> Wait, you're computer savvy enough to know how to buy hardware and OS separately
> and install the OS and get the drivers working, but you're not smart enough to
> burn your browser of choice onto a disk before starting this process?

I am smart enough, I don't know about anyone else, though. I know people who have upgraded to Vista by buying a Retail box for their existing system, and installed that. Or bought a new OS because they lost the OEM restore CDs for their existing system, and it died and needed a reinstall (and lost their only computer for that time).

The simple fact of it is that without a web browser you're basically removing the ability for users to install the OS (be it from OEM restore CD, recovery partition or Retail box copy) and then get instant access to drivers, updates and of course the web browser itself (and a media player, and a messenger client..).

And simply enough, I don't think people should REQUIRE a separate CD for Windows to give it a browser. I don't need it for MacOS X, or Linux.. hell even my mobile phone has a goddamned browser by default.

Let's look at this logically. You buy a laptop from Dell or HP or Asus, and it comes preinstalled with Windows. Dell or HP or Asus have seen fit to include Firefox, Opera, Chrome or even Internet Explorer (as an add-on) so you can get onto the internet right away.

However, when you buy an OEM (with hard disk or motherboard) or retail copy (at Best Buy or so) of Windows, you get just Windows under this new ruling. How do you get out to the internet to download a new web browser like Opera, Firefox or Chrome?

Removing Windows Media Player is fair enough; you can live without a media player built in to the OS. You can go and download any one you choose online, because the OS came with a web browser. Removing tools like email clients, messenger clients etc. is fair enough, because you can go get them with a web browser.

But removing the web browser? It's impractical and requires end users to go through cruel and unusual steps (like finding another PC to download Firefox on, or ordering a copy of Firefox on CD (which you need an internet connection and web browser to do) or going all the way to a PC store to get a copy if they so do them..

Probably what Microsoft will end up doing is bundling OEM/Retail Windows copies with an Internet Explorer CD, or putting it in the "addons" directory of the DVD or something, which kind of defeats the object of the ruling at all, since you're required to install it to get any other web browser anyway..

Hasn't KDE had this feature since the dark ages? :D

> No, it's the OS developers who are guilty of incorrectly displaying
> Mebi/Gibi/Bytes as Mega/Giga/Bytes.

No, it's not, because hard disks sizes have NOT been around since before than the most common operating systems and software environments (such as DOS etc. popping up and calculating disk size divided by 1024) AND the relatively new (2005-2008) IEC standards for specifying binary measurement prefixes.

The article explains it well enough; when your disk was 20MB, the extra few hundred bytes did not matter.

When your disk is "200GB" and every OS written before 2 years ago says "195GB", and this cannot be put down to the old adage of "well, formatted capacity is less than disk capacity" bullshit excuse (not even the worst filesystem ever would drop that much of of the disk space) or anything else but boldfaced cheek.

Of course your view of it is entirely revisionist, in that somehow a special new naming methodology that hadn't been standardized is NOW used which exonerates them for all the mislabeling in the past.

> Right. Fault lies with the OS, not the hard drive. The only thing that's really
> measured in binary bytes these days is memory space. Everything else is measured
> decimally. Do you complain that network speeds are measured in decimal bytes?

Network speeds are defined in decimal - 100Mbit is 100,000,000 bits. This is defined by the amount of bandwidth available and the encoding on the wire.

Hard disk manufacturers were expected to specify the disk size in terms of how you will see this size in the applications you're meant to use it, if they are marketing to people who are using these applications. It's a simple matter of applied marketing; but the hard disk manufacturers were sued, and settled exactly because they could not hide behind "engineering" to explain why the advertised values differed, and they could not explain WHY they did not clarify it on the packaging or specification sheets of the products.

Using "engineering" and "maths" in order to justify that the disk actually WAS "100GB" in reality and not "97GiB but marked as GB as every app made since disks were used and it's not our fault the software designed in the last 25 years was ALL buggy" - that's facetious at best. You cannot expect the unwashed public to know anything about the difference. In this, the hard disk manufacturers put their foot in it which is why they settled. They should have changed the packaging, specifications and lobbied software developers to reflect the reality, and it took a class-action lawsuit to make the do it.

It is the disk maker's responsibility to make sure the products are well labeled and not marketed in a misleading way. The status quo was, operating systems listed GiB as GB for a very very long time, and the hard disk manufacturers exploited that fact by labeling their disks as GB and making excuses like "formatted capacity is lower". They did not say "Windows counts its disk sizes differently than the way we calculate it". They did not list it in GiB and GB to clarify the difference. They just kept the biggest number and got caught out.

Hence, big fat lie.

http://apcmag.com/seagate_settles_class_action_cash_back_over_misleading_hard_drive_capacities.htm

All manufacturers clearly state the units they are using NOW, however none of them lists BOTH sizes and none of them clearly state what the relationship this might be to the sizes listed in popular operating systems.

Windows until Vista and 7 happily displayed size/some-base-2-number as Gigabytes, which always meant the disk you bought that was "100GB" actually turned out to be "98GB" or so. Hard disk manufacturers are absolutely guilty of manipulating their product marketing such that you buy one size disk and get it home to reveal it's lower than expected.

Imagine if you clicked Properties on a folder and found it was "100GB" in Windows. You might go out and buy a 100GB disk to back it up. Obviously this would never have worked and you'd be a few files short of backing it up totally. Who would have known, if not an engineer or technician or software developer or worked in professional IT support?

USB 3.0 is going to suffer the same thing because of the 8b10 encoding (which means that the bandwidth is actually 4/5ths of the speed it says on the box, even before packet header overhead; http://articles.techrepublic.com.com/5100-10878_11-1056753.html)

I've seen some articles on, for instance, the Seagate website which explain that the value is the "fastest speed at which the drive can send data across the cable (or bus) from the drive buffer" which is not an outright lie, but does move into the realms of blurring and misinformation;

http://www.seagate.com/ww/v/index.jsp?locale=en-US&name=External_Drive_Troubleshooter_-_Performance_Issues_-_My_drive_is_slow&vgnextoid=33434a3cdde5c010VgnVCM100000dd04090aRCRD

Overclocking by 1-5% gives you how much of a performance benefit, really? You're far more likely to get a decent speed increase with simply better drivers and more efficiently written games.

For the car analogy; just because your car's RPM meter goes up to 10000, doesn't mean you should hammer it at that constantly, or even ever. A racing driver would never keep his car running at full tilt, nor even try and get there, because the simple fact is that when you do the whole thing becomes unstable and the engine generally starts to burn. Formula 1 car engines are put through rigorous testing to make sure they can actually perform at the performance level they need to, but once they meet that level, they push it to see when it will die. Then they work out the safe level for it to be at and the driver knows this exactly.

What you never see, though, is the results of this, neither for the car engine (trade secret) or the results from the tests at the fab. So YOU have no clue whatsoever what that safe limit really is.

Being in the electronics industry I fully understand WHY these chips go through bin sorts and so on, and WHY you shouldn't actually do anything with them. A good example is the chips Apple used in their late-model PowerBooks. The MPC7447A chip they were using NEVER shipped at higher than a 1.4GHz clock speed. Freescale actually specially sorted out chips which would run at 20% greater voltage and 1.66GHz at the cost of only being specified for a 5 year (standard 10-year) running life at a junction temperature of 85C (standard 105C). They're laser marked on the die, still, as 1.4GHz chips.. this is a case where overclocking is okay, in fact even sanctioned. But they draw a ton more power, generate a ridiculous amount of extra heat, and require a cooling system to match. That's the price of 233MHz extra processor performance.. barely 10% in the real world.

Get a CPU or GPU that says "1.0GHz" on it, and yes, it may run at 1.1GHz with a bit of tweaking, it may even run at 1.5GHz if you are clever with cooling. It may be that your graphics card is one of the lucky ones that can take a good 5% or even 10% clock speed increase, or your RAM may overclock FAR past the JEDEC specs it was designed to meet (however a vast majority of RAM is designed to meet it to within very strict limits, to the point that they use older processes and cheaper production techniques and get it within 1% tolerance, IF THAT - because this is exactly what the JEDEC standard says it has to be). But there is a chance your chip has been validated and tested at that clock speed and voltage, and badged at that clock speed and voltage, for the simple reason that it will not be reliable at anything higher, confirmed by the burn-in at the fab.

Since you simply cannot tell what the actual tolerance is (and those "render something real fast until it starts corrupting the display" tests actually serve to damage the chip), it may well be that your chip could be only capable of running at 0.5% past it's rated value, it could be the lucky 10% chip. You're taking a big risk in even trying, and in the end, getting half a frame per second out of some game isn't worth losing a $300 graphics card over. So you want $3 extra bang? $30 extra bang? Come on..

As for what computer I own; it's a stock Asus P4P-800 which is perfectly good for overclocking, a Pentium 4 HT 2.4GHz which is fine at 2.4GHz, and an ATI Radeon X800 with OverDrive turned *off*. I also have a VIA EPIA, PowerPC G4 (not a Mac, just a board with a G4 in it), PowerPC MPC8641D (which has all the switches to let me configure the entire gamut of bus ratios and core clock speed), a bunch of other embedded chips (PPC, ARM) and a Vaio laptop. I've never had a Mac in my life..

People also would do well to note that, just like hard disk sizes, wireless speeds are a big fat lie.

http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/wireless/2003/08/08/wireless_throughput.html

You made it this far without needing SSH from your phone, what makes today any different?

What's wrong with your laptop, which you obviously use right now for this? The limitations are going to be the same.. you need to have it with you to do anything, anyway.

Also, do you really want to be on-call 24/7 just because you have your phone with you, and no possible excuse? This is the start of your availability being abused at work, and that's the end of it. I don't think it's stupid to want to be able to legitimately claim I'm on vacation or it's a weekend and I didn't bring my laptop with me so it'll have to wait until Monday.

Oh. This is all of course if your internet access via the 3G network isn't restricted through god knows how many routers, filters and .. proxies..

The ability to run your favourite app on your phone may not be so cool if you need to find a WiFi hotspot to do it on (not that those won't be similarly restricted in public places, either). That is of course assuming that Debian has any access to the 3G modem to actually connect out without wifi.. good luck with that.

I really don't think it is "cool" at all that running real applications you use in real life on a PHONE, and it certainly doesn't make Android "cooler" than the iPhone (or any other phone) just because it can.. There is a point when running Linux on yet something else gets really boring. It got boring with NetBSD, too.

Thousands of poorly maintained, 3 year old apps, too! :)

I can think of one advantage over iPhone; no apps like iFart in the repositories. It will only be a matter of time though.

Is there really anything cool about Debian anymore, unless you're a 57 year old hippie with a beard that would make Brian Blessed jealous?

There are lots of reasons I'd like to run Linux on a phone. But a busybox and apt-get on a phone? Come on.

I wonder if he has tried NOT overclocking the card or changing the fan speed? :D

Overclocking is the stupidest, stupidest thing people can do on modern hardware. By designing a graphics card or CPU that overclocks you're pandering to the statistics freaks who want to get that extra 1% performance increase and therefore "more bang for their buck".

What a f**king ridiculous market. Processors and graphics chips go through sorts and testing for a good reason; they're not rated to go any higher because there is a very good chance they WON'T. Depending on the exact chip you get, at which time in production it was made, and the quality of the PCB it's soldered to (especially if you're overclocking a memory bus, which also relies on the quality of the memory) every card can and will be WILDLY different. Sometimes overclocking by 20MHz is going to completely screw things even though some guy said he got it past 200MHz on some review site.

Simply stop doing it and guess what, the chip won't overheat, and the graphics card will get broadly the same performance give or take a frame per second in some game that your monitor is not fast enough to even display anyway :)

Sometimes you have to put down your money, be happy with what you've got, and enjoy your 1-year statutory warranty which clicking ANY of those overclocking buttons automatically voids.

Well, you boot Android, get Debian on it and the video we're treated to is... ... running apt-get to drag down packages.

Am I the only one who thinks this is totally pointless?

Yes, by spreading the word and asking people to go look into fixes we crashed the bug tracker so nobody doing kernel development can file new bugs or new bug fixes for anything else today.

Awesome plan. Really awesome.

Sorry but I don't want to pay $99 a year for bookmark syncing when Foxmarks is free. And my GMail account is free. Some services just aren't something I really feel I should be paying money to get. Google is going for the big "digital life and data storage" angle here, a browser, email, search, contacts, documents, cloud computing etc. If I can use my mail, search history, documents anywhere I want on the web, it's a pain in the ass not to be able to take bookmarks around automatically.

Google Browser Sync was such an awesome tool and consolidated everything I did on a computer that I wanted back up along with all the others. And now, it's gone. I really don't care if they were searching my bookmarks or flagging it for ads or so, it was USEFUL.

As for MacOS, I wouldn't run a Mac even if you paid for it and the subscription to MobileMe. The prospect of updating apps to get new features requiring a new OS every 18 months is just.. ridiculous. While Microsoft may well screw Windows up more and more every time they release, at least if you build something these days it pretty much runs on Vista/XP/2000 without too many problems (at the cost of maybe putting the .NET 3.5 distro and Windows Installer 4.0 packages into your installers...)

Two problems with that

1) Google Talk client doesn't support AIM (even though the web version does, sigh) or the video chat. That means you wouldn't use the Google Talk client as much as you might want to

2) Pidgin crashes a fucking hell of a lot. I've never used a version that didn't blow up on exit, or nuke when a file is downloaded, or if someone messages you, or if you enable ANY plugin at all. The quality of the project is absolutely down there in the sewers, and the same bugs affect both the Linux AND Windows builds exactly the same way.

So, neither of them are any good for anything.