Wait, what browser do you use that seems so much faster? Certainly not Opera, what with its awful JS performance (tho the beta is slick).
On Windows it's not a beta anymore; Opera 10.5 is out, and coming (quote) "soon" on Linux. I mostly use a development build of 10.5 for linux, and it runs quite briskly -- though it doesn't seem *quite* as fast as the Chrome Linux beta. Certainly faster than Firefox or any other browser I've tried. And the ridiculous number of features are all solid, useful, unmatched, and don't slow it down even a bit.
I'm growing weary of this discussion, but I'll just say two things:
SI doesn't own kilo, Greek does.
Indeed. And in Greek, it means thousand.
Coming up with a new unit that nobody understands, which fucks with the entire nomenclature used throughout the computer, all to accommodate hard drive manufacturers as they try to convince you that they are selling you more than they actually are, is fucking retarded.
There's no point assigning blame at this point (even though the hard drive manufacturers fucked everything up); the fact remains that saying kilobyte is ambiguous. Furthermore, everyone in the IT/CS world knows exactly what a kibibyte is, and it's almost trivial to explain to other people (say, "it's a little more than a thousand bytes" or if they have basic math skills, "it's 2 to the 10th bytes, which is around a thousand"). Using binary prefixes confuses almost nobody except those who haven't heard of it, and those people will understand it quickly, and it's much clearer and more precise than using kilo, mega, etc.
Then why use SI prefixes? More generally, why use prefixes with established and well-known definitions to mean something else? It's confusing. (And it's entirely irrelevant that bytes aren't an SI unit.)
The ambiguity is introduced by those people saying it should instead be 1000 kb.
Make no mistake, the ambiguity was introduced by the people who used "kilo" to mean 1024. Blaming the people who hear "kilo" and think "thousand" is just silly, because thats what the prefix actually means. My whole point is that using kilo (and the rest) to mean something special in specific contexts is ambiguous, because the listener must either ask or guess to know which you mean. You're saying that everyone should know the special case that kilobyte means 1024 bytes, but that's already a lost cause; disk makers have been using kilo to mean 1000 for years, and it'll probably never be really sorted out.
The "KiB" thing doesn't really help, because now you have no idea who's using the new system or not. It would have been more sensible to use the alternative letters for the 1000 system. And whilst I sometimes see people write "KiB" etc, I've never once heard people say "Kibibyte" or anything like that...
The point of using the kibi-style prefixes is to make it clear what you're talking about. "Kilobyte" is already ambiguous, and using kibibyte more doesn't change that. It just provides an unambiguous option.
when the C64 came out with 64K No-ONE doubted it had 65536 Bytes of RAM. if it would came out now, there would be confusion, so the kibi-business introduced confusion. people who don't understand the difference between binary and decimal have no place in IT
No, the kibi-business was in response to confusion. Why on earth would you think we can use the exact same unit prefixes and just say "Oh, no, when that's applied to bytes it's clearly 2^10, not 10^3" without causing confusion? Also, why be so small-minded to think that this only affects people in IT? Other people use computers, other people buy computers, and (briefly on-topic) the change in Ubuntu will affect many non-IT people.
Why all the resistance to the "kibi-business"? Because, despite reducing ambiguity and being wholly reasonable, it's unfamiliar and new? If that's it, I'll just step off your lawn so you can enjoy your final years shouting at random passers-by in peace.
why does the It industry get special treatment. I thought the IT industry was one of the industries that wanted to use established standards the most for interoperability.
The day you can find a way to stick a peg^10 into peg^2 hole, let me know and we can just call everything '1000'.
There's a solution that's been out there for years: binary prefixes. Why use decimal prefixes to mean binary powers? Why say kilobyte and hope that the listener interprets it the correct way, when you can say kibibyte and know that they'll understand? (And the laypeople who've never heard of binary prefixes will pick it up pretty quickly, since kibi is close to kilo, mebi is close to mega, etc.)
But there are many applications and areas which are not appropriate to shoehorn into the decimal system. Binary computer memory sizes are one such application. It is not appropriate to group base 2 numbers using a base 10 units.
I agree entirely. However, SI prefixes *are* in base 10, and just redefining them in specific contexts to mean something in base 2 is unnecessarily confusing. Kilo is accepted to mean thousand, and redefining it in specific contexts to mean 2^10 is just unreasonable. To use your phrase, it's not appropriate to shoehorn this system of decimal prefixes into describing a naturally binary system (which is precisely what happened in CS).
I understand it's how we've been doing things for decades, but why on earth are so many CS people arguing *against* decreasing ambiguity? I find the whole KiB thing to be a relatively elegant solution, which maintains the familiar letters so there's nothing new to learn, but makes it clear what units you're using. The only reason to resist it that I can see is just blind and unthinking resistance to change -- the exact same reason so many people resist the metric system and SI at all.
You seem to be arguing "if it ain't broke, don't fix it", but I think it is a little broke and we should fix it.
Your answer is as stupid as criticising someone's answer on "what to do when attacked by a bear" (run), because it's not "what to do when attacked by a rhinoceros" (climb a tree).
I'd just like to point out that running from a bear is completely pointless. They can easily run faster than any human, and if they've decided they're going to attack you (say, if you're playing with their cute little baby) you're pretty much fucked. The way to deal with a bear is to convince it not to attack you by not doing anything to make it angry (it almost certainly isn't planning to eat you, so it probably won't attack unless you piss it off), and by making yourself look larger and scarier than it by holding your jacket/pack over your head, standing up straight, making noises, talking (to show that you're human) etc. Of course, then you slowly get the hell out of there.
I'm not taking issue with anything in your post, but I figured knowing how not to be killed by a bear is useful knowledge that everyone should have.
On the other hand, it could be litotes; emphasizing something by negating its opposite. From the title/summary, it's ambiguous, but from TFA it looks like he truly likes the phone.
The range of topics covered here is very wide and I don't know abc of several things discussed here. Does that make me stupid and pathetic?
The key point is that you recognize that you don't know everything about the topic at hand. The post that sunking2 was responding to was essentially a spew of vitriol against the researchers, claiming that it's impossible to make such a small engine with any sort of efficiency, and that they're stupid and ignorant for even trying. According to that post's replies, the writer is completely wrong and doesn't know some basic facts about the subject they're yelling about.
So, no, you're not at all stupid and pathetic for not knowing everything about everything, and I'm in the same boat with you (I've learned a fair amount from this story's discussion), but neither of us is telling everyone (including the Dutch engineers in question) that they're stupid and don't know what they're talking about.
It's not like a heat pump turns heat into nothing. One side of a heat pump gets cold, the other side gets hot. At half a micron across, it's hard to see how such a device could help evacuate heat from a CPU.
Just stick 100,000 of them end-to-end, naturally. Of course, I've no idea how efficient or effective they really are, but it seems like it *could* work.
Re:And we're trusting you because....
on
Hiding From Google
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· Score: 1
Why does the person need to be terminally ill? why can't it just be someone who agrees to be mummified following their death?
are the producers that impatient?
Yes! Even if you've got some 100-year-old heroin addict, it could be years before they drop, and by then everyone involved will have lost interest and the body will either be buried boringly or go to, like, science or something stupid like that.
It is arguably the best browser available and has always been a trend setter. They are playing a little bit of follow the leader this time, but they again seem to be doing it just as well if not better.
Wow. That gave me a double whiplash.:)
Heh. How about, each final release of Opera is arguably the best browser available at the time. Right now, however, new versions of other browsers have superseded Opera's stable release (version 10 was good, but quickly overtaken). They're playing catch-up, but looking at this pre-alpha it appears they're doing a damn good job of it.
I don't think they're immune, but I have yet to get any (that I know about). I even run windows sometimes. But then, I at least keep my exposure to such things to a minimum. The same cannot be said for everyone, but just so long as I can keep using the computers the way I want to use them, I don't care what others are doing.
There's a lot to be said for supporting herd immunity throughout the internet. In principle, I also don't really give a damn what people do with their own computer (short of sympathetic pain when I see how horrible it is to use some people's bogged-down, (crap|mal|spy)ware-ridden computers), but viruses, worms, etc. take advantage of the vulnerable majority and make the internet a less safe place for everyone, even those of us who can generally take care of ourselves. I suspect (hope?) Apple's goal is to include a not-incredibly-annoying AV program that most of their users won't even know exists, but will prevent them from becoming yet another spam bot or node in a botnet.
As an afterthought, I've never been able to trust AV vendors completely, since their livelihood depends on viruses still being a threat. Apple doesn't have that hangup, so it seems feasible they'll actually have something better.
*shrug* Of course, I have no direct personal interest in this. I run linux!
And if insurance companies could get the expectations exactly right, then no one would buy insurance.
This is laughably incorrect. Imagine that the probability of your house burning down in a given year is 0.5%. If it burns down, and you don't have insurance, you'll be bankrupt, homeless, lose your job, and go through significant hardships. Your house has a market value of $100k. The insurance company offers you a year's worth of insurance for 0.005 * $100k = $500 plus, say $100 profit for themselves. Do you take it, or do you go without insurance? Guess what, most people would take the insurance.
I think the idea was that if, theoretically, an insurance company could accurately predict with 100% certainty what was going to happen, they would charge you slightly more than you will end up costing them. If your house is going to burn down, well, they're gonna charge you ahead of time $100k + a little bit (gotsta make a profit). Of course, this is unrealistic and silly.
And I'm guessing the family is the trustee and so have every right to protect his works.
Yup, just like every slave owner was perfectly within his rights to beat his slaves to death.
Would you have cheerfully joined the (mandatory) posse to track down a runaway slave?
Wow, that could be the worst argument I've ever heard.
If I made myself a chair, would that then be a slave chair, just because I owned it?
That would indeed be a horrible argument, but it's not at all what he actually said. The argument wasn't that copyright is in any respect like slavery, he was just pointing out how weak arguing "they're have every right" (and appealing to the law in general) is.
In the case of the slaves, the slave owner had the legal right to beat them and hunt down runaways. Is it therefore okay? Presumably not. This implies that "having the right" doesn't necessarily mean that what you're doing is acceptable. Tolkien's heirs have the legal right to assert ownership of his works. Is that okay? If so, it's clearly not just because they're allowed to, and the GGP's argument is less than convincing.
For the argument to work, though, you need an example of something legal that basically everyone agrees was very bad, and most of those are much worse than enforcing an old copyright, so it might sound like you're blowing it out of proportion. Without laying it out step by step, then, people react emotionally before they take time to consider what's actually being said (see other responses to the GP, or pretty much anywhere on the internet).
Honestly, I'd like to live in a world where arguments like the GP's could be given succinctly and understood clearly, but alas. It'll never happen.
Slashdot Mirror
Wait, what browser do you use that seems so much faster? Certainly not Opera, what with its awful JS performance (tho the beta is slick).
On Windows it's not a beta anymore; Opera 10.5 is out, and coming (quote) "soon" on Linux. I mostly use a development build of 10.5 for linux, and it runs quite briskly -- though it doesn't seem *quite* as fast as the Chrome Linux beta. Certainly faster than Firefox or any other browser I've tried. And the ridiculous number of features are all solid, useful, unmatched, and don't slow it down even a bit.
SI doesn't own kilo, Greek does.
Indeed. And in Greek, it means thousand.
Coming up with a new unit that nobody understands, which fucks with the entire nomenclature used throughout the computer, all to accommodate hard drive manufacturers as they try to convince you that they are selling you more than they actually are, is fucking retarded.
There's no point assigning blame at this point (even though the hard drive manufacturers fucked everything up); the fact remains that saying kilobyte is ambiguous. Furthermore, everyone in the IT/CS world knows exactly what a kibibyte is, and it's almost trivial to explain to other people (say, "it's a little more than a thousand bytes" or if they have basic math skills, "it's 2 to the 10th bytes, which is around a thousand"). Using binary prefixes confuses almost nobody except those who haven't heard of it, and those people will understand it quickly, and it's much clearer and more precise than using kilo, mega, etc.
Bytes (or bits) are not SI units.
Then why use SI prefixes? More generally, why use prefixes with established and well-known definitions to mean something else? It's confusing. (And it's entirely irrelevant that bytes aren't an SI unit.)
The ambiguity is introduced by those people saying it should instead be 1000 kb.
Make no mistake, the ambiguity was introduced by the people who used "kilo" to mean 1024. Blaming the people who hear "kilo" and think "thousand" is just silly, because thats what the prefix actually means. My whole point is that using kilo (and the rest) to mean something special in specific contexts is ambiguous, because the listener must either ask or guess to know which you mean. You're saying that everyone should know the special case that kilobyte means 1024 bytes, but that's already a lost cause; disk makers have been using kilo to mean 1000 for years, and it'll probably never be really sorted out.
The "KiB" thing doesn't really help, because now you have no idea who's using the new system or not. It would have been more sensible to use the alternative letters for the 1000 system. And whilst I sometimes see people write "KiB" etc, I've never once heard people say "Kibibyte" or anything like that...
The point of using the kibi-style prefixes is to make it clear what you're talking about. "Kilobyte" is already ambiguous, and using kibibyte more doesn't change that. It just provides an unambiguous option.
when the C64 came out with 64K No-ONE doubted it had 65536 Bytes of RAM. if it would came out now, there would be confusion, so the kibi-business introduced confusion. people who don't understand the difference between binary and decimal have no place in IT
No, the kibi-business was in response to confusion. Why on earth would you think we can use the exact same unit prefixes and just say "Oh, no, when that's applied to bytes it's clearly 2^10, not 10^3" without causing confusion? Also, why be so small-minded to think that this only affects people in IT? Other people use computers, other people buy computers, and (briefly on-topic) the change in Ubuntu will affect many non-IT people.
Why all the resistance to the "kibi-business"? Because, despite reducing ambiguity and being wholly reasonable, it's unfamiliar and new? If that's it, I'll just step off your lawn so you can enjoy your final years shouting at random passers-by in peace.
why does the It industry get special treatment. I thought the IT industry was one of the industries that wanted to use established standards the most for interoperability.
The day you can find a way to stick a peg^10 into peg^2 hole, let me know and we can just call everything '1000'.
There's a solution that's been out there for years: binary prefixes. Why use decimal prefixes to mean binary powers? Why say kilobyte and hope that the listener interprets it the correct way, when you can say kibibyte and know that they'll understand? (And the laypeople who've never heard of binary prefixes will pick it up pretty quickly, since kibi is close to kilo, mebi is close to mega, etc.)
But there are many applications and areas which are not appropriate to shoehorn into the decimal system. Binary computer memory sizes are one such application. It is not appropriate to group base 2 numbers using a base 10 units.
I agree entirely. However, SI prefixes *are* in base 10, and just redefining them in specific contexts to mean something in base 2 is unnecessarily confusing. Kilo is accepted to mean thousand, and redefining it in specific contexts to mean 2^10 is just unreasonable. To use your phrase, it's not appropriate to shoehorn this system of decimal prefixes into describing a naturally binary system (which is precisely what happened in CS).
I understand it's how we've been doing things for decades, but why on earth are so many CS people arguing *against* decreasing ambiguity? I find the whole KiB thing to be a relatively elegant solution, which maintains the familiar letters so there's nothing new to learn, but makes it clear what units you're using. The only reason to resist it that I can see is just blind and unthinking resistance to change -- the exact same reason so many people resist the metric system and SI at all.
You seem to be arguing "if it ain't broke, don't fix it", but I think it is a little broke and we should fix it.
Because if you ever do web development, you are required to hate Internet Explorer.
It's not so much a requirement as it is a natural consequence, in my experience.
Your answer is as stupid as criticising someone's answer on "what to do when attacked by a bear" (run), because it's not "what to do when attacked by a rhinoceros" (climb a tree).
I'd just like to point out that running from a bear is completely pointless. They can easily run faster than any human, and if they've decided they're going to attack you (say, if you're playing with their cute little baby) you're pretty much fucked. The way to deal with a bear is to convince it not to attack you by not doing anything to make it angry (it almost certainly isn't planning to eat you, so it probably won't attack unless you piss it off), and by making yourself look larger and scarier than it by holding your jacket/pack over your head, standing up straight, making noises, talking (to show that you're human) etc. Of course, then you slowly get the hell out of there.
I'm not taking issue with anything in your post, but I figured knowing how not to be killed by a bear is useful knowledge that everyone should have.
"Doesn't hate."
Dammned with faint praise...
On the other hand, it could be litotes; emphasizing something by negating its opposite. From the title/summary, it's ambiguous, but from TFA it looks like he truly likes the phone.
You could totally form a language based on barfing, and from there it's just a short jump to civilization! A barfy one.
Understand just enough to know that I don't understand enough, but this sounds fantastic.
Agreed! Even more so because the picture in TFA clearly shows that they totally built Cerebro!
Except that instead of enhancing the telepathy of whomever's inside, it blows things up with lasers. I'd call that an improvement.
Hey, you and I said the same thing in response to the same post, and we both italicized "recognize" in the first sentence!
:P
Stop copying me!
The range of topics covered here is very wide and I don't know abc of several things discussed here. Does that make me stupid and pathetic?
The key point is that you recognize that you don't know everything about the topic at hand. The post that sunking2 was responding to was essentially a spew of vitriol against the researchers, claiming that it's impossible to make such a small engine with any sort of efficiency, and that they're stupid and ignorant for even trying. According to that post's replies, the writer is completely wrong and doesn't know some basic facts about the subject they're yelling about.
So, no, you're not at all stupid and pathetic for not knowing everything about everything, and I'm in the same boat with you (I've learned a fair amount from this story's discussion), but neither of us is telling everyone (including the Dutch engineers in question) that they're stupid and don't know what they're talking about.
How many beer cans fit in a 0.5 micrometers refrigerator?
Depends. Are we talking micro- or macrobrews?
It's not like a heat pump turns heat into nothing. One side of a heat pump gets cold, the other side gets hot. At half a micron across, it's hard to see how such a device could help evacuate heat from a CPU.
Just stick 100,000 of them end-to-end, naturally. Of course, I've no idea how efficient or effective they really are, but it seems like it *could* work.
It's called http://tor.eff.org/
Talk about an unwieldy name
Why does the person need to be terminally ill? why can't it just be someone who agrees to be mummified following their death? are the producers that impatient?
Yes! Even if you've got some 100-year-old heroin addict, it could be years before they drop, and by then everyone involved will have lost interest and the body will either be buried boringly or go to, like, science or something stupid like that.
;-)
I can't even imagine how popular the .fart TLD would be...
It is arguably the best browser available and has always been a trend setter. They are playing a little bit of follow the leader this time, but they again seem to be doing it just as well if not better.
Wow. That gave me a double whiplash. :)
Heh. How about, each final release of Opera is arguably the best browser available at the time. Right now, however, new versions of other browsers have superseded Opera's stable release (version 10 was good, but quickly overtaken). They're playing catch-up, but looking at this pre-alpha it appears they're doing a damn good job of it.
Sound better?
You can drink a blessed potion of see invisible or eat an invisible stalker's corpse while invisible.
Or just be a monk. You also get the bonus of being incredibly badass.
Well its not bad here. I just downloaded the slackware 13.0 iso (3.5GB) in 8 min from Switzerland to Austria. Faster than a pigeon.
Unless that pigeon is carrying a 128GB USB drive instead of the GP's paltry 8GB. Or five of them!
Of course, this just shows how ridiculous the whole comparison is, though they do legitimately have some slow-ass internets in South Africa.
I don't think they're immune, but I have yet to get any (that I know about). I even run windows sometimes. But then, I at least keep my exposure to such things to a minimum. The same cannot be said for everyone, but just so long as I can keep using the computers the way I want to use them, I don't care what others are doing.
There's a lot to be said for supporting herd immunity throughout the internet. In principle, I also don't really give a damn what people do with their own computer (short of sympathetic pain when I see how horrible it is to use some people's bogged-down, (crap|mal|spy)ware-ridden computers), but viruses, worms, etc. take advantage of the vulnerable majority and make the internet a less safe place for everyone, even those of us who can generally take care of ourselves. I suspect (hope?) Apple's goal is to include a not-incredibly-annoying AV program that most of their users won't even know exists, but will prevent them from becoming yet another spam bot or node in a botnet.
As an afterthought, I've never been able to trust AV vendors completely, since their livelihood depends on viruses still being a threat. Apple doesn't have that hangup, so it seems feasible they'll actually have something better.
*shrug* Of course, I have no direct personal interest in this. I run linux!
This is laughably incorrect. Imagine that the probability of your house burning down in a given year is 0.5%. If it burns down, and you don't have insurance, you'll be bankrupt, homeless, lose your job, and go through significant hardships. Your house has a market value of $100k. The insurance company offers you a year's worth of insurance for 0.005 * $100k = $500 plus, say $100 profit for themselves. Do you take it, or do you go without insurance? Guess what, most people would take the insurance.
I think the idea was that if, theoretically, an insurance company could accurately predict with 100% certainty what was going to happen, they would charge you slightly more than you will end up costing them. If your house is going to burn down, well, they're gonna charge you ahead of time $100k + a little bit (gotsta make a profit). Of course, this is unrealistic and silly.
And I'm guessing the family is the trustee and so have every right to protect his works.
Yup, just like every slave owner was perfectly within his rights to beat his slaves to death.
Would you have cheerfully joined the (mandatory) posse to track down a runaway slave?
Wow, that could be the worst argument I've ever heard.
If I made myself a chair, would that then be a slave chair, just because I owned it?
That would indeed be a horrible argument, but it's not at all what he actually said. The argument wasn't that copyright is in any respect like slavery, he was just pointing out how weak arguing "they're have every right" (and appealing to the law in general) is.
In the case of the slaves, the slave owner had the legal right to beat them and hunt down runaways. Is it therefore okay? Presumably not. This implies that "having the right" doesn't necessarily mean that what you're doing is acceptable. Tolkien's heirs have the legal right to assert ownership of his works. Is that okay? If so, it's clearly not just because they're allowed to, and the GGP's argument is less than convincing.
For the argument to work, though, you need an example of something legal that basically everyone agrees was very bad, and most of those are much worse than enforcing an old copyright, so it might sound like you're blowing it out of proportion. Without laying it out step by step, then, people react emotionally before they take time to consider what's actually being said (see other responses to the GP, or pretty much anywhere on the internet).
Honestly, I'd like to live in a world where arguments like the GP's could be given succinctly and understood clearly, but alas. It'll never happen.
No, I'm pretty sure they're still around. They're the ones with the topless chick on the third page, right?