I can't remember if I posted this, but my girlfriend got me a PSP for our six months haha.
Did you slap a custom firmware on it yet? :3
Spec, I <3 your avatar.
Thankie!
All I've been playing on my 360 recently is Sonic the Hedgehog '06
What do you think of it? I've heard good and bad about it...mostly bad.
Oh yeah, speaking of my 360, the video thingy broke. I suppose it was overdue; I've had it for more than a year and this is the first trouble its ever given me.
Ouch.
That's the famous Red Ring of Death, isn't it?
Hope you can get that fixed soon. Maybe you'll get lucky and get a replacement with the new architecture (and the lovely 65nm Xenon).
That is so ironic coming from an American. That made me laugh very hard spec. I really have to wonder why the US hasn't smartened up and switched to metric already, there are only what, 3 countries in the world not using the metric system?
It'd be a very hard changeover. Granted, a lot of things have been in place for years to facilitate the change if need-be (for example, cars with both miles per hour and kilometers per hour on the speedometer).
The biggest hurdle the people, as with anything else. Even with people around my age, who had been taught the metric system in school, would have a problem with it because everything would suddenly turn upside down. As someone who's traveled a fair amount (it's a 5.5 hour drive to my parent's house and I've gone back and forth several times...not to mention the regular hour trips to visit pyroko and Jinxie when I lived in Ohio) I'm used to thinking of long distances as miles. Not because they make more sense, per se, but because everything here is measured in miles. When you print directions on Google Maps, MapQuest, or whatever, it reports the distance in miles. When you travel, you look at the odometer on your car which, here, is given in miles. When you're approaching an exit on a freeway it gives the distance to the next exit in miles. When you're tracking where you are on the highway, there are signs every tenth of a mile. Basically, in every single instance where you'd think of a kilometer, I'd think in a mile, simply because it's impractical to do it any other way.
Another giant hurdle would be cost. You know all of those signs that I mentioned? Mile markers, highway signs, signs telling you how far to go to the next rest stop, everything. All of that would have to be completely replaced. For an effective changeover it would all have to be done very quickly at great cost to the government (in other words, taxpayers). There would also be great corporate expense as companies changed all of their internal documentation and the like to reflect metric measurements if they haven't done so in the past.
To elaborate on one of my previous points, you really can't compare it to a currency changeover. Currency changes are not quite as psychologically set as distance changes are. I could move to the UK right now and I guarantee that the move to metric would screw me up more than a change in currency. Also, keep in mind that the United States is a hell of a lot bigger than any of the European countries. We have a humongous web of roads and highways that would all require a great deal of work. I don't really know enough about Canada to compare the experience with it, but perhaps this will make you see my point a bit more:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gimli_GliderSoon after Canada changed to the metric system, a commercial airplane was loaded with an insufficient amount of fuel for its flight. Had the pilot not been an experienced glider pilot with enough skill to get the huge Boeing to the ground safely, 69 people would have been likely been dead due to the switch. Given that a
125 million dollar spacecraft was already hosed by unit conversion issues -- with rocket scientists at the helm of the project, no doubt -- it's not a stretch to think that this could happen again. Many times.
Just something to think about.
I just wish that ISO or IEEE or whoever has dominion over this issue would issue something to try to get everything on track in some system that makes more sense.
As shown
here, the binary prefixes were standardized back in January 1999 by the IEC. Additionally, those prefixes are also backed by the likes of IEEE, CIPM, and NIST, and is set to become a European standard.
To end on a humorous note (taken from the "binary prefix" Wikipedia article that I linked to), Western Digital got the last word in when one of their customers sued them for being "misleading" about the storage capacity of their drives (which is probably why you see "capacity based on 750,000,000,000 bytes" or something similar on the packaging of hard drives now). They were, as companies generally are due to legal costs, basically forced to settle. On the footnote of the settlement, they wrote: "Apparently, Plaintiff believes that he could sue an egg company for fraud for labeling a carton of 12 eggs a “dozen,” because some bakers would view a “dozen” as including 13 items."
For the full document showing the details of the settlement, go here:
http://www.wdc.com/settlement/docs/document20.htm. It's actually a good read. Western Digital clearly put their most sarcastic lawyers on the case for that one -- good for them.
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