On the other hand, L/100km is very useful for figuring what you need to arrive at a given destination. Driving somewhere that's 250 km away in a car that uses 10 L/100 km? You'll need 25 L of fuel for that. With gas in the US at roughly $1/L, you'll know it costs $25 to drive there. You release about 2.5 kg of CO2 per L, so the trip dumps about 60 some kg of CO2 in the gas powered car.

But what decision are you going to make based on that figure? Are you really going to choose whether to take a trip based on the gas cost? (I suppose you might want to figure drive cost vs air or something like that.)

Whereas "I estimate I have 3 gallons left in my tank, can I make it 90 miles" is something I compute many times each longish car trip.

Interestingly, I prefer cm/mm over inches and feet over meters; have no preference with gallons/qts vs. liters; prefer ml over fluid ounces, prefer grams over ounces but pounds over kg. How is THAT for confused.

Heh, I'm similar except with a different list: inches over cm and feet over meters; liters over gallons/qts/fl oz; indifferent about pounds vs kg; prefer Fahrenheit over Celsius.

redneck detected. mpg isn't clear about efficiency

But who cares? How often do you really compare about the efficiency? About the only time I would was if I was contemplating buying a new car and trying to figure out if it would be worth it. And how often do you do that, vs when driving around figuring out how far you can go on the current tank? Because for me it's a ratio of about 1 time to 100...

Abbreviation from SystÃfme international des unitÃf©s (I may be missing an 'e' or an accent, somewhere)

Don't worry, so is Slashcode.

No, zero Celsius is "too damn cold", zero Fahrenheit is HOLY SHIT HOW CAN A HUMAN BEING LIVE HERE.

I'm biased because of my location (Wisconsin), but part of the reason that I like that quote is because it matches my own temperature opinions so closely. By my scale, down to about 10F it's really easy to dress appropriately and be reasonably comfortable, and single digits Fahrenheit is where I really start wishing it was warmer. On the other end of the spectrum, I can deal reasonably well up to mid-80s, and 90 is where I really start wishing it was cooler. And ~60 is about perfect. :-)

Really though, places that regularly see 100 F, I have the same reaction to your reaction to 0 F. I really don't understand how someone would voluntarily live in Texas or Arizona or whatever. (And if you say "it's a dry heat" I hope to god someone mods you down as literally flamebait. :-))

Are there many different speed limits in US?

Yeah. 25, 30, 35, 45, 55, 65, and 70 are all extremely common in my experience. 15 and 20 are common for fairly special cases (e.g. school zones or shopping mall access roads), you occasionally see 40 or 50, and other parts of the country have interstate speed limits that are 75 or even 85.

We have a weird situation here in the UK. All fuel is sold by the litre - but no one knows what litres per 100km means or how the cost of a litre of gas will affect them. We all refer to MPG and we know that a gallon is about 4.5x the cost of a litre (yes, our gallons have more litres than yours).

So I tend to be pretty ambivalent about metric vs imperial. I would vaguely prefer if everything switched to metric, but I also don't think that it would make much of a difference at all in day-to-day life. Cooking is about the one time I care about the imperial system. (How many tsp are in a tbsp again?)

But I would posit that one reason that L/100km may not have taken off is because that's a stupid way to measure fuel efficiency.

The times I'd care about my fuel efficiency are (1) when I'm choosing whether to buy a new car and what to get and (2) when I'm on the road and want to know whether I have enough fuel to get me to some future waypoint of interest (e.g. "can I get past the Mobil stations on the Indiana turnpike that are run by a bunch of greedy opportunist bastards and across the border to Ohio where prices drop substantially, or should I fill up now?"). Volume-per-distance is the better way to measure efficiency for the first purpose, as if one car's L/100km measure is twice another's then it'll make me pay twice as much for gas.

But for the second purpose you really want distance-per-volume, so you can look at your gas gauge, estimate how many gallons are left, then multiply. Easy peasy. With volume-per-distance it becomes much more awkward. And #2 happens way more than #1. How often do you buy a new car?

It's 200K to Seattle? We'll, we're averaging 100 kph so we'll be there in a couple of hours.

Actually I think driving is one place where miles actually has a tiny advantage.

Suppose you're going 60 mph. That's a mile each minute, which is really easy to work with. Destination 13 miles away? That's 13 minutes. But if you're going 100 km/h and your destination is 20 km away, now you have to do more actual math: divide 100 [km/h] by 20 [km] to get 5 [1/h], then divide 60 [min/hr] by 5 [1/h] to get 12 [min].

It's not hard, but really nothing in this unit conversion stuff is.

Even at 70 or 75 mph, the 1 mile/minute rule can be adjusted a bit. 13 miles away? Well, that's a bit less than 13 minutes. You do still have to do some calculations to get a more accurate answer, but a rough estimate can be arrived at nearly immediately. And even 60 mph is reasonably common -- many non-interstate highways have a 55mph speed limit, as do most interstates in urban areas. Also even on the interstates, if are going 70 mph but stop for an average of 5 minutes each hour, you get a lot closer to 1 mi/min. (That comes out to 64.1 mph on average.)

OK, I am giving a bit of a strawman. 75mph is 120km/h, which is very nicely 2 km/min, so there you'd just divide the destination distance by 2. At 70mph, you'd divide by 2 then add in a fudge factor, just like I subtract a fudge factor.)

This is made possible of course by the coincidence that 60 mph happens to be in the ballpark of highway speeds and there are 60 minutes in an hour, not because of any actual unit conversions or anything.

(Actually know I wonder what you'd get if you took the average speed limit of the entire interstate system weighted by traffic amount.)

I did see an awesome comment here on /. on an earlier story on the topic. It was something like:

"Fahrenheit is a wonderfully human temperature scale: 0 degrees is too damn cold, and 100 degrees is too damn hot."

I actually pretty much agree with this; Fahrenheit much more nicely covers the range of temperatures that a lot of places experience than does Celsius. The much-vaunted pegging of the Celcius scale at the melting and boiling points of water doesn't really matter one iota in day-to-day life; when I want to make pasta, I don't put a thermometer in the pot of water and say "yup, it's at 100 degC now, must be boiling; I just wait until it's bubbly."

Distributing software to end users isn't a core purpose of Google Code; the download functionality (which could be, and often was, used for that purpose) wasn't, as I understand it, provided for that purpose, but provided mostly as an alternative to using source control tools to get source code bundles.

It's possible that's what they were thinking (and maybe even said) but it sure doesn't come out from the design of the site, which I've always thought has been well-geared toward the end users. There's a consistent landing page with consistent links to the downloads, documentation, and news groups. Of the "hey, stick your OSS projects here!" sites, Google Code has been the one that I most like to use as an end user.

Amusingly, the biggest counterpoint was that if you want to offer downloads you should probably use google code which is much more user (rather than programmer) friendly.

That's pretty much my view too.

The way I looked at things was that Google Code and SourceForge are a lot more centered around what an end user would want to see (either someone who has no idea about version control and coding, or for a library or something like that even a programmer but who just wants to grab a library to use) while GitHub is a lot more centered around what developers who are actually working on a project want to see.

I mean, just think about what the landing page is: on Google Code you get a page with a description of the project and clear, standardized links to the downloads and documentation, and you have to follow a couple (still standardized) links before you're at the code. On GitHub, pretty much the most prominent thing you see when you go to a project page is the directory listing; it even appears above whatever README is present (if any).

Dropping support for a quick and easy download from the former is a lot more baffling of a move than dropping it from the latter.

Oh, I know. Let me try to recap my argument, because I suspect we're not actually disagreeing all that much. :-)

The conversation started with Holi saying "Find a console that isn't locked down that people actually want then come back with your whining" and you responding with "PC", and then the discussion changed to DRM on the PC.

My argument is that DRM is still a significant factor on the PC. Sure, the situation is better than it is on consoles both because there are some DRM-free games and because you can even do that in the first place if you want, but few people in my experience are willing to actually forgo games with DRM. And in some sense I would say that's DRM is rather closer to the rule than the exception, and I suspect this post by you was more focusing on the exceptions.

It's pretty much just that focus that I objected to rather than the fact that PCs are a better ecosystem.

How do you expect a 32-bit program with no knowledge of 64-bit processors to be able to tell the OS to not give it the full 4 GB, because the developer wasn't careful?

That happens by default on Windows. By default, programs only get 2GB of address space, and Windows "uses" (just doesn't give out, really) the other 2GB.

If a programmer thinks they're careful, they opt into the larger address space by setting the IMAGE_FILE_LARGE_ADDRESS_AWARE flag in their PE header (usually by passing a linker flag).

So now we can get to your question, and there are two answers:

1) Even if a program doesn't have knowledge of 64-bit Windows, they can still get some benefit from setting that flag: on a 32-bit Windows system configured to support it, they'll get a 3GB address space instead of 2GB.

2) If a program has no knowledge about the large-address-aware flag at all, then they "tell the OS to not give it the full 4 GB" by doing nothing.

In Firefox's case, Mozilla has set this flag:

C:\Program Files (x86)\Mozilla Firefox>dumpbin /headers firefox.exe
...
FILE HEADER VALUES
            14C machine (x86)
...
            122 characteristics
                  Executable
                  Application can handle large (>2GB) addresses <--
                  32 bit word machine
...

(You could probably actually modify the Firefox executable to unset that flag and stop it from using above 2GB of user memory, but I'm not sure what would happen or if there are other mechanisms that can overrule it or whatever.)

The direction in which I take this line of discussion depends on what fraction of the total audience a particular game needs before it's considered successful.

Also, I don't really care what the answer to this question is. I'm not looking at things from the point of view of the game developer and trying to argue that it makes sense for publishers to include DRM or not include DRM or whatever; I'm looking at things from the point of view of the gamer, who has to decide between supporting DRM-ed products or going without games they probably want.

Or do you claim that someone is likely to browse through GOG and see absolutely no worthwhile games?

Absolutely not.

What I mean is the following: if you were to ask everyone who plays PC games (maybe exclude the guy who just dabbles in solitaire in his spare time) what their favorites are and what games they haven't played that they would most like to, I strongly suspect that almost all of those lists will have games that are only available with DRM.

It doesn't have to be the same game between different people: maybe I put Portal on my list, you put HL2 on your list, someone else puts Mass Effect on their list. But there will be very few lists consisting entirely of games available DRM-free.

Sticking to DRM-free games will cause you to miss out on a ton of good stuff. If it's a strong principle to avoid DRM then it's worth it, but for most people that's not the case.