That the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were dropped in order to end the second world war, doesn't mean they didn't had disastrous results. In fact, that was the whole point of the operation, to force Japan into surrender by causing extreme devastation. I think it is a valid question to ask if the millions of innocent citizens spanning multiple generations who lost their lives or were severly harmed by these actions justify the ending of a war.
And of course, there is the question of necessity. It's plausible to assume the war would have stopped without nuclear attacks. It's extremely plausible the war would have stopped after the first nuclear attack on Hiroshima, so surely the second atomic bomb dropped on Nagasaki was gratuitous at best.
Points one and two hold no relevance for consumers, that are problems for manufacturers and vendors. You would say it would result in point number 3 however, a higher price for consumers to pay. But are 6 monitors actually cheaper than one large television? It depends of course on what you will purchase, but you pay $300 for a small monitor, that means you get a budget of $1800 to pick a large television. I'm sure you can get something nice for that.
So we remain with point 4. Which is what I am asking: is it actually better to have a higher resolution when that means there will be bars running through your screen? My gut feeling says "no".
Is the increased resolution of 6 screens really that much of an improvement over one large Full HD television, that the fact there are lines running right through your vision is acceptable? I really doubt that.
Most roads are already quite curvy in Europe and I'm pretty sure new roads are constructed in the same manner to encourage lower driving speeds. Straight lines make people want to speed, lots of turns and twists make people want to break, so maybe making all your roads as straight as possible and thus creating grid-like layouts isn't such a good idea after all.
A side effect of less straight roads could also be a decline in traffic jams, because curved lines are longer than straight ones and thus can hold more cars.
The A4 CPU is already in the iPad, so you could have been familiar with it. It's basically a "system on a chip", like the SnapDragon, designed and developed by Apple themselves. It's basically a Cortex-A8 CPU core combined with a PowerVR SGX GPU in one device.
But if the entire Earth would be swallowed by a black hole at once, would we even notice it? I'm sure there would be quite a difference when viewed from outside of the black hole, but when you're inside, wouldn't everything be exactly the same, relatively speaking?
Obviously making your screen the touch surface will never work, for exactly the reason you give. But that doesn't mean that the touch technology itself couldn't work for a desktop computer.
The bandwith of 10 fingers is a lot higher than a mouse with just one pointer and a few buttons. You can potentially transmit a lot more instructions in a lot less time using your hands, if only we figured out a proper way to make it work.
It would be a good idea if the games weren't going to be out of date almost as soon as they're bought. What good is a huge collection of outdated games?
Games don't lose their value over time. Just like movies and books, a great game is simply a great game, even when it has been out for decades.
What do you mean, games and movies don't tell stories? Storytelling is the main driving force behind games nowadays, even on the consoles and even the mainstream ones, and they're often quite complex too.
I'm sure there's a solution for this, as you can rent games from lots of places other than the library, right? Maybe there are special editions of the games which are specially made for rental and not meant for sale or something?
Back in the early '90ies, I got loads of games from the public city library in my home town. It was especially great for adventure games, because they have a limited replay value anyway. And my library got all the CD-ROM versions, which meant you could get full speech on games like Day of the Tentacle, which was awesome of course.
What the hell does the way semiconductors work have to do with how you represent data to users?
People prefer to work with base-10 numbers. That's why the metric system is used by the entire civilized world. So for the sake of usability and to be consistent with other units people are familiair with, working with base-10 is the only option that makes any sense.
So what if things internally are kept in a base-2 system or otherwise? It's not like we're looking at raw CPU instructions when using our computers or something. The user interface is the perfect place to translate all values into units that the people using the computer can work with.
People know kilo == 1000. Manufacturers of harddisks have been abusing this for a long time. It's a great idea to take away all the confusion and simply present all units in base-10 to the user, so their 500 GB harddisk can actually hold 500 gigabytes, made out of 500000 megabytes, made out of 500000000 kilobytes.
It's a great development for everyone, there are only pros and no real cons, except for the 1% of the world's population who think 1024 makes sense because that's what they're used to. But luckily for them, there is Slashdot.
until prices come down we won't be seeing SSDs replacing HDDs
SSDs wont be as cheap per GB as HDDs for years and years, but that doesn't mean SSDs dont have their application already today. A 80 GB SSD is already quite affordable and holds enough data to be useful for a lot of people. And of course there's always the option to put your large data on HDDs (photos, videos, music, porn, whatever), and run your OS and applications from an SSD to get the benefit of the increased access times.
Most people working in IT in the last 20 years have dealt almost exclusively with x86 CPUs. More to the point, really, most IT people in the last 20 years didn't care about byte order in the first place -- by 1990, not everyone in computing was a programmer, and most of the ones who were didn't care about bitwise operations very often.
The fact that a lot of people didn't need to change the way they ordered bits, doesn't mean this change didn't occur. A lot of people had to change their code dramatically because their application needed to run on platforms with different byteorders. Even if you're always working with x86 instructionsets on your CPU, you still might run into this sort of matter once you want code to run on DSPs or other external hardware with their own dedicated processing unit.
So what? Lots of numbers increase, the units used with them rarely change, and all of those are bits.
So what?! It's a huge deal if your integer suddenly doesn't hold the number of bits that you thought it would hold anymore. Why do you think a lot of software still isn't 64 bit? Because these sort of changes have farreaching consequences to your programming. If it totally didn't matter, it would be a matter of a simple recompile to get your 32-bit software working 64-bit mode, but as you know in practice, things aren't as simple as that.
Just another size increase. Not to mention the fact that by 1990, such a limitation was effectively a DOSism. Anyone on a Unix box didn't give a shit.
Sure it's just a changing number. Just like going from 1024 bytes in a kilobyte to 1000 bytes in a kilobyte is just a changing number. But changing the limit of your filenamesize does change the way you think about your computer and it does affect your workflow quite radically.
Sure it's a DOS-thing to limit people to 8 character filenames, but how is that relevant? It's not like nobody was using DOS in the '90ies.
Another simple size increase that did not change the units in question. And look at that, you just referred to a base-2 gigabyte, since that was the limitation.
Again, it does dramatically change the way you do your work every day. If you know files have a certain size limit, you adapt your workflow to fit that limitation. If the limit changes, the way you do things changes as well. The fact that the units doesn't change in the process, doesn't mean it's a radical change nonetheless.
Odd. The few times I've had to explain the concept to anyone, they understood it immediately. "Computers operate in base-2, and a funny result is that kilobytes, megabytes, etc. end up being 1024."
What sub-human protoplasmic entities do YOU deal with?
Well, it took me half an hour to convince my old boss that "1.5 minutes" in his Excelsheet isn't actually 1 minute and 50 seconds, but one minute and 30 seconds. He finally got it when I asked him to enter "1.59" and "2" so that he could see the resulting amount of money changed quite dramatically for just one second of extra work, but I doubt he ever really grasped the root of the problem.
The problem is not that other browsers implement their own standards. The problem is that Microsoft didn't implement the actual standards. Sure, Webkit creates their own "--webkit-border-radius" CSS-property, but which property is there for IE to do rounded borders? Nothing. There's a whole list of features which have long been supported in other browsers and could be used to make the web more awesome, but because IE supports none of these, they're holding back the development of the web as a whole.
It's a good thing IE is finally catching up a bit. Of course their implementations of HTML5, CSS3 and SVG will suck and behave in non-standard ways, but at least there will be something to work with.
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.
How is it possible you survived working in IT for over 20 years and not being able to adapt to radical changes? These sort of things happen all the time. One moment you're working from LSB upward, then you're suddenly working from MSB downward. 8 bit changed into 16, into 32 and now in 64. Filenames can't be longer than 8 characters and now they can. A file can't be larger than 4 GB and now it can. And now finally, operating systems are beginning to understand SI units (which we've been using for all sorts of applications for hundreds of years) and *THAT* is a problem?
What's next? Imperial units for us Europeans?
A better comparison would be using metric units in the US, because metrics are based on SI and imperial units are more like the weird way bits and bytes are counted into kilobytes, megabytes etc.
Saying that 1024 is a kilo never made any sense to anyone. I'm really glad we're finally entering an age where computers represent datasizes in units people can understand.
Slashdot Mirror
That the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were dropped in order to end the second world war, doesn't mean they didn't had disastrous results. In fact, that was the whole point of the operation, to force Japan into surrender by causing extreme devastation. I think it is a valid question to ask if the millions of innocent citizens spanning multiple generations who lost their lives or were severly harmed by these actions justify the ending of a war.
And of course, there is the question of necessity. It's plausible to assume the war would have stopped without nuclear attacks. It's extremely plausible the war would have stopped after the first nuclear attack on Hiroshima, so surely the second atomic bomb dropped on Nagasaki was gratuitous at best.
Maybe they'll just skip the prequel trilogy and go straight for ID5 and 6.
Points one and two hold no relevance for consumers, that are problems for manufacturers and vendors. You would say it would result in point number 3 however, a higher price for consumers to pay. But are 6 monitors actually cheaper than one large television? It depends of course on what you will purchase, but you pay $300 for a small monitor, that means you get a budget of $1800 to pick a large television. I'm sure you can get something nice for that.
So we remain with point 4. Which is what I am asking: is it actually better to have a higher resolution when that means there will be bars running through your screen? My gut feeling says "no".
Is the increased resolution of 6 screens really that much of an improvement over one large Full HD television, that the fact there are lines running right through your vision is acceptable? I really doubt that.
Most roads are already quite curvy in Europe and I'm pretty sure new roads are constructed in the same manner to encourage lower driving speeds. Straight lines make people want to speed, lots of turns and twists make people want to break, so maybe making all your roads as straight as possible and thus creating grid-like layouts isn't such a good idea after all.
A side effect of less straight roads could also be a decline in traffic jams, because curved lines are longer than straight ones and thus can hold more cars.
The A4 CPU is already in the iPad, so you could have been familiar with it. It's basically a "system on a chip", like the SnapDragon, designed and developed by Apple themselves. It's basically a Cortex-A8 CPU core combined with a PowerVR SGX GPU in one device.
It runs at 1 GHz, it's pretty powerful for the amount of power it consumes and it looks like this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Ipad-a4.jpg
Yeah, which is actually 4x times the current resolution of 480 x 320, instead of 2x like mentioned in the summary.
Yeah, but everything around us will be equally scrunched down in to the size of something that is relative to our shrinkage, right?
But if the entire Earth would be swallowed by a black hole at once, would we even notice it? I'm sure there would be quite a difference when viewed from outside of the black hole, but when you're inside, wouldn't everything be exactly the same, relatively speaking?
Obviously making your screen the touch surface will never work, for exactly the reason you give. But that doesn't mean that the touch technology itself couldn't work for a desktop computer.
Look at this for example.
You mean like a keyboard?
No, I mean like 10 mouse pointers.
Boner Gaylord Jr
Are we still talking about his child?
At least it's not Boner Gaylord.
His kids will be Gaylords, no matter what he calls 'em.
The bandwith of 10 fingers is a lot higher than a mouse with just one pointer and a few buttons. You can potentially transmit a lot more instructions in a lot less time using your hands, if only we figured out a proper way to make it work.
It would be a good idea if the games weren't going to be out of date almost as soon as they're bought. What good is a huge collection of outdated games?
Games don't lose their value over time. Just like movies and books, a great game is simply a great game, even when it has been out for decades.
What do you mean, games and movies don't tell stories? Storytelling is the main driving force behind games nowadays, even on the consoles and even the mainstream ones, and they're often quite complex too.
I'm sure there's a solution for this, as you can rent games from lots of places other than the library, right? Maybe there are special editions of the games which are specially made for rental and not meant for sale or something?
Back in the early '90ies, I got loads of games from the public city library in my home town. It was especially great for adventure games, because they have a limited replay value anyway. And my library got all the CD-ROM versions, which meant you could get full speech on games like Day of the Tentacle, which was awesome of course.
What the hell does the way semiconductors work have to do with how you represent data to users?
People prefer to work with base-10 numbers. That's why the metric system is used by the entire civilized world. So for the sake of usability and to be consistent with other units people are familiair with, working with base-10 is the only option that makes any sense.
So what if things internally are kept in a base-2 system or otherwise? It's not like we're looking at raw CPU instructions when using our computers or something. The user interface is the perfect place to translate all values into units that the people using the computer can work with.
People know kilo == 1000. Manufacturers of harddisks have been abusing this for a long time. It's a great idea to take away all the confusion and simply present all units in base-10 to the user, so their 500 GB harddisk can actually hold 500 gigabytes, made out of 500000 megabytes, made out of 500000000 kilobytes.
It's a great development for everyone, there are only pros and no real cons, except for the 1% of the world's population who think 1024 makes sense because that's what they're used to. But luckily for them, there is Slashdot.
until prices come down we won't be seeing SSDs replacing HDDs
SSDs wont be as cheap per GB as HDDs for years and years, but that doesn't mean SSDs dont have their application already today. A 80 GB SSD is already quite affordable and holds enough data to be useful for a lot of people. And of course there's always the option to put your large data on HDDs (photos, videos, music, porn, whatever), and run your OS and applications from an SSD to get the benefit of the increased access times.
Most people working in IT in the last 20 years have dealt almost exclusively with x86 CPUs. More to the point, really, most IT people in the last 20 years didn't care about byte order in the first place -- by 1990, not everyone in computing was a programmer, and most of the ones who were didn't care about bitwise operations very often.
The fact that a lot of people didn't need to change the way they ordered bits, doesn't mean this change didn't occur. A lot of people had to change their code dramatically because their application needed to run on platforms with different byteorders. Even if you're always working with x86 instructionsets on your CPU, you still might run into this sort of matter once you want code to run on DSPs or other external hardware with their own dedicated processing unit.
So what? Lots of numbers increase, the units used with them rarely change, and all of those are bits.
So what?! It's a huge deal if your integer suddenly doesn't hold the number of bits that you thought it would hold anymore. Why do you think a lot of software still isn't 64 bit? Because these sort of changes have farreaching consequences to your programming. If it totally didn't matter, it would be a matter of a simple recompile to get your 32-bit software working 64-bit mode, but as you know in practice, things aren't as simple as that.
Just another size increase. Not to mention the fact that by 1990, such a limitation was effectively a DOSism. Anyone on a Unix box didn't give a shit.
Sure it's just a changing number. Just like going from 1024 bytes in a kilobyte to 1000 bytes in a kilobyte is just a changing number. But changing the limit of your filenamesize does change the way you think about your computer and it does affect your workflow quite radically.
Sure it's a DOS-thing to limit people to 8 character filenames, but how is that relevant? It's not like nobody was using DOS in the '90ies.
Another simple size increase that did not change the units in question. And look at that, you just referred to a base-2 gigabyte, since that was the limitation.
Again, it does dramatically change the way you do your work every day. If you know files have a certain size limit, you adapt your workflow to fit that limitation. If the limit changes, the way you do things changes as well. The fact that the units doesn't change in the process, doesn't mean it's a radical change nonetheless.
Odd. The few times I've had to explain the concept to anyone, they understood it immediately. "Computers operate in base-2, and a funny result is that kilobytes, megabytes, etc. end up being 1024." What sub-human protoplasmic entities do YOU deal with?
Well, it took me half an hour to convince my old boss that "1.5 minutes" in his Excelsheet isn't actually 1 minute and 50 seconds, but one minute and 30 seconds. He finally got it when I asked him to enter "1.59" and "2" so that he could see the resulting amount of money changed quite dramatically for just one second of extra work, but I doubt he ever really grasped the root of the problem.
Sure, the imperial system's conversions made sense in the context that they were created
Could you please explain this? How does it makes sense there's 12 inch in a foot and 3 feet in a yard?
The problem is not that other browsers implement their own standards. The problem is that Microsoft didn't implement the actual standards. Sure, Webkit creates their own "--webkit-border-radius" CSS-property, but which property is there for IE to do rounded borders? Nothing. There's a whole list of features which have long been supported in other browsers and could be used to make the web more awesome, but because IE supports none of these, they're holding back the development of the web as a whole.
It's a good thing IE is finally catching up a bit. Of course their implementations of HTML5, CSS3 and SVG will suck and behave in non-standard ways, but at least there will be something to work with.
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.
How is it possible you survived working in IT for over 20 years and not being able to adapt to radical changes? These sort of things happen all the time. One moment you're working from LSB upward, then you're suddenly working from MSB downward. 8 bit changed into 16, into 32 and now in 64. Filenames can't be longer than 8 characters and now they can. A file can't be larger than 4 GB and now it can. And now finally, operating systems are beginning to understand SI units (which we've been using for all sorts of applications for hundreds of years) and *THAT* is a problem?
What's next? Imperial units for us Europeans?
A better comparison would be using metric units in the US, because metrics are based on SI and imperial units are more like the weird way bits and bytes are counted into kilobytes, megabytes etc.
Saying that 1024 is a kilo never made any sense to anyone. I'm really glad we're finally entering an age where computers represent datasizes in units people can understand.