Don't be naive. The problem is simply worse for Windows because windows is the most heavily used OS.
Holy hell, didn't we dismiss this argument about a decade ago, when the most common webserver was Apache and IIS was a distant second, but IIS was getting exploited left, right, and center and Apache, relatively rarely?
Larger market share makes a nicer target, true, but there ARE basic, important design differences between Unix and Windows that go back DECADES. Long story short, Unix was meant to be on a network since Day 1, and it assumed that the network would be hostile. Windows didn't get networking until 3.11 in the 90s and assumed you'd be on a friendly corporate network; MS has been slapping band-aids on ever since. (And making bad decisions along the way. Remember Outlook Express automatically running executable attachments? Remember MSIE's security record?)
Thinking that you are safe just because you use Linux is, well, dumb.
True. On the other hand, DON'T make the logically incorrect assumption that "Neither Windows nor Linux are perfect, therefore they're equally bad." And you've also got to multiply by how much worse the problem is. This isn't a matter of a little difference, like saying "Hail in New York is worse than in Chicago." Saying that "problem is... worse for Windows" is like saying "Stepping on a landmine is worse than getting a hangnail."
he didn't know? really? a BIG HUGE HONKING heatsink and he thinks he can turn on a system without it?
Not as dramatic but equally dumb: a friend had a small-form-factor Compaq Deskpro. Very tight little case. Shipped with a PIII/500 but he bought it used with no CPU. He decided to upgrade to a PIII/800. He bought one that was for a regular Deskpro and of course it didn't fit--so he used a Dremel to grind away almost half of the heatsink. Let's see... more-powerful chip, smaller heatsink, small case with limited airflow... I told him I didn't think it was a good idea, he said it wouldn't be a problem. He did the operation on Monday or Tuesday and it was dead by Friday.
This testosterone-fueled space-fantasy is a stub! You can help by expanding it.
"As [[Ja Rool]] climbed out of the skies CLAIRE IS T3H AWESOME of Planet 142, in the yellow smoke trails he caught the glint BUCH SUCKS [NPOV] of an enemy spacecraft. Maneuvering his nimble XPJ-134, JAMES LOVE CINDY [citation needed]."
Learn to properly manage special characters! The pullquote looks like this:
"Punches make ridiculous sounds %u2013 it%u2019s not so much Sylvester Stallone punching sides of beef as Thor giving Zeus a damn good hiding with his hammer"
Ha! I just reloaded and they already, um, pulled the pullquote. I guess a fix is coming.
If my perfectly-functional three-year-old iPod with video, five-year-old Dock Connector iPod, and seven-year-old iBook are any indication, yes, they'll be working just fine.
Negroponte said the foundation hopes that the cost of the new device, which is scheduled for production by 2010, can be kept to $75, in part by using low-cost displays manufactured for portable DVD players...
... and in part by waiting until 2010 to make it. In two years you'll be able to buy a used first-gen iPhone, iPod touch, or Kindle for $75. At least he's aware of it: "Negroponte said the foundation plans to bring out the second-generation device by 2010. By that time, he added, the cost of the original XO Laptop will also have been brought below $100."
Also, the "low-cost displays manufactured for portable DVD players" bit worries me some, since those displays don't have a particularly high pixel density. Who wants a 7, 8, 9" screen to read from that's only ~720x480? Yeah, it'll work, but it'll be far from ideal.
Never mind abuse, AMD's problem will be keeping it meaningful. MPC, anyone?
The Multimedia PC, or MPC, was a recommended configuration for a PC with a CD-ROM drive. The standard was set and named by the "Multimedia PC Marketing Council", which was a working group of the Software Publishers Association (now the Software and Information Industry Association). The MPMC comprised companies including Microsoft, Creative Labs, Dell, Gateway, and Fujitsu... MPC Level 1 - 1990 16 MHz 386SX CPU 2 MB RAM 30 MB hard disk 256-color, 640×480 VGA video card 1x (single speed) CD-ROM drive using no more than 40% of CPU to read, with Followed by two more levels in the following years.
Touch didn't "just catch on." It's been around forever and has been evolving steadily and is being used in more and more places. You're postulating that because the iPhone uses touch and Bill Gates did a demo that now, May 2008, it has "arrived"? Touch isn't just now "catching on," it's simply becoming more and more common as technology improves. The regular iPod has had a touch-sensitive wheel ever since the 2nd generation. Laptops have had trackpads for ages. PDAs have had touch-sensitive screens since, well, as long as they've been around. I've seen touchscreen kiosks and ordering screens (Arby's used to have them) The only thing I can say is that as touch technology improves in the same way that all technology improves--becoming cheaper and smaller, in addition to better--it's being offered in more devices where small and cheap matters--i.e., portables.
I had a touchscreen 17" CRT at home almost ten years ago, and while it was really neat--there's something really satisfying about actually pressing a link with your finger to 'click' on it--it was a pain (literally) to use for any extended amount of time. Touch works best when your arms can be at rest, which means your hands won't move much, which means a small device. Now, who wants to poke on a tiny screen on their desk, when they could instead use a mouse and keyboard to manipulate objects on a 20" screen? No one. So, where does that leave us? Where is touch useful? Ding ding ding! In tiny devices that are already in your hand. Or, to put it another way, it's not so much that touch is just now "catching on," it's that we're finally finding things that it's really good for. Like I said, a touchscreen is not a good replacement for a regular old mouse.
Multitouch is a nice new addition to touch technology, but you know what? I hardly ever use it on my iPhone. I rarely zoom in or out. I click and drag a lot, and double-tap to zoom in and out, but this is nothing that couldn't have been done on a mid-90s Palm.
There's MSNBC, now CnetBS, what's next... ABC/Slashdot? Fox/Fark? CW/Goatse?
Ops, just remembered, Fox owns MySpace. Damn, truth is stranger than fiction. And of course, Fox is News Corp, and News.com is CNet is now CBS... man, this is confusing.
And yes, I do remember the old days... CNet reviews were great at the time, and they kept them online for a long time, so when a few years went by, I could easily look up the specs on, say, a used 200 MHz Compaq Presario that I was eyeing. The only thing I disliked about them was when they started pushing themselves as news.com.com... seriously, who the fuck thought that was a good idea? MORE letters?!?!? Hell, why not just make a subdomain called news.com.com.com so it could be news.com.com.com.com.com? Maybe redirect the frontpage to news.com.com.com.com.com/news/com/news? And for the coup de gras, do a custom extension like arstechnica (.ars) and make all the pages end in.com? news.com.com.com/news/com/news.com? AWESOME!!!!!11
In all seriousness, it'll be interesting to see how quickly CBS turns news.com into a non-tech-centered news site. My prediction is you'll need a good stopwatch and fast reflexes.
Then, unless you've got a blistering need to fit it into a rack, consider either a small PC (Compaq Deskpro EN comes to mind) or a Mac mini (with an external HDD, I guess.) The Mini in particular is low power, low heat, low noise. I've had one in my bedroom doing hosting duties since February '05. Before that, it was a Compaq Deskpro EN SFF for a few years.
I'm a big maker-of-lists and someday I'll make a list of trilogies (and more-ogies) and see how they relate. While many movies follow the slide downward (like the Lethal Weapon series, though I never personally saw #4), I felt the second Indy wasn't that good and the third was great, maybe even better than the first. For Die Hard, It was Great, Very Good, Total Crap, and Very Good.
Overall, movie series are probably evenly split between Great, So-So, and Bad; and Great, Bad, Good. Then there's also Great, Pretend It Didn't Happen, Pretend It Didn't Happen, like The Matrix.:-)
The Kindle looks mostly great so far, compared to readers that came before it. Partly because the tech has improved, but also partly because of clever things like the built in EVDO and the free-first-chapter-preview. (I think that would mostly make up for being unable to physically browse books. Or maybe I'd cruise the bookstores, Kindle in hand, and browse physically and buy electronically.) However, the price for the device is too high ($400 is a bit steep; $200 is more like it) and same with the books. I'm not a have-to-read-it-in-hardcover-right-away person. Most of what I read (2-5 novels/month) comes from the library or other people, the few books I do buy are <$10 paperbacks or <$10 discounted hardbacks. After paying a bunch for a device, books should be in the $5 range. The last books I paid over $10 for were the illustrated versions of The DaVinci Code and Angels & Demons. (And I'd happily pay as much for an illustrated The Broker or Playing for Pizza by Grisham.)
So my main complaint is price, and a couple years should take care of that.:-)
You often hear about the police pulling over some guy for whatever reason and finding out he had an outstanding warrant or something. I've always wondered why they don't equip police cars with a video camera and the ability to OCR every single plate that comes into view. License plates all use the same font, so they should be easy to OCR, and in theory they use a high-visibility color scheme (though that's not always the case.) The camera would scan, read the characters, and compare it to a big list of stolen vehicles, stolen license plates, vehicles that fled accident scenes or other crimes, vehicles that belong to people that have warrants, Amber alerts, etc., and any "interesting" plates would pop up on the laptop that's now in most police cars.
I'm not saying it would put up a big "pull over and detain!" notice, but it could pop up the plate, the vehicle it should be on, the owner, and why it's of interest, then the officer would decide what to do. I.e., if a car pops up as belonging to a wanted 22-year-old male but it's obviously someone else in the car (too old, wrong gender, etc.) then they would ignore it.
Of course, like anything, there is the potential for abuse, but before you freak out about privacy, remember that driving, by definition, is a very public act. We're not talking about millimeter-wave radio or looking behind closed curtains with an infrared camera, we're talking about reading the required-by-law several-inch-high unique identifier on a hunk of steel with unobstructed windows on the public roads. If you're wanted and don't want to get caught, it's your responsibility to not go out in public with a visible unique identifier.
Re:It also lacked wireless..
on
iMac Turns 10
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· Score: 2, Interesting
In my mind, Apple really missed the boat on that one. First of all, Palm was still pretty big in '98. Apple should have gotten over their failure with the Newton and their NIH-ness, recognized how great Palm was, and actively promoted the ability to wirelessly sync a Palm with an iMac. (I don't know if you actually could sync a Palm with an iMac via IR, but I used to love doing that with my ThinkPad. And Palm's USB/serial kludge of the time (which stuck around for waaaay too long) sucked out loud.) A rising tide lifts all boats, and both companies would have benefited greatly.
Secondly, when Apple came out with the DV iMac a few years later--featuring FireWire ports and (gasp!) a DVD drive--they should have offered a remote. How much better would that have made the iMac for dorms and kids? Apple did, of course, wind up moving to remote-controlled, entertainment-oriented systems just a few years ago. They really, really missed an opportunity ten years ago. They never pushed the point of why there was an IR port--the marketing materials at the time pretty much said "there is one" and nothing more--and IIRC (I am too lazy to look it up right now) they dropped the port on the very first major revision. (When they went to 266 MHz.) It became just another body on the heap of potentially cool, unused, and eventually killed neat things from Apple.
Apple dropped SCSI, their proprietary connectors, and the floppy drive.
No, Apple wasn't quite done with proprietary connectors. After the iMac came out--years later--Apple came out with ADC for video (DVI-I plus power and USB) and that shitty "digital audio" system in the G4s--an audio jack that would accept nothing else, and speakers that won't work anywhere else. Happily, they have since dropped both--permanently this time, let's hope. My company has a good amount of dopey gear from that era--ADC Cinema Displays, several pairs of those otherwise-good (and pretty) clear round "nice pair of boobs" speakers--that will only work with a Mac from that era, or with an expensive adapter, or not at all.
And as long as I'm ranting about waste: as much as I like Apple, and think they make good gear, I have to wonder how big their 'green' commitment really is. Every display I've ever had has had a lifespan at least 2x longer than any computer I've ever had. And Apple won't even let you repurpose them--at least LCDs from Dell (which, in some cases, use the exact same panel as similar Apple displays*) have composite, S-Video, and/or component inputs so you can use them for something else. How cool (and useful, and green) would it be if every iMac could be used with a common VCR, DVD player, or cable box? Even limited to standard-def inputs it would still kick ass. (As my 20" Dell LCD does at home.) The iMac made all-in-one, dispose-as-one computing popular again, and it sucks.
I almost stopped watching when I saw the title card that said "Dark side of the moon." Pink Floyd be damned, there IS no side of the moon that is permanently dark. What there is is a FAR side of the moon. Duh.
But it also sometimes means "1024 Giga", where the Giga could be using either convention (and, for all you know, the "Mega" implied within could have been computed using either convention). So you can get a gradient of "mixed numbers" that conform to neither standard. You might say that only a non-professional would make such a stupid mistake... but on the other hand, if you see a column of numbers listed in "Gigabytes" and you want to convert them to Terabytes, what conversion factor would you use?
My 7th grade science teacher, when we were learning the metric system (this was in the mid-80s... any day now!) was really picky about how we did conversions. If you were going from millimeters to kilometers, he'd say convert mm to meters, then meters to km. Feet to meters was feet to inches, inches to cm, cm to meters. So same here--just go all the way down to bytes, then all the way back up.:-)
Slashdot Mirror
Don't be naive. The problem is simply worse for Windows because windows is the most heavily used OS.
Holy hell, didn't we dismiss this argument about a decade ago, when the most common webserver was Apache and IIS was a distant second, but IIS was getting exploited left, right, and center and Apache, relatively rarely?
Larger market share makes a nicer target, true, but there ARE basic, important design differences between Unix and Windows that go back DECADES. Long story short, Unix was meant to be on a network since Day 1, and it assumed that the network would be hostile. Windows didn't get networking until 3.11 in the 90s and assumed you'd be on a friendly corporate network; MS has been slapping band-aids on ever since. (And making bad decisions along the way. Remember Outlook Express automatically running executable attachments? Remember MSIE's security record?)
Thinking that you are safe just because you use Linux is, well, dumb.
True. On the other hand, DON'T make the logically incorrect assumption that "Neither Windows nor Linux are perfect, therefore they're equally bad." And you've also got to multiply by how much worse the problem is. This isn't a matter of a little difference, like saying "Hail in New York is worse than in Chicago." Saying that "problem is... worse for Windows" is like saying "Stepping on a landmine is worse than getting a hangnail."
he didn't know? really? a BIG HUGE HONKING heatsink and he thinks he can turn on a system without it?
Not as dramatic but equally dumb: a friend had a small-form-factor Compaq Deskpro. Very tight little case. Shipped with a PIII/500 but he bought it used with no CPU. He decided to upgrade to a PIII/800. He bought one that was for a regular Deskpro and of course it didn't fit--so he used a Dremel to grind away almost half of the heatsink. Let's see... more-powerful chip, smaller heatsink, small case with limited airflow... I told him I didn't think it was a good idea, he said it wouldn't be a problem. He did the operation on Monday or Tuesday and it was dead by Friday.
If my perfectly-functional three-year-old iPod with video, five-year-old Dock Connector iPod, and seven-year-old iBook are any indication, yes, they'll be working just fine.
Negroponte said the foundation hopes that the cost of the new device, which is scheduled for production by 2010, can be kept to $75, in part by using low-cost displays manufactured for portable DVD players...
... and in part by waiting until 2010 to make it. In two years you'll be able to buy a used first-gen iPhone, iPod touch, or Kindle for $75. At least he's aware of it: "Negroponte said the foundation plans to bring out the second-generation device by 2010. By that time, he added, the cost of the original XO Laptop will also have been brought below $100."
Also, the "low-cost displays manufactured for portable DVD players" bit worries me some, since those displays don't have a particularly high pixel density. Who wants a 7, 8, 9" screen to read from that's only ~720x480? Yeah, it'll work, but it'll be far from ideal.
Your question cannot be answered because it depends on incorrect assumptions.
Touch didn't "just catch on." It's been around forever and has been evolving steadily and is being used in more and more places. You're postulating that because the iPhone uses touch and Bill Gates did a demo that now, May 2008, it has "arrived"? Touch isn't just now "catching on," it's simply becoming more and more common as technology improves. The regular iPod has had a touch-sensitive wheel ever since the 2nd generation. Laptops have had trackpads for ages. PDAs have had touch-sensitive screens since, well, as long as they've been around. I've seen touchscreen kiosks and ordering screens (Arby's used to have them) The only thing I can say is that as touch technology improves in the same way that all technology improves--becoming cheaper and smaller, in addition to better--it's being offered in more devices where small and cheap matters--i.e., portables.
I had a touchscreen 17" CRT at home almost ten years ago, and while it was really neat--there's something really satisfying about actually pressing a link with your finger to 'click' on it--it was a pain (literally) to use for any extended amount of time. Touch works best when your arms can be at rest, which means your hands won't move much, which means a small device. Now, who wants to poke on a tiny screen on their desk, when they could instead use a mouse and keyboard to manipulate objects on a 20" screen? No one. So, where does that leave us? Where is touch useful? Ding ding ding! In tiny devices that are already in your hand. Or, to put it another way, it's not so much that touch is just now "catching on," it's that we're finally finding things that it's really good for. Like I said, a touchscreen is not a good replacement for a regular old mouse.
Multitouch is a nice new addition to touch technology, but you know what? I hardly ever use it on my iPhone. I rarely zoom in or out. I click and drag a lot, and double-tap to zoom in and out, but this is nothing that couldn't have been done on a mid-90s Palm.
There's MSNBC, now CnetBS, what's next... ABC/Slashdot? Fox/Fark? CW/Goatse?
.com? news.com.com.com/news/com/news.com? AWESOME!!!!!11
Ops, just remembered, Fox owns MySpace. Damn, truth is stranger than fiction. And of course, Fox is News Corp, and News.com is CNet is now CBS... man, this is confusing.
And yes, I do remember the old days... CNet reviews were great at the time, and they kept them online for a long time, so when a few years went by, I could easily look up the specs on, say, a used 200 MHz Compaq Presario that I was eyeing. The only thing I disliked about them was when they started pushing themselves as news.com.com... seriously, who the fuck thought that was a good idea? MORE letters?!?!? Hell, why not just make a subdomain called news.com.com.com so it could be news.com.com.com.com.com? Maybe redirect the frontpage to news.com.com.com.com.com/news/com/news? And for the coup de gras, do a custom extension like arstechnica (.ars) and make all the pages end in
In all seriousness, it'll be interesting to see how quickly CBS turns news.com into a non-tech-centered news site. My prediction is you'll need a good stopwatch and fast reflexes.
Then, unless you've got a blistering need to fit it into a rack, consider either a small PC (Compaq Deskpro EN comes to mind) or a Mac mini (with an external HDD, I guess.) The Mini in particular is low power, low heat, low noise. I've had one in my bedroom doing hosting duties since February '05. Before that, it was a Compaq Deskpro EN SFF for a few years.
I'm a big maker-of-lists and someday I'll make a list of trilogies (and more-ogies) and see how they relate. While many movies follow the slide downward (like the Lethal Weapon series, though I never personally saw #4), I felt the second Indy wasn't that good and the third was great, maybe even better than the first. For Die Hard, It was Great, Very Good, Total Crap, and Very Good.
:-)
Overall, movie series are probably evenly split between Great, So-So, and Bad; and Great, Bad, Good. Then there's also Great, Pretend It Didn't Happen, Pretend It Didn't Happen, like The Matrix.
I got as far as dark clothing plus ski masks plus pick, but now how am I supposed to subtract 'up truck @ 3am' from all that?
The Kindle looks mostly great so far, compared to readers that came before it. Partly because the tech has improved, but also partly because of clever things like the built in EVDO and the free-first-chapter-preview. (I think that would mostly make up for being unable to physically browse books. Or maybe I'd cruise the bookstores, Kindle in hand, and browse physically and buy electronically.) However, the price for the device is too high ($400 is a bit steep; $200 is more like it) and same with the books. I'm not a have-to-read-it-in-hardcover-right-away person. Most of what I read (2-5 novels/month) comes from the library or other people, the few books I do buy are <$10 paperbacks or <$10 discounted hardbacks. After paying a bunch for a device, books should be in the $5 range. The last books I paid over $10 for were the illustrated versions of The DaVinci Code and Angels & Demons. (And I'd happily pay as much for an illustrated The Broker or Playing for Pizza by Grisham.)
:-)
So my main complaint is price, and a couple years should take care of that.
I'm pretty sure I can build my own working R2D2 for a fraction of that.
Yeah, forget these guys! I'm gonna build my own R2D2, with blackjack and hookers. In fact, forget the robot. Ah, screw the whole thing.
Thanks. Eds, take note: please use that link in tomorrow's dupe. kthxbye
You often hear about the police pulling over some guy for whatever reason and finding out he had an outstanding warrant or something. I've always wondered why they don't equip police cars with a video camera and the ability to OCR every single plate that comes into view. License plates all use the same font, so they should be easy to OCR, and in theory they use a high-visibility color scheme (though that's not always the case.) The camera would scan, read the characters, and compare it to a big list of stolen vehicles, stolen license plates, vehicles that fled accident scenes or other crimes, vehicles that belong to people that have warrants, Amber alerts, etc., and any "interesting" plates would pop up on the laptop that's now in most police cars.
I'm not saying it would put up a big "pull over and detain!" notice, but it could pop up the plate, the vehicle it should be on, the owner, and why it's of interest, then the officer would decide what to do. I.e., if a car pops up as belonging to a wanted 22-year-old male but it's obviously someone else in the car (too old, wrong gender, etc.) then they would ignore it.
Of course, like anything, there is the potential for abuse, but before you freak out about privacy, remember that driving, by definition, is a very public act. We're not talking about millimeter-wave radio or looking behind closed curtains with an infrared camera, we're talking about reading the required-by-law several-inch-high unique identifier on a hunk of steel with unobstructed windows on the public roads. If you're wanted and don't want to get caught, it's your responsibility to not go out in public with a visible unique identifier.
In my mind, Apple really missed the boat on that one. First of all, Palm was still pretty big in '98. Apple should have gotten over their failure with the Newton and their NIH-ness, recognized how great Palm was, and actively promoted the ability to wirelessly sync a Palm with an iMac. (I don't know if you actually could sync a Palm with an iMac via IR, but I used to love doing that with my ThinkPad. And Palm's USB/serial kludge of the time (which stuck around for waaaay too long) sucked out loud.) A rising tide lifts all boats, and both companies would have benefited greatly.
Secondly, when Apple came out with the DV iMac a few years later--featuring FireWire ports and (gasp!) a DVD drive--they should have offered a remote. How much better would that have made the iMac for dorms and kids? Apple did, of course, wind up moving to remote-controlled, entertainment-oriented systems just a few years ago. They really, really missed an opportunity ten years ago. They never pushed the point of why there was an IR port--the marketing materials at the time pretty much said "there is one" and nothing more--and IIRC (I am too lazy to look it up right now) they dropped the port on the very first major revision. (When they went to 266 MHz.) It became just another body on the heap of potentially cool, unused, and eventually killed neat things from Apple.
Apple dropped SCSI, their proprietary connectors, and the floppy drive.
No, Apple wasn't quite done with proprietary connectors. After the iMac came out--years later--Apple came out with ADC for video (DVI-I plus power and USB) and that shitty "digital audio" system in the G4s--an audio jack that would accept nothing else, and speakers that won't work anywhere else. Happily, they have since dropped both--permanently this time, let's hope. My company has a good amount of dopey gear from that era--ADC Cinema Displays, several pairs of those otherwise-good (and pretty) clear round "nice pair of boobs" speakers--that will only work with a Mac from that era, or with an expensive adapter, or not at all.
And as long as I'm ranting about waste: as much as I like Apple, and think they make good gear, I have to wonder how big their 'green' commitment really is. Every display I've ever had has had a lifespan at least 2x longer than any computer I've ever had. And Apple won't even let you repurpose them--at least LCDs from Dell (which, in some cases, use the exact same panel as similar Apple displays*) have composite, S-Video, and/or component inputs so you can use them for something else. How cool (and useful, and green) would it be if every iMac could be used with a common VCR, DVD player, or cable box? Even limited to standard-def inputs it would still kick ass. (As my 20" Dell LCD does at home.) The iMac made all-in-one, dispose-as-one computing popular again, and it sucks.
* Yes, really. Anand even has pics of the internals.
User
What if I got rid of the off button?!? That would be MUCH SIMPLER!
That's not the USER, that's APPLE!
I'll see your apostrophe and raise you a missing capital 'N'.
I almost stopped watching when I saw the title card that said "Dark side of the moon." Pink Floyd be damned, there IS no side of the moon that is permanently dark. What there is is a FAR side of the moon. Duh.
I'll skip Internet2. I'm waiting for Internet3.11 for Workgroups.
But it also sometimes means "1024 Giga", where the Giga could be using either convention (and, for all you know, the "Mega" implied within could have been computed using either convention). So you can get a gradient of "mixed numbers" that conform to neither standard. You might say that only a non-professional would make such a stupid mistake... but on the other hand, if you see a column of numbers listed in "Gigabytes" and you want to convert them to Terabytes, what conversion factor would you use?
:-)
My 7th grade science teacher, when we were learning the metric system (this was in the mid-80s... any day now!) was really picky about how we did conversions. If you were going from millimeters to kilometers, he'd say convert mm to meters, then meters to km. Feet to meters was feet to inches, inches to cm, cm to meters. So same here--just go all the way down to bytes, then all the way back up.
Can't speak for DEO (did you mean DIO?) but Robert Palmer's over here.