, too: in the case of Star Wars, exclusivity over distribution of the original films would no longer be protected by copyright, and story elements (like lightsabers, Jedi, etc.) would no longer be protected. I think that is quite reasonable: in this scenario the people who, by hard work and providence, have created this huge blockbuster have been able to profit from it through its first wave of popularity and well into its second: but that generation for whom the experience of that work is a shared cultural milestone will, in their lifetime, have the opportunity to build on that themselves if they like, and their ability to be recognized for that work will be based largely on merit. The original creator's best shot at retaining control over their creation would then be name recognition:"That's not real Star Wars canon because George Lucas wasn't involved".
Changing the length of copyright also changes the stakes: the potential reward for producing a lasting copyrighted work is much greater if you (or your heirs) can still profit from the work 100 years later. This means "intellectual property" is big business: everyone wants the next Star Wars or Beatles - they want to own the work that will "define a generation" and stick with them for life. So, yeah, long copyright terms are important if you want high-budget films. If the exclusivity of your return on investment into a film is "only" 20 years, you may not be able to justify sinking $300 million into it.
But personally I don't feel that it's worth it. I think by making the stakes so high, we've created an environment where it's difficult to take creative risks. Experimental work is marginalized because of the barriers to entry. With lower stakes (as defined by copyright)
I think illiterate posters make reading the site kind of painful sometimes, too. I think AC was kind of a jerk about it but I don't think it's wrong to expect that people learn to word things correctly.
Are you suggesting that hoarding information is morally equivalent to owning a human being?
Not equivalent, but I think it's certainly comparable.
The fact that one can own a word or an idea enslaves a little piece of us all.
It's a very whimsical way of putting it, of course, and I don't want to trivialize slavery, but maybe there's some truth to the analogy: that instead of taking away all of one person's rights and liberty, you've taken a smaller amount of these from a larger number of people.
But I'd like to address some of the other points as well:
For instance, one point brought up was "if so many people are doing it, maybe it shouldn't be illegal".
This is not a reasonable basis for determining what should be legal. Consider what's known as "the commons problem" - given a resource shared (without restriction) by a bunch of people, people will be inclined to treat this resource in a way that squanders it for their own benefit. Why? Because of the perception that if they don't, someone else will, and the only difference will be that in the end it's someone else who gets the benefit. (This could mean, for instance, over-farming, over-hunting, littering, whatever...)
It's appropriate to strike a balance in law, between personal freedom and responsibility to society.
Copyright is a special privilege extended to those who create original works, to help them profit from those creations. But it has gone too far. Copyright terms are unreasonably long and there are inadequate provisions for fair use of copyrighted material.
Well, now, tell me how long is a meter.
About the length of my stride?
A little bit more than half my height?
Or if I need to fall back to the system I grew up with: "A bit more than a yard".
Then they'll understand Imperial Measurements perfectly!
The only reason America doesn't switch to the Metric System is because they're too stupid to learn something new.
Not too stupid - we just have the luxury of not needing to switch yet. Once we start seeing some major financial hurt (and no, we're not there yet - I mean financial hurt to the extent that we can no longer act as a world leader) then we may see some major changes in order to "make America competitive".
What's even funnier is that these metric superiority trolls will do a quick 180 (see, gasp, a non-metric unit again!) when it comes time for them to argue over whether customers are getting full value when marketing uses a Metric Gigabyte (1GB=1,000,000,000 bytes) instead of a "Real Gigabyte" (1Gibibyte=1,073,741,824 bytes) when stating the capacity of storage media.
I agree with most of what you said, however would argue that the "Real Gigabyte" is a metric unit in the computer realm. computers operate in base 2, you can't have half a bit so it makes most sense for the measuring units to be expressed in base 2.
That assertion mostly only makes sense in cases where you're saturating your address space.
For instance, if you've got 16-bit memory addresses, it makes sense to have an amount of memory that corresponds to that address space (64kiB, assuming no paging or other mechanisms to get more).
With hard drives and other secondary storage, it doesn't matter. Manufacturers offer a wide range of capacities, and whether they're measured in GB or GiB, they are very rarely at a power of two. (800GiB hard drives don't neatly fill a binary address space, right? So it doesn't matter if they say 800GiB or 860GB, so long as they're clear about which definition they're using.) The nature of a rotating disk (with different data density on outer sectors than on inner sectors) doesn't naturally yield a power of two either. And, of course, filesystems have long since learned to cope with the situation.
I can sympathize with those who feel that the traditional definitions of kB, MB, and GB (etc.) have been hijacked - but at the same time I appreciate that there's now a way forward that disambiguates the situation.
Why some French used 10 is beyond me!
That's because in France we have 10 fingers! Not in the US?
Most places, not necessarily in the deep South.