There are still some things in the original timeline that will have to be addressed (internal to the rebooted universe, not necessarily on-screen).
Khan's story might not happen because his ship was found by Kirk in TOS, but the Doomsday machine, V'Ger, and the whale Probe from Star Trek IV are all bearing down on Earth, on journeys started long before the original or rebooted stories take place.
Steve Jobs should call Gray out of the audience and have *him* introduce the new iPhone at the unveiling.
It would show he has a sense of humor...and no hard feelings. Probably won't happen but would be extremely cool.
There's precedent for this, kinda. After Pirates of Silicon Valley was released, the next Macworld Keynote started off with Noah Wyle coming on stage as Steve Jobs, before Jobs himself came on, exchanged a few jokes, and took over the show. This despite the final tone of the film which made it seem Steve Jobs was left humbled before a victorious Gates.
Meanwhile, though I can't find anything after a quick Google, I remember reading that BIll Gates complained about inaccuracies in the film and how he was portrayed.
Locally grown food is probably tastier too, as it hasn't been shipped half-way around the world either. The big change is you have to learn to eat seasonally. It may be unreasonable to expect to find magoes in December in Ohio.
Someone managed to screw up even that simple an idea.
We have farmers growing produce near Ottawa, a reasonably large city by Canadian standards, but because of how one of the local supermarket chains work, everything has to go through one of their major distribution centres near Toronto.
This means the produce now travels almost 900 km round-trip, to end up less than 50 km from where it started.
But they have a point. In most of the places where that happens the cyclists are violating the traffic codes. No driver is supposed to impede the flow of traffic. Which means that cyclists huffing up the hill are supposed to be on the sidewalk. Rather than impeding traffic.
Where I live, biking on a sidewalk (if it's not a recreational pathway) is illegal, so the cyclist would be in a catch-22 where he could be cited one way or the other.
I don't usually reply to ACs, but you're already modded to +2 for a comment that's patently wrong.
5. the iTunes compatibility thing. That was rather unethical business by palm in the first place to in essence hack the phone
They didn't "hack" the phone - whatever that's supposed to mean. How far has the world come that it is now unethical, even for a technology oriented forum's standards, to interface one piece of software with another's API. If anything, it is unethical of Apple to lock out every other device out of iTunes API besides their iPods and iPhones.
This shows how much you know of the actual situation. What Palm did was a hack in the original technical sense--it was a quick and dirty solution (a "hack") to an problem, but one of their own making.
Palm *didn't* use Apple's public APIs for accessing iTunes playlists. Instead, Palm faked their devices' USB vendor and device IDs to make iTunes think an iPod had been connected. This is something expressly prohibited by the USB spec. This part of the spec had relied on the honour system rather than strictly enforced via some signed handshake, but Palm violated it, and the USB Implementers Forum which oversees the USB spec rightly slapped Palm silly for even making the complaint.
Interestingly, history is full of things that were completely over-engineered... given 20/20 hindsight and more modern technology. Bridges were made with far more material than was needed, for example. Yet, if many of those bridges hadn't been over-engineered, would they have been capable of supporting modern 18-wheelers, or as many cars as cross them every day?
What your story reinforces for me is that despite all our modern technology, with spaceflight we're still not at the point where we can get away with not designing things that aren't seriously "over-engineered."
It doesn't matter what component costs the most in the purchase, it's the chain of payment.
The user pays the store for the computer (which happens to have Windows pre-installed), the store stocked it from HP or whoever, who in turn licensed Windows from Microsoft.
You cannot buy a WinPC where the store paid Microsoft, who then pays the PC maker (unless someone has a $700 bill for Microsoft Windows which says otherwise).
As for supporting the VP8 CODEC on iPhone, I don't recall seeing anything that specifically bans third party CODECs on the phone itself. In fact, given that the hardware encoder in slingbox appears to be either WMV9 or VC-1 (I haven't verified it, but I read it somewhere), SlingPlayer for iPhone almost certainly is delivering a 3rd party CODEC to the device. It might simply be an issue of making a new player that triggers on VP8 media.
According to Wikipedia, Slingbox cut off iPhone support for older Slingbox models, presumably because they only encoded to WMV, whereas the newer ones converts it to H.264 on the fly before streaming it to iPhone.
This idea is already used by another app, Air Video. It has companion software for your computer that converts almost any video to an H.264 on the fly, and streams it to a wifi iPhone or iPod touch.
Leaving aside market share, Microsoft was using their monopoly to punish hardware OEM vendors for *not* including Windows, or for including a different browser than IE. Punishment was either additional fees, or termination of their OEM license for Windows. If Microsoft had never done this, it's quite possible they wouldn't now have to include the browser ballot box on European versions of Windows.
One more difference: people don't buy Windows, which happens to include a PC. They buy PCs that include Windows. This makes the "it was Microsoft's operating system" even more irrelevant to the argument.
One interesting thing about html5 video is you can have fall backs, ie the video in ogg, the video in mp4 and the video in another codec in the same tag. So if you want to do it right you re-encode in all formats and everyone gets to use the codec they want.
The disadvantage is you need more disk space, but really how expensive is that?
As AndrewStephens already mentioned it's not necessarily the disk space but having to encode things multiple times, and manage them.
This isn't analogous to having three major image formats, because websites could use any or all of them and the browser displays them fine (well okay, IE sucks for PNG). You don't need 2 or 3 versions of the exact same image. With HTML5 video though, you do. At least it rids of of the embed/object code soup...
HTML5 video sounds to me like it's the best workaround/compromise, rather than a good solution.
Countdown timers are being installed in Ottawa Canada too. First saw this in China in 1997, I'm glad we're finally seeing this here.
I have another method for telling when to go through a yellow or not. In multilane roads the last metres of lane separators become solid, indicating no lane changes should be made. However I noticed that if you're travelling the speed limit, the length of the solid divider is roughly the distance you'd travel while the light is yellow, so if I'm behind that solid lane divider when it goes yellow, I definitely brake.
Every time I see some stupid fucking douchebag barking into his cellphone, or some giggle brained bleeth yammering into her iPhone, I curse the gods for not letting me be able to fire rockets or RPGs at those stupid fucks as they blunder their way down the highway and endangering the lives of the rest of us with their inattention and sense of entitlement.
Currently, developers use the in-application ads to monetize free applications. This means that the only people who will see those apps are freeloaders who don't want to pay $0.99 for the full version of the app. Those folks won't tap on the ads, and even if they do, they won't buy stuff. Epic fail.
That's what I thought at first, and I've been ignoring the in-app ads since I got my iPhone. I'm good at ignoring ads on traditional webpages too (I don't adblock, and I haven't turned Slashdot's optional ads off either).
However, after watching the video of the iPhone 4 sneak peek event, I have to change my opinion. The demo ads they whipped up were at least mildly engaging, with interactive games, videos, and links to buy music and probably other things on iTunes. All of this without Flash, and none of it took you out of the current app, like current ads have to.
Not saying I'm more likely to buy anything because of the new ad framework, but I can definitely see myself checking some out when it comes online (three words for developers and advertisers: first mover advantage!). And if a well-done iAd can pull in someone like me, who rarely acts on any form of TV, print or online advertising, then they're going to make a killing on people prone to impulse buys.
First Murdock displays his love for it, now the CEO of Verizon not only says he wanted one, but send one of his minions to pick it up for him. If someone were trying to paint the iPad in a bad light, couldn't get it better than this.
By itself, it says nothing about the thing they're attaching themselves to.
It's only natural that the ultimate in unhip and uncool will try and attach themselves to something perceived as hip and cool. In the process they bring the product down in the eyes of others (like you), but they couldn't care less because it raises their own stature up just a bit.
Re:Apple has, what, 9% of the market?
on
The Apple Two
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· Score: 1
Apple is taking the war onto new(er) battlefields like smartphones and mobile computing appliances, and handily redefining them just like they did with mp3 players.
The desktop/laptop marketshare is last decade's battle, and Apple doesn't really care if its desktop/laptop computing market share expands much more. It's saturated, the only way they'll increase it to even 20% is to slash prices (even Dell is trying not to slide further into that trap) and invest more time/marketing into "traditional" computer markets which are low margin, high maintenance, or outright hostile to them. Lose/lose/lose for Apple.
Apple and Dell both had revenues last quarter of around $15-16 billion. Dell's actual profit was $334 million, which is pretty paltry compared to Apple's $3.4 billion. I'm sure no one at Apple is losing any sleep over their desktop market share.
Don't forget all the other choices you are missing out on because of religion.
Murder, stealing, lying, cheating etc.
Right. I really needed to go every Sunday to have my moral compass re-aligned.
Oh wait, no I didn't! I was raised in the absence of formal religion (except for that daily prayer they used to allow in public schools), never taken to church, and to my recollection never explicitly told that killing someone is wrong.
But here's the funny thing... even though I have no religious imperative, I still live by these "morals" better than many who claim to follow the religions which teach them.
The worst are those who violate many of these morals, but make a show of going to church every Sunday, pay the tithe, confess their sins, etc... as if it gives them a pass for ignoring their religious commandments the rest of the week. That's the most dangerous flaw of religion, that even if you screw over people royally now, you can still be forgiven in the afterlife; and that those you've sinned against, may also be compensated in turn.
Another poster mentioned Robert J. Sawyer's Neanderthal Parallax trilogy in the context of EM fields stimulating religious experience, here's a part from the first book, the Hugo-winning Hominids, explaining why the completely atheistic Neanderthals came to have the same morals without religious "guidance":
"But where do those standards [morals] come from?" "From... from our conviction that there is no life after death! That is why your belief troubles me; I see it now. Our assertion is straightforward, and congruent with all observed fact: a person's life is completely finished at death; there is no possibility of reconciling with them, or making amends with them after they are gone, and no possibility that, because they lived a moral life, they are now in paradise, with the cares of this existence forgotten.
[...]
"Do you not see? If I wrong someone--if I say something mean to them, or, I do not know, perhaps take something that belongs to them--under your worldview I can console myself with the knowledge that, after they are dead, they can still be contacted; amends can be made. But in my worldview, once a person is gone--which could happen for any of us at any moment, through accident or heart attack or so on--then you who did the wrong must live knowing that that person's entire existence ended without you ever having made peace with him or her."
This passage doesn't explain how more heinous crimes like murder came to be considered bad, but since it's actually a central plot point in the story I won't spoil it.
The Vatican doesn't even have as much money as minor movie studio, just a lot of old stuff that frankly isn't worth very much.
The Vatican itself is estimated to have assets of between $1.5 to $15 billion.
If you consider the Vatican to be the head of a multinational corporation, and include all worldwide assets of the Roman Catholic Church, some estimate they have close to $100 BILLION in money, property and other assets. And think how much of that is tax-free.
The 2 things that fail on computers are hard disks and fans. I wonder if a really low power cpu could run without sucking dust in if a cpu cooling fan wasn't needed much.
Smartphones fit this bill, as will the iPad and other next-generation "computer-lite" tablets.
I work mostly on OS X and this so-called feature annoys me to no end. I do not know the size of my files anymore, I have to go to the terminal just to know the size of a file (bash hasn't been polluted by this feature).
I've been using computers for 20+ years and I do _not_ want to change how I think file sizes, especially since I feel that base 10 is the wrong way to count.
And this is precisely the attitude that keeps America using the imperial system. Not that you're necessarily American yourself, but it's that attitude and unwillingness to change to something "better" simply because you've used a different system all your life.
I submitted the original Slashdot story about Snow Leopard changing the prefix definitions, and my position (though not explicitly stated in that story) is that it was a mistake by computer science to have co-opted the kilo-, mega- etc prefixes for binary measurements. It was convenient for them at the time to avoid creating new prefixes, and it was wrong for them to do so, so this is now being corrected. That this happened to be spearheaded by hard drive marketing is incidental.
What's unfortunate is that for the next few years at least, there will be inconsistency as some OSes use the decimal prefix system while others continue using the binary one. There will be some confusion in the market place, but it's unlikely any disaster will occur because of it (like mixing imperial and metric units on one of the Mars probes).
Unless it's pure science, information and knowledge aren't worth much without some practical application. Traditionally, this resulted in a manufactured product--faster hard drive, better LED lights, improved engines, a new medicine.
More recently, products are a little less tangible--software, applications, entertainment.
Funny thing is, information is easier to copy than physical products. If the only thing you produce other than military hardware is "information" (i.e. intellectual property) and you're indebted to a country who doesn't care at all about your laws protecting IP, *and* you've outsourced most of your manufacturing, *and* the IP driving that is available to local workers who may or may not steal it to get a payout higher than the little you're paying them, you don't have a very rosy future.
On the other hand, it also can't add back what Canon took out. One of the best photos I ever took (IMHO) was taken with the Color Accent mode accidentally turned on in my Canon A540. This feature was removed in the A570 that replaced it. It seems like trivial functionality to put back in, but CHDK can't.
I prefer writing yyyy-mm-dd, especially for anything programming-related.
In regular writing, I'm fine with seeing dd-mm-yyyy. mmm dd, yyyy is still okay since there's no ambiguity about what which the day and month are, but this leads to the laziness that results in....
mm-dd-yyyy or mm/dd/yyyy. Which are about the stupidest written conventions I've ever come across. Along with imperial measurements, why is the US hell-bent on foisting backwards systems on the rest of the world?
Slashdot Mirror
There are still some things in the original timeline that will have to be addressed (internal to the rebooted universe, not necessarily on-screen).
Khan's story might not happen because his ship was found by Kirk in TOS, but the Doomsday machine, V'Ger, and the whale Probe from Star Trek IV are all bearing down on Earth, on journeys started long before the original or rebooted stories take place.
Steve Jobs should call Gray out of the audience and have *him* introduce the new iPhone at the unveiling.
It would show he has a sense of humor...and no hard feelings. Probably won't happen but would be extremely cool.
There's precedent for this, kinda. After Pirates of Silicon Valley was released, the next Macworld Keynote started off with Noah Wyle coming on stage as Steve Jobs, before Jobs himself came on, exchanged a few jokes, and took over the show. This despite the final tone of the film which made it seem Steve Jobs was left humbled before a victorious Gates.
Meanwhile, though I can't find anything after a quick Google, I remember reading that BIll Gates complained about inaccuracies in the film and how he was portrayed.
Locally grown food is probably tastier too, as it hasn't been shipped half-way around the world either. The big change is you have to learn to eat seasonally. It may be unreasonable to expect to find magoes in December in Ohio.
Someone managed to screw up even that simple an idea.
We have farmers growing produce near Ottawa, a reasonably large city by Canadian standards, but because of how one of the local supermarket chains work, everything has to go through one of their major distribution centres near Toronto.
This means the produce now travels almost 900 km round-trip, to end up less than 50 km from where it started.
But they have a point. In most of the places where that happens the cyclists are violating the traffic codes. No driver is supposed to impede the flow of traffic. Which means that cyclists huffing up the hill are supposed to be on the sidewalk. Rather than impeding traffic.
Where I live, biking on a sidewalk (if it's not a recreational pathway) is illegal, so the cyclist would be in a catch-22 where he could be cited one way or the other.
Then there's this guy who mowed down 5 cyclists, from behind, with a minivan, while the cyclists were in a designated bike lane, then drove off.
I don't usually reply to ACs, but you're already modded to +2 for a comment that's patently wrong.
5. the iTunes compatibility thing. That was rather unethical business by palm in the first place to in essence hack the phone
They didn't "hack" the phone - whatever that's supposed to mean. How far has the world come that it is now unethical, even for a technology oriented forum's standards, to interface one piece of software with another's API. If anything, it is unethical of Apple to lock out every other device out of iTunes API besides their iPods and iPhones.
This shows how much you know of the actual situation. What Palm did was a hack in the original technical sense--it was a quick and dirty solution (a "hack") to an problem, but one of their own making.
Palm *didn't* use Apple's public APIs for accessing iTunes playlists. Instead, Palm faked their devices' USB vendor and device IDs to make iTunes think an iPod had been connected. This is something expressly prohibited by the USB spec. This part of the spec had relied on the honour system rather than strictly enforced via some signed handshake, but Palm violated it, and the USB Implementers Forum which oversees the USB spec rightly slapped Palm silly for even making the complaint.
Interestingly, history is full of things that were completely over-engineered... given 20/20 hindsight and more modern technology. Bridges were made with far more material than was needed, for example. Yet, if many of those bridges hadn't been over-engineered, would they have been capable of supporting modern 18-wheelers, or as many cars as cross them every day?
What your story reinforces for me is that despite all our modern technology, with spaceflight we're still not at the point where we can get away with not designing things that aren't seriously "over-engineered."
It doesn't matter what component costs the most in the purchase, it's the chain of payment.
The user pays the store for the computer (which happens to have Windows pre-installed), the store stocked it from HP or whoever, who in turn licensed Windows from Microsoft.
You cannot buy a WinPC where the store paid Microsoft, who then pays the PC maker (unless someone has a $700 bill for Microsoft Windows which says otherwise).
As for supporting the VP8 CODEC on iPhone, I don't recall seeing anything that specifically bans third party CODECs on the phone itself. In fact, given that the hardware encoder in slingbox appears to be either WMV9 or VC-1 (I haven't verified it, but I read it somewhere), SlingPlayer for iPhone almost certainly is delivering a 3rd party CODEC to the device. It might simply be an issue of making a new player that triggers on VP8 media.
According to Wikipedia, Slingbox cut off iPhone support for older Slingbox models, presumably because they only encoded to WMV, whereas the newer ones converts it to H.264 on the fly before streaming it to iPhone.
This idea is already used by another app, Air Video. It has companion software for your computer that converts almost any video to an H.264 on the fly, and streams it to a wifi iPhone or iPod touch.
Leaving aside market share, Microsoft was using their monopoly to punish hardware OEM vendors for *not* including Windows, or for including a different browser than IE. Punishment was either additional fees, or termination of their OEM license for Windows. If Microsoft had never done this, it's quite possible they wouldn't now have to include the browser ballot box on European versions of Windows.
One more difference: people don't buy Windows, which happens to include a PC. They buy PCs that include Windows. This makes the "it was Microsoft's operating system" even more irrelevant to the argument.
One interesting thing about html5 video is you can have fall backs, ie the video in ogg, the video in mp4 and the video in another codec in the same tag.
So if you want to do it right you re-encode in all formats and everyone gets to use the codec they want.
The disadvantage is you need more disk space, but really how expensive is that?
As AndrewStephens already mentioned it's not necessarily the disk space but having to encode things multiple times, and manage them.
This isn't analogous to having three major image formats, because websites could use any or all of them and the browser displays them fine (well okay, IE sucks for PNG). You don't need 2 or 3 versions of the exact same image. With HTML5 video though, you do. At least it rids of of the embed/object code soup...
HTML5 video sounds to me like it's the best workaround/compromise, rather than a good solution.
Countdown timers are being installed in Ottawa Canada too. First saw this in China in 1997, I'm glad we're finally seeing this here.
I have another method for telling when to go through a yellow or not. In multilane roads the last metres of lane separators become solid, indicating no lane changes should be made. However I noticed that if you're travelling the speed limit, the length of the solid divider is roughly the distance you'd travel while the light is yellow, so if I'm behind that solid lane divider when it goes yellow, I definitely brake.
Every time I see some stupid fucking douchebag barking into his cellphone, or some giggle brained bleeth yammering into her iPhone, I curse the gods for not letting me be able to fire rockets or RPGs at those stupid fucks as they blunder their way down the highway and endangering the lives of the rest of us with their inattention and sense of entitlement.
There's an app for that.
Currently, developers use the in-application ads to monetize free applications. This means that the only people who will see those apps are freeloaders who don't want to pay $0.99 for the full version of the app. Those folks won't tap on the ads, and even if they do, they won't buy stuff. Epic fail.
That's what I thought at first, and I've been ignoring the in-app ads since I got my iPhone. I'm good at ignoring ads on traditional webpages too (I don't adblock, and I haven't turned Slashdot's optional ads off either).
However, after watching the video of the iPhone 4 sneak peek event, I have to change my opinion. The demo ads they whipped up were at least mildly engaging, with interactive games, videos, and links to buy music and probably other things on iTunes. All of this without Flash, and none of it took you out of the current app, like current ads have to.
Not saying I'm more likely to buy anything because of the new ad framework, but I can definitely see myself checking some out when it comes online (three words for developers and advertisers: first mover advantage!). And if a well-done iAd can pull in someone like me, who rarely acts on any form of TV, print or online advertising, then they're going to make a killing on people prone to impulse buys.
"We weren't the first to this party," Jobs said of the new multitasking feature, "but we're going to be the best. Just like cut and paste."
Also, apparently Apple is the market leader in cutting and pasting.
In fact, they're so far ahead that even Microsoft has given up and decided to remove it from WinMobile 7!
First Murdock displays his love for it, now the CEO of Verizon not only says he wanted one, but send one of his minions to pick it up for him. If someone were trying to paint the iPad in a bad light, couldn't get it better than this.
By itself, it says nothing about the thing they're attaching themselves to.
It's only natural that the ultimate in unhip and uncool will try and attach themselves to something perceived as hip and cool. In the process they bring the product down in the eyes of others (like you), but they couldn't care less because it raises their own stature up just a bit.
Apple is taking the war onto new(er) battlefields like smartphones and mobile computing appliances, and handily redefining them just like they did with mp3 players.
The desktop/laptop marketshare is last decade's battle, and Apple doesn't really care if its desktop/laptop computing market share expands much more. It's saturated, the only way they'll increase it to even 20% is to slash prices (even Dell is trying not to slide further into that trap) and invest more time/marketing into "traditional" computer markets which are low margin, high maintenance, or outright hostile to them. Lose/lose/lose for Apple.
Apple and Dell both had revenues last quarter of around $15-16 billion. Dell's actual profit was $334 million, which is pretty paltry compared to Apple's $3.4 billion. I'm sure no one at Apple is losing any sleep over their desktop market share.
Don't forget all the other choices you are missing out on because of religion.
Murder, stealing, lying, cheating etc.
Right. I really needed to go every Sunday to have my moral compass re-aligned.
Oh wait, no I didn't! I was raised in the absence of formal religion (except for that daily prayer they used to allow in public schools), never taken to church, and to my recollection never explicitly told that killing someone is wrong.
But here's the funny thing... even though I have no religious imperative, I still live by these "morals" better than many who claim to follow the religions which teach them.
The worst are those who violate many of these morals, but make a show of going to church every Sunday, pay the tithe, confess their sins, etc... as if it gives them a pass for ignoring their religious commandments the rest of the week. That's the most dangerous flaw of religion, that even if you screw over people royally now, you can still be forgiven in the afterlife; and that those you've sinned against, may also be compensated in turn.
Another poster mentioned Robert J. Sawyer's Neanderthal Parallax trilogy in the context of EM fields stimulating religious experience, here's a part from the first book, the Hugo-winning Hominids, explaining why the completely atheistic Neanderthals came to have the same morals without religious "guidance":
"But where do those standards [morals] come from?"
"From... from our conviction that there is no life after death! That is why your belief troubles me; I see it now. Our assertion is straightforward, and congruent with all observed fact: a person's life is completely finished at death; there is no possibility of reconciling with them, or making amends with them after they are gone, and no possibility that, because they lived a moral life, they are now in paradise, with the cares of this existence forgotten.
[...]
"Do you not see? If I wrong someone--if I say something mean to them, or, I do not know, perhaps take something that belongs to them--under your worldview I can console myself with the knowledge that, after they are dead, they can still be contacted; amends can be made. But in my worldview, once a person is gone--which could happen for any of us at any moment, through accident or heart attack or so on--then you who did the wrong must live knowing that that person's entire existence ended without you ever having made peace with him or her."
This passage doesn't explain how more heinous crimes like murder came to be considered bad, but since it's actually a central plot point in the story I won't spoil it.
The Vatican doesn't even have as much money as minor movie studio, just a lot of old stuff that frankly isn't worth very much.
The Vatican itself is estimated to have assets of between $1.5 to $15 billion.
If you consider the Vatican to be the head of a multinational corporation, and include all worldwide assets of the Roman Catholic Church, some estimate they have close to $100 BILLION in money, property and other assets. And think how much of that is tax-free.
The 2 things that fail on computers are hard disks and fans. I wonder if a really low power cpu could run without sucking dust in if a cpu cooling fan wasn't needed much.
Smartphones fit this bill, as will the iPad and other next-generation "computer-lite" tablets.
I work mostly on OS X and this so-called feature annoys me to no end. I do not know the size of my files anymore, I have to go to the terminal just to know the size of a file (bash hasn't been polluted by this feature).
I've been using computers for 20+ years and I do _not_ want to change how I think file sizes, especially since I feel that base 10 is the wrong way to count.
And this is precisely the attitude that keeps America using the imperial system. Not that you're necessarily American yourself, but it's that attitude and unwillingness to change to something "better" simply because you've used a different system all your life.
I submitted the original Slashdot story about Snow Leopard changing the prefix definitions, and my position (though not explicitly stated in that story) is that it was a mistake by computer science to have co-opted the kilo-, mega- etc prefixes for binary measurements. It was convenient for them at the time to avoid creating new prefixes, and it was wrong for them to do so, so this is now being corrected. That this happened to be spearheaded by hard drive marketing is incidental.
What's unfortunate is that for the next few years at least, there will be inconsistency as some OSes use the decimal prefix system while others continue using the binary one. There will be some confusion in the market place, but it's unlikely any disaster will occur because of it (like mixing imperial and metric units on one of the Mars probes).
I think this says it best - http://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?db=comics&id=1777
Wait, you mean there's something that isn't covered by an xkcd comic!?
We make and manage information.
Unless it's pure science, information and knowledge aren't worth much without some practical application. Traditionally, this resulted in a manufactured product--faster hard drive, better LED lights, improved engines, a new medicine.
More recently, products are a little less tangible--software, applications, entertainment.
Funny thing is, information is easier to copy than physical products. If the only thing you produce other than military hardware is "information" (i.e. intellectual property) and you're indebted to a country who doesn't care at all about your laws protecting IP, *and* you've outsourced most of your manufacturing, *and* the IP driving that is available to local workers who may or may not steal it to get a payout higher than the little you're paying them, you don't have a very rosy future.
On the other hand, it also can't add back what Canon took out. One of the best photos I ever took (IMHO) was taken with the Color Accent mode accidentally turned on in my Canon A540. This feature was removed in the A570 that replaced it. It seems like trivial functionality to put back in, but CHDK can't.
I prefer writing yyyy-mm-dd, especially for anything programming-related.
In regular writing, I'm fine with seeing dd-mm-yyyy. mmm dd, yyyy is still okay since there's no ambiguity about what which the day and month are, but this leads to the laziness that results in....
mm-dd-yyyy or mm/dd/yyyy. Which are about the stupidest written conventions I've ever come across. Along with imperial measurements, why is the US hell-bent on foisting backwards systems on the rest of the world?