And that's where you're really, really wrong (alternatively I could've just mistunderstood what you meant by "Venting", but if you're referring to working off your anger about topic A with completely unrelated topic B, it works). Example: This monday my (hate to type those two letters, but I guess they're true now) ex-girlfriend (cue "Welcome Back to/." jokes) dumped me. For the next hours you may or may not be able to imagine how fucking angry I was (hint: "very, very, very"). I rented a bike, rode some 60 kilometers, two hours later I still felt bad as hell but a lot better than before. I was even able to write comprehensible sentences once again. "Venting", of course, didn't solve the problem, but it certainly helped me see things more clear, focus on the actual problem and realize how wrong my initial anger reaction was. Most other forms of "Venting" will, imo and most of the time, produce similar results. If pulling the trigger of a gun while it's pointing at a target in a shooting range, killing loads of virtual zombies or beating up boxing bags help you shut off the world and think clearer: Go for it. Just don't affect people adversely.
Doesn't stop many people from mistakingly thinking that schools are the biggest threat to their children.
Check the parallels to "the real world". I don't have any studies to confirm this, but I am quite certain if you'd walk around Boston (remember the Mooninites?) and asked a representative group of people which of Terrorists, Traffic or Hunger they deem the biggest danger to humans in general, the overwhelming majority would answer "Terrorists".
I must admit to be a bit under-informed in numbers, but as far as I know, "Terrorists" (let's limit this to the common use related to Al Quaeda and such, no spanish separatists, no isreal/palestine conflict) cause a few hundred deaths per year. Traffic causes what, a five or six digit sum of casualties in the U.S. alone annually? What about famines? Five to six digits per day?
While I'm ranting: How many hundred billions has the U.S. gov't spent on The War Against Terror (gotta like that thing's acronym) in recent years? How many millions directly on fighting world hunger? (Reparations to Iraq and Afghanistan belong to TWAT!)
If you really care about the power usage and can live with some restrictions, use a notebook instead. With some power-saving features enabled and the display usually turned off, you'll average some 10-15 watts with a real (read "Core Duo class") processor and a USB or second internal harddrive. Base cost's gonna be higher though.
Consider the Terratec Noxon series. Prices range around $100 for the not-top-of-the-range models (had the luck of getting a first-gen WiFi-capable one for some $60), they come with a remote, play stuff from your media library and so on.
What they don't do, though, is run Linux. If you're interested in a li'l thingie that plays music, you might just like 'em, if it's just about hackery and not about getting that stuff to actually run, you won't;)
Right, they could make better software. I suppose they also could squash the whole hype this Microsoft Windows is and take over the OS market in a matter of seconds, if only they wanted to, right?
Compiz-Quinnstorm (Beryl before the actual fork) and Beryl itself were on a very fast track to become an extreme mess. In many cases, Beryl managed to eat more than the tenfold cpu cycles of compiz and if they had gone on like that a few more months, Beryl might even have beaten Aero Glass in terms of performance waste. Merging back, most of those problems seem to be gone, but I think there's a damn good reason for the compiz folks not to accept every bit of highly experimental quinn code into their branch.
It's only about a one-hour walk or half-hour jog. Everybody over 12 and under 60 should be *really* concerned if they don't manage to do it.
If you're talking about scaling this up according to size/weight differences, it becomes a whole different deal. Estimating a mouse's length at about 15 cm and a person's at 2 meters, one had to make some 84 kilometers at 14 km/h. For comparison: A marathon is some 42 kilometers and done (world record) in two hours and a few minutes. I don't know too much about human stamina and so on, but when scaled up those little beasts might have themselves a photofinish against human world champs.
The problem with storage examples is the limitation they have - basically, there's only three kinds of storage: Hard drives, internal electronic (as in Flash, RAM etc) and removable devices. But since you pointed out that all storage is computed in base 2 by referring to the second kind, I found myself forced to check the capacities of some removable media: (Mkt. C stands for Marketed capacity, Real C for the actual Capacity)
Product| Mkt. C | Real C.| Result Name DVD ..| 4.7 GB | 4.3 GiB | bse 10 CD ..| 700 MB | 703 MiB | base 2 BluRay | 50. GB | 46. GiB | bse 10 HD-DVD | 51. GB | 47. GiB | bse 10 DLT ..| **. GB | **. GiB | bse 10 -- see explanation below
I couldn't confirm the DLT claim, but according to a Quantum manual, DLT seems to be based on base-10 as well. Ultrium and co will (probably) be similar.
Four out of five samples of removable storage media seem to be using base-10 for their claims which kinda positions two of three storage types in the base-10 camp which could be interpreted as RAM being the evil, non-uniform group. So let's ask them to add the tiny little "i", eh?
On that one you're right. Some stores have, however, started transitioning TV's screen diagonals from inches to centimeters, so a longer-term switch may be possible. Also, I personally find the screen diagonal of something to be kind of a "soft" value. If you want to make sure the device will fit in a given spot, you check that spot's measurements (in centimeters) and check those values back against the screen's dimensions (which are, all over europe, given in *meters). If you want to make sure the screen will properly display 1080p video, you'll check the screen's resolution and so on. Especially with the recent uptake of widescreen displays, those diagonal values seem more like AMD's PR (processor rating; e.g. Athlon X2 4000+) - a more or less useful, more or less arbitrary value to help you group different products at a glance.
Pretty sure the fine print somewhere said something along the lines of "1 GB = 1'000'000'000 bytes". Every Dell ad I see anywhere printed does, most every large online store does. Probably the court just found it to be printed a wee bit too fine.
Actually, to a scientist, '1K' would be very fucking cold (to the point where the nerves probably wouldn't be quick enough to even transmit the coldness info to his brain). '1k' is a thousand.:)
Computers were working with powers of 2 LONG before HD's were invented.
Yep. They were also working with NOT powers of 2 long before HDs (no apastrophe, ffs) were invented. Remember 1.44 MB floppy disks? Oh and just to have said it: nano ftw.
Thank you for introducing yet another extremely pointless irregularity. If we're going on like this, we could just use the French language instead of SI units, lots of irregularities there too.
Seriously: Think about it for more than three seconds: What does the unit "kB" consist of? The prefix "k", representing "kilo", representing 1000 (in pretty much any counting system this wonderful world has to offer) and the unit "B", representing a byte, commonly representing eight bits? Interrupt me if I'm wrong, but isn't the only part that changes if you look at a "kb" instead the unit? Now we're talking about a kilo of bits, which would (logically) be exactly one eight of a kB? Why change that? Actually, why not americanize the system? Introduce inchbits, each being 2.54 bytes and footbits, short for 42/4 inchbits? We could also make it a bit less consistent by figuring in atmospheric pressure expressed in centi-headaches and the temperature expressed in drops of sweat per square gobblywock of skin per a 200th of the period of one of Jupiter's moons.
OS manufacturers are in a position to make the much easier fix though. Changing hard drives to report base-2 sizes, or to introduce sizes with the *iB notation requires changes from every hard drive manufacturer, and suddenly leaves them inconsistent with older versions of their products.
Whereas, for OS manufacturers, it's a simple matter of changing the labeling and packaging.
Technically, you're right. Most "advanced" systems ("advanced" as in "catering a crowd that understands the difference between GB/GiB") are actually doing just that right now. Try `df --si`. Most commonly used other tools also include a similar if not the exact same switch.
On the other hand: If Joe sixpack buys a 200 Gigabyte hard drive, he'll expect Windows Explorer to show 200 Gigabytes of space. Vista will most probably eat about 50 of 'em, but that doesn't concern him, as long as there's 200 Gigabyte of total space. What also won't concern him is if that unit right behind the number says GB or GiB. He doesn't commonly use the mega or even giga prefix (if he's american he might even still be used to using medieval terms like feet and miles (no prefixes for those, of course)), 'cause commonly thousands of kilometers aren't expressed as megameters. He'll ignore the i and be as annoyed as before, cause they still took his bytes.
Everyone else except them uses KB/MB/TB/etc in a consistent - if not SI-compliant - fashion.
Bullshit. Remember 4.8 kbps modems which managed to transfer 4800 bps? What's the throughput of what's commonly referred to as Gigabit Ethernet, while we're on it? 1024 Mibps or more like 1'000'000'000 bps? What about an 1.5 Gbps SATA link? How many Pixels in a Megapixel? How many lomaniacs in a Megalomaniac?
We had that kind of units. They went by the names of ell, foot, inch. After scientists realized that those units were pure idiocy for any kind of scientific work (and missed any kind of logic), they were replaced by the international system of units (abbr. SI). Units like the meters and grams have started replacing "old" units internationally starting in the 19th century and as for today, no civilized nation would ever have the idiotic idea to use something as arbitrary as a foot anymore, now would it?
Since your post is written with about as much intelligence as one'd expect from a tree stump, I doubt you are going to grasp anything at all, but to try and help you anyway: Read what the U.S. gov't has to say about it. If that's too dry for you, this wikipedia article might be interesting, too.
No need to. All they need the system to do is create an iron grip on the developing computer market in the developing world. Trust me, no user down in Africa will call Microsoft's U.S. helpline about problems with his XO. The hardware will also only change very slowly and probably be as compatible as it gets. After developing v1.0 of their XO XP, all MSFT will need to do is wait. Wait for a nice marketshare, wait for users to get used to Windows, wait for the country to be developed enough for people to buy second- or third-generation comps. Then, they'll jack prices up and add anti-piracy measures. They'll probably also dump XP in favour of Win 7 by then.
the chances the MS will port any of the bloated MS products to work well on the OLPC
Sorry to disappoint you, but I'm pretty sure this is a situation MS is not going to allow itself to screw up like Vista's launch. Vista was a home match. It wasn't some operation to attract new customers, it was an upgrade to existing ones and maybe a (weak and probably somewhat failed) attempt to lure MSFT->AAPL switchers back home.
The XO/ClassMate situation, however, is completely different. If they do it right, they can expose hundreds of millions of people to a MSFT OS when they first touch a computer. Like giving free licenses to students, this first exposure will (with absolute certainity) strongly affect those people's decisions when it comes to buying a computer on their own. If they know a product called "Windows" to be slow as hell, they will (in most cases) avoid it in favour of whatever doesn't have "Windows" written all over it. If they get it right first, they might increase their userbase in double-digit percentages. Of course there will be rampant piracy and tons of "illegal" versions, but if parts of this audience finally make the transition from developing to developed, vista-style activation will snap into place and prices will reflect Microsoft's very strong position in the market.
At first it seemed great, then the price went up, they chose a non-open manufacturer for their network chip, and now Windows?
Price: What do you expect? Negroponte paying $80 per sold laptop so they could ship it for the attempted $100? Keep it real. It is (apparently) not currently possible to build a device that would satisfy their needs for (Plus shipping a POS (not talking about Point-of-Sale) device to developing countries who might spend quite a big chunk of their educational budget (assuming they have that) might very permanently kill the little bit of trust that is there in such technology).
Network: Neko summarized it perfectly. Shiping an illegal product is something very, very stupid. While there may be a point in questioning the laws that illegalize a completely open driver, you're wrong here. The XO needs to be finished and shipped as soon as possible (and by that I mean after thorough testing, not talking 'bout a giant public beta), laws change very, very slowly.
Windows: Freedom, sir, do you understand it? (That's a rhetorical question and the answer is "no".) Freedom isn't limited to what mr AC deems to be the best right now. Grant MSFT the freedom to port XP to the XO, just like you granted the FSF the freedom to annoy everybody with their BadVista campaign. Freedom includes the freedom to choose a closed, paid-per-seat, user or pixel operating system. It also includes the freedom to whine about the completely unjustified absolute dominance said system has on the desktop market while it's company's marketing skills seriously and unquestionedly suck (which is also their freedom to do). As long as you are free (this may, due to license costs, development costs for drivers and so on be free as in speech yet not free as in beer) to run Linux, LMOS or whatever OS you want on your devices, please make use of your freedom to shut the fuck up and leave other's freedom to not run those systems alone.
By the way: Most of my PCs run Ubuntu, testing machines with properly licensed XP and Vista installations are at hand. I switched to Ubuntu (and Gentoo and Debian) not because of ideology but because of (IMO) the technical superiority and beter configuration. I don't get paid by Microsoft and I don't intend to change that.
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I must admit to be a bit under-informed in numbers, but as far as I know, "Terrorists" (let's limit this to the common use related to Al Quaeda and such, no spanish separatists, no isreal/palestine conflict) cause a few hundred deaths per year. Traffic causes what, a five or six digit sum of casualties in the U.S. alone annually? What about famines? Five to six digits per day?
While I'm ranting: How many hundred billions has the U.S. gov't spent on The War Against Terror (gotta like that thing's acronym) in recent years? How many millions directly on fighting world hunger? (Reparations to Iraq and Afghanistan belong to TWAT!)
If you really care about the power usage and can live with some restrictions, use a notebook instead. With some power-saving features enabled and the display usually turned off, you'll average some 10-15 watts with a real (read "Core Duo class") processor and a USB or second internal harddrive. Base cost's gonna be higher though.
Consider the Terratec Noxon series. Prices range around $100 for the not-top-of-the-range models (had the luck of getting a first-gen WiFi-capable one for some $60), they come with a remote, play stuff from your media library and so on. ;)
What they don't do, though, is run Linux. If you're interested in a li'l thingie that plays music, you might just like 'em, if it's just about hackery and not about getting that stuff to actually run, you won't
Thank you very much for the best slashdot laugh I've had all week (at least) :D
Right, they could make better software. I suppose they also could squash the whole hype this Microsoft Windows is and take over the OS market in a matter of seconds, if only they wanted to, right?
Compiz-Quinnstorm (Beryl before the actual fork) and Beryl itself were on a very fast track to become an extreme mess. In many cases, Beryl managed to eat more than the tenfold cpu cycles of compiz and if they had gone on like that a few more months, Beryl might even have beaten Aero Glass in terms of performance waste. Merging back, most of those problems seem to be gone, but I think there's a damn good reason for the compiz folks not to accept every bit of highly experimental quinn code into their branch.
It's only about a one-hour walk or half-hour jog. Everybody over 12 and under 60 should be *really* concerned if they don't manage to do it.
If you're talking about scaling this up according to size/weight differences, it becomes a whole different deal. Estimating a mouse's length at about 15 cm and a person's at 2 meters, one had to make some 84 kilometers at 14 km/h. For comparison: A marathon is some 42 kilometers and done (world record) in two hours and a few minutes. I don't know too much about human stamina and so on, but when scaled up those little beasts might have themselves a photofinish against human world champs.
I couldn't confirm the DLT claim, but according to a Quantum manual, DLT seems to be based on base-10 as well. Ultrium and co will (probably) be similar.
Four out of five samples of removable storage media seem to be using base-10 for their claims which kinda positions two of three storage types in the base-10 camp which could be interpreted as RAM being the evil, non-uniform group. So let's ask them to add the tiny little "i", eh?
That's great for you! I hope you, for one, welcome your kind and polite tree stump overlords.
On that one you're right. Some stores have, however, started transitioning TV's screen diagonals from inches to centimeters, so a longer-term switch may be possible. Also, I personally find the screen diagonal of something to be kind of a "soft" value. If you want to make sure the device will fit in a given spot, you check that spot's measurements (in centimeters) and check those values back against the screen's dimensions (which are, all over europe, given in *meters). If you want to make sure the screen will properly display 1080p video, you'll check the screen's resolution and so on. Especially with the recent uptake of widescreen displays, those diagonal values seem more like AMD's PR (processor rating; e.g. Athlon X2 4000+) - a more or less useful, more or less arbitrary value to help you group different products at a glance.
Wait, the Flying Spaghetti Monster damned the box?
Pretty sure the fine print somewhere said something along the lines of "1 GB = 1'000'000'000 bytes". Every Dell ad I see anywhere printed does, most every large online store does. Probably the court just found it to be printed a wee bit too fine.
Actually, to a scientist, '1K' would be very fucking cold (to the point where the nerves probably wouldn't be quick enough to even transmit the coldness info to his brain). '1k' is a thousand. :)
Thank you for introducing yet another extremely pointless irregularity. If we're going on like this, we could just use the French language instead of SI units, lots of irregularities there too.
Seriously: Think about it for more than three seconds: What does the unit "kB" consist of? The prefix "k", representing "kilo", representing 1000 (in pretty much any counting system this wonderful world has to offer) and the unit "B", representing a byte, commonly representing eight bits? Interrupt me if I'm wrong, but isn't the only part that changes if you look at a "kb" instead the unit? Now we're talking about a kilo of bits, which would (logically) be exactly one eight of a kB? Why change that? Actually, why not americanize the system? Introduce inchbits, each being 2.54 bytes and footbits, short for 42/4 inchbits? We could also make it a bit less consistent by figuring in atmospheric pressure expressed in centi-headaches and the temperature expressed in drops of sweat per square gobblywock of skin per a 200th of the period of one of Jupiter's moons.
OS manufacturers are in a position to make the much easier fix though. Changing hard drives to report base-2 sizes, or to introduce sizes with the *iB notation requires changes from every hard drive manufacturer, and suddenly leaves them inconsistent with older versions of their products.
Whereas, for OS manufacturers, it's a simple matter of changing the labeling and packaging.
It works that way round too, you know?
Technically, you're right. Most "advanced" systems ("advanced" as in "catering a crowd that understands the difference between GB/GiB") are actually doing just that right now. Try `df --si`. Most commonly used other tools also include a similar if not the exact same switch.
On the other hand: If Joe sixpack buys a 200 Gigabyte hard drive, he'll expect Windows Explorer to show 200 Gigabytes of space. Vista will most probably eat about 50 of 'em, but that doesn't concern him, as long as there's 200 Gigabyte of total space. What also won't concern him is if that unit right behind the number says GB or GiB. He doesn't commonly use the mega or even giga prefix (if he's american he might even still be used to using medieval terms like feet and miles (no prefixes for those, of course)), 'cause commonly thousands of kilometers aren't expressed as megameters. He'll ignore the i and be as annoyed as before, cause they still took his bytes.
We had that kind of units. They went by the names of ell, foot, inch. After scientists realized that those units were pure idiocy for any kind of scientific work (and missed any kind of logic), they were replaced by the international system of units (abbr. SI). Units like the meters and grams have started replacing "old" units internationally starting in the 19th century and as for today, no civilized nation would ever have the idiotic idea to use something as arbitrary as a foot anymore, now would it?
Since your post is written with about as much intelligence as one'd expect from a tree stump, I doubt you are going to grasp anything at all, but to try and help you anyway: Read what the U.S. gov't has to say about it. If that's too dry for you, this wikipedia article might be interesting, too.
The XO/ClassMate situation, however, is completely different. If they do it right, they can expose hundreds of millions of people to a MSFT OS when they first touch a computer. Like giving free licenses to students, this first exposure will (with absolute certainity) strongly affect those people's decisions when it comes to buying a computer on their own. If they know a product called "Windows" to be slow as hell, they will (in most cases) avoid it in favour of whatever doesn't have "Windows" written all over it. If they get it right first, they might increase their userbase in double-digit percentages. Of course there will be rampant piracy and tons of "illegal" versions, but if parts of this audience finally make the transition from developing to developed, vista-style activation will snap into place and prices will reflect Microsoft's very strong position in the market.
Network: Neko summarized it perfectly. Shiping an illegal product is something very, very stupid. While there may be a point in questioning the laws that illegalize a completely open driver, you're wrong here. The XO needs to be finished and shipped as soon as possible (and by that I mean after thorough testing, not talking 'bout a giant public beta), laws change very, very slowly.
Windows: Freedom, sir, do you understand it? (That's a rhetorical question and the answer is "no".) Freedom isn't limited to what mr AC deems to be the best right now. Grant MSFT the freedom to port XP to the XO, just like you granted the FSF the freedom to annoy everybody with their BadVista campaign. Freedom includes the freedom to choose a closed, paid-per-seat, user or pixel operating system. It also includes the freedom to whine about the completely unjustified absolute dominance said system has on the desktop market while it's company's marketing skills seriously and unquestionedly suck (which is also their freedom to do). As long as you are free (this may, due to license costs, development costs for drivers and so on be free as in speech yet not free as in beer) to run Linux, LMOS or whatever OS you want on your devices, please make use of your freedom to shut the fuck up and leave other's freedom to not run those systems alone.
By the way: Most of my PCs run Ubuntu, testing machines with properly licensed XP and Vista installations are at hand. I switched to Ubuntu (and Gentoo and Debian) not because of ideology but because of (IMO) the technical superiority and beter configuration. I don't get paid by Microsoft and I don't intend to change that.