Archive for September, 2009

My BrainHex

Tuesday, September 8th, 2009

A post on Indigo Static talks about the BrainHex test. It seems interesting. It genuinely seems to try to categorize what sort of gamer you are.

Here’s my results:

Your BrainHex Class is Mastermind.

Your BrainHex Sub-Class is Mastermind-Achiever.

You like solving puzzles and devising strategies as well as collecting anything you can collect or doing everything you possibly can.

Each BrainHex Class also has an Exception, which describes what you dislike about playing games. Your Exceptions are:

ยป No Mercy: You rarely if ever care about hurting other players’ feelings – mercy is for the weak!

Learn more about your classes and exceptions at BrainHex.com.

Your scores for each of the classes in this test were as follows:

Mastermind: 20
Achiever: 15
Survivor: 11
Daredevil: 9
Seeker: 8
Conqueror: 6
Socialiser: 1

Hahaha! No mercy!

I guess the survey interpreted my disdain for playing with unknown people over the net as me being merciless. Actually, I like playing multiplayer, only if they are in the same room. I have hosted Wii parties at home when my parents are out a few times a few times back and they were a blast! You only need Wii Sports, Wii play and 2 sets of controllers. I have not yet had PS3 parties, but I can imagine a bunch of us having mini Street Fighter tournaments for both Street Fighter 4 and Street Fighter 2 HD Remix. That would be cool as well.

I guess that merciless remark about me is true. Even when same-room multiplayer gaming, I don’t give any quarter to my opponent. It’s not that I am out to humiliate them. I don’t want them to give me any quarter as well. It’s a bit lame to win because your opponent gave you chances. Of course, all of us aren’t experts in the games we play so it is somewhat of a level playing field.

Yes, I love to solve puzzles. Maybe that’s why I am such an RPG buff. I don’t know about the “devising strategies” part. I am absolute sh*t in RTS games, except maybe Red Alert 2. But I do like empire-building games and trying out ways how to win a boss-fight in RPGs.

I like to do personality tests like these. Of course, it is because I am insecure about my own self. I know myself better than my own parents. I am just curious to see how accurate the test is. The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator personality test was spot on when I took it. It was so accurate about how I feel, it’s unnerving.

This gaming aptitude test seems pretty accurate too. It’s not as precise, because there can be different meanings to certain terms in games, like my example above about multiplayer which can be with friends or over the Internet, usually using a service. It’s quite cool. If you like to play games, do try it out!

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Posted in Ramblings | 8 Comments »

Of Megabytes And Mebibytes

Friday, September 4th, 2009

Snow Leopard has been released! Whoopedoo! But I got no Mac to play with right now. Not counting my Dell Mini 9 of course..

One of reported goodness that comes out from changing the species of OS X is that the harddisk space is finally displayed correctly. You buy a 500GB drive, and “500GB” is displayed, instead of “465GB”. What happens to the missing space in the latter, you ask? This happens to be one of the many questions that keeps surfacing on tech forums.

Let’s take that figure, 500GB, as an example. From manufacturer’s point of view, 500GB, or 500 gigabytes, means 500,000,000,000 bytes. Thus, giga- means multiplied by 1,000,000,000. This is what I like to call “human mode”. We give abbreviations to every three zeroes that we see. 1,000 = kilo; 1,000,000 = mega; 1,000,000,000 = giga. We are creatures who live, breathe and sleep in base-10. I’m guessing this is because that particular base is conveniently equivalent to the numeric system. We use 10 symbols to represent numbers, so we think in base-10.

However, computers think in binary, in base-2. Somehow, we also programmed that into our software as well. So in most OSes, a kilo = 1024; a mega = 1024*1024 = 1048576; a giga = 1024*1024*1024 = 1073741824. Thus, taking 500,000,000,000 divided by a computer’s giga, we get 465 gigabytes.

So which one is correct? Are manufacturers screwing us all this time?

My answer: no.

I guess I prefer standard units as defined by a proper governing body, not marketing. I hate it when people use terms such as “HD-Ready”, “Full-HD” or “SATA2″, because there is no such thing. HD format is usually displayed in 720i, 720p, 1080i or 1080p. Any screen capable of displaying this is HD. There is no specification for SATA2, only SATA-150 or SATA-300. Somehow, people have gotten used to thinking that SATA2 is the latter, which is again fundamentally wrong.

The terms “kilo”, “mega” and “giga” are all standard SI-unit prefixes, along with other prefixes shown in this table:

SI_Prefix_Table

Because the SI prefixes strictly represent powers of 10, they should not be used to represent powers of 2. Thus, one kilobit, or 1 kbit, is 1000 bit and not 210 bit = 1024 bit. To alleviate this ambiguity, prefixes for binary multiples have been adopted by the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) for use in information technology.

Thus, the correct SI prefixes for binary numbers are:

SI_Prefix_Table2

That is why, in this case, the space reported by an OS (except Snow Leopard) is wrong and should use “kibi”, “mebi” and “gibi” instead, to properly distinguish itself from the prefixes for powers of 10.

I’m glad that Snow Leopard is at least attempting to get it right. Of course, on the flip side, people are reporting outrageous space savings when moving from Tiger/Leopard to Snow Leopard. I do know that there are savings, but to report space savings of 20GB is a bit too ridiculous. I’m sure engineers at Apple are freaking smart, but they’re not miracle workers.

Apparently, the SI prefix for binary numbers have been set since 1998. The standard has been set more than 10 years ago! Why are Windows still stuck reporting GB as GiB? Is it so difficult to change that behaviour? Or is Microsoft just scared to change, in case the millions of idiots using Windows start a class-action lawsuit?

I just hate discrepancies.

[SI prefixes] && [Prefixes for binary multiples]

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Posted in Hardware, Software | 2 Comments »