The Imperial system may use a metric shitload of inconsistent conversion factors, but for the units one uses day-to-day it's not hard to remember. All I need to remember are the conversions between inches and feet; feet and yards; ounces and pounds; pounds and stone; pints and gallons. That's just five factors. Also of occasional use is the conversion from gallons of water to pounds weight.
Anything else I have to think about, but that doesn't matter as I rarely need to convert them. This is no harder than having to remember what order to sort the SI prefices pico, nano, micro, milli, kilo, mega etc.
For day-to-day use, I find that the imperial system is superior as I get to use smaller numbers for day-to-day things like my height (6'3" vs 190cm) and weight (21st vs 133kg) for no significant loss of precision. For scientific or engineering use, or for measurements of the very big or very small - basically for measuring stuff that falls outside the caveman scale (mm, or the distance to geo-synchronous orbit, for instance) or needs better than caveman accuracy (if it matters that it's exactly 1905mm rather than 6'3" plus or minus a little bit) - the SI system wins.
a lot of offices I visit use them for envelopes and labels
I don't think I've even *seen* a typewriter in ten years, outside antique/junk shops. Businesses don't print envelopes, they print the destination' address on wahtever they put in the envelope and it shows through a clear window. Labels for other uses get printed a zillion at a time on printer-friendly sheets.
I recently used FreeDOS as a stepping stone to installing Linux. I have a Toshiba Libretto 50CT, and those little bastards have no built in floppy or CD. They *do* have PCMCIA floppy or CD, which are bootable, but only the BIOS recognises them so once the kernel has loaded and run - poof! the device disappears so you can't insert the second disk or load files off the CD or anything else useful.
But because FreeDOS, like MSDOS, uses the BIOS, it *can* read files off floppies, so I created a zip file of a minimal Debian installer plus pkunzip, loadlin and a kernel, used split(1) to break it into floppy-sized chunks, and copied it across like that. Ahhhh, swapping disks 20-odd times! That brings back memories!
Anyway, once all the data was on there and on a little DOS partition, I used loadlin to boot a kernel, load a root disk from a disk image, and then pointed the installer at the files I'd extracted from the recombined zip file.
A (slightly) more detailed account should show up on Linux On Laptops soon.
>>So you're saying this "mud" may actually just be >>Martian rat urine? >That doesn't make any sense, because if there's no >water, then what are the Martian rats drinking in >the first place?
They're drinking petroleum, obviously. Come on, who seriously thought that Monkey-boy's administration would send a rover to Mars if it wasn't for the oil?
The idea that Niue (or however the bloody place is spelt) will have to close because it might have only 500 people left is ridiculous. There are smaller places, and they're viable. Pitcairn, for example, has a population of "less than 50" (source: World Factbook 2002). The people are largely subsistence farmers, with most of the island's revenue coming from the sale of postage stamps.
I used to be scared that the open source software I used would fork, but it hasn't happened to Linux, nor to perl, nor to apache, nor to exim, nor to any of the other tools I use day in and day out. The only forks I've seen in major projects have been when a new version has been released but the old version has continued to have occasional maintenance patches released. And that, if anything, is *better* than what you get with commercial software.
I suppose OpenBSD could be considered a fork, but the effect on its parent has been practically nill - if anything it has benefited by back-porting work done by the paranoids at OpenBSD which simply wasn't happening before the fork.
Broadband users don't generally change their IP that often, so you *are* punishing the shitwit with the open relay. As far as I'm concerned, computer owners are entirely responsible for what their computers do, and if they allow (yes, ALLOW - if you get infested by a winvirus, or run an open relay, YOU are responsible for that happening and YOU are responsible for what the virus or relay does) their machines to be hijacked by spammers, they are as guilty as the spammer is, and should be made Bubba's Prison Fucktoy.
This is bad because the CDs I buy will have turned into mould in a few years time. This is good because if there's no copies of "their" content in existence afte $N years, they won't need their bought politicians to make copyrights last longer again! Next, self-destructing books.
Then change to a proper ISP that actually provides an Internet Service rather than merely letting you use a few select protocols. Surely in the capitalist western utopia market forces will dictate that there is someone providing the service you need.
I run several mailing lists, free of charge. They currently require virtually no effort from me at all to maintain. I will not put in the effort required to jump through the challenge-response hoops - even if it's only a minute or so per challenge, that would amount to many hours of my time wasted. And I dread to think what it would be like for people who run larger lists with thousands or hundreds of thousands of subscribers.
So in the couple of occasions when I have seen that stupidity, I simply unsubscribe the user and, if they have an account on my system, delete the account and all their data.
I think you misunderstand me. Either that or I didn't write very clearly. I did not mean to give the impression that the choice between using payware and freeware is an all-or-nothing choice.
>Ok, so why are you not using Windows or MacOSX?
I *am* using OS X where it is appropriate:-) But I still use free software too, because commercial OSes and applications do not always provide sufficient convenience to outweigh the cost.
> AND if you are paying for Windows or MacOSX > then why would you use the software in > question? Because there are already pay for > software variants that do that job quite well.
Just because I pay for some software - where the convenience is greater than the cost - doesn't mean I will always choose payware. Instead, I'll choose the product which provides the greatest value. Sometimes that means paying money (for Photoshop, for instance). Sometimes it means not paying money (like with Apache).
According to a nice man I spoke to at the Public Records Office, it's *not* on DVD. And they can't sell copies for various copyrighty reasons. Although apparently the PRO and BBC want to and are trying to figger out how.
> Lets put it this way. If I had the ability to > pay nothing or a something and the difference > was an installer then I would pay nothing.
You might not, but many would. I would, for large complex applications with lots of dependencies. That's because my time is valuable and I would rather spend my time *using* the software (or reading a good book) rather than fighting to get the software installed.
So what if it hurts US retailers? When you consider that they have to ship goods X thousand miles, they should never have been competitive anyway without tax evasion on the part of their customers.
And anyway, if you actually add up the taxes paid by Europeans and USians, they're approximately equal once you include the zillion state, county, etc taxes in the US. That is at least true when comparing US and UK.
If the photograph accompanying the CBS article is of "good" handwriting, then it deserves to die. The A is misformed, the D and G are too similar, I looks like an illiterate ampersand, J and Z are too similar, with what we can see of T also looking too much like a J. M and N are misformed, and U and V are too similar. Looking at the lowercase letters, f looks too similar to J and j. Some of the letters - particularly G - are misformed to the extent of being illegible.
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Anything else I have to think about, but that doesn't matter as I rarely need to convert them. This is no harder than having to remember what order to sort the SI prefices pico, nano, micro, milli, kilo, mega etc.
For day-to-day use, I find that the imperial system is superior as I get to use smaller numbers for day-to-day things like my height (6'3" vs 190cm) and weight (21st vs 133kg) for no significant loss of precision. For scientific or engineering use, or for measurements of the very big or very small - basically for measuring stuff that falls outside the caveman scale (mm, or the distance to geo-synchronous orbit, for instance) or needs better than caveman accuracy (if it matters that it's exactly 1905mm rather than 6'3" plus or minus a little bit) - the SI system wins.
I don't think I've even *seen* a typewriter in ten years, outside antique/junk shops. Businesses don't print envelopes, they print the destination' address on wahtever they put in the envelope and it shows through a clear window. Labels for other uses get printed a zillion at a time on printer-friendly sheets.
But because FreeDOS, like MSDOS, uses the BIOS, it *can* read files off floppies, so I created a zip file of a minimal Debian installer plus pkunzip, loadlin and a kernel, used split(1) to break it into floppy-sized chunks, and copied it across like that. Ahhhh, swapping disks 20-odd times! That brings back memories!
Anyway, once all the data was on there and on a little DOS partition, I used loadlin to boot a kernel, load a root disk from a disk image, and then pointed the installer at the files I'd extracted from the recombined zip file.
A (slightly) more detailed account should show up on Linux On Laptops soon.
With 12 billion, they sure can buy an awful lot of copies of Zubrin's "The Case For Mars"!
>>So you're saying this "mud" may actually just be
>>Martian rat urine?
>That doesn't make any sense, because if there's no
>water, then what are the Martian rats drinking in
>the first place?
They're drinking petroleum, obviously. Come on, who seriously thought that Monkey-boy's administration would send a rover to Mars if it wasn't for the oil?
The idea that Niue (or however the bloody place is spelt) will have to close because it might have only 500 people left is ridiculous. There are smaller places, and they're viable. Pitcairn, for example, has a population of "less than 50" (source: World Factbook 2002). The people are largely subsistence farmers, with most of the island's revenue coming from the sale of postage stamps.
The possibility of becoming Bubba's Prison Fucktoy would be more of a deterrent than mere fines, surely!
I suppose OpenBSD could be considered a fork, but the effect on its parent has been practically nill - if anything it has benefited by back-porting work done by the paranoids at OpenBSD which simply wasn't happening before the fork.
Note that the main ftp archive running on a sparc machine was not compromised, so the exploit might not yet be ported to non-i386 architectures.
So if we run Linux on Sparc, and Solaris on x86, we're safe!
Broadband users don't generally change their IP that often, so you *are* punishing the shitwit with the open relay. As far as I'm concerned, computer owners are entirely responsible for what their computers do, and if they allow (yes, ALLOW - if you get infested by a winvirus, or run an open relay, YOU are responsible for that happening and YOU are responsible for what the virus or relay does) their machines to be hijacked by spammers, they are as guilty as the spammer is, and should be made Bubba's Prison Fucktoy.
This is bad because the CDs I buy will have turned into mould in a few years time. This is good because if there's no copies of "their" content in existence afte $N years, they won't need their bought politicians to make copyrights last longer again! Next, self-destructing books.
And the ACLU took up their case?
the Russell Group (UK)
The who? Never 'eard of 'em.
Then change to a proper ISP that actually provides an Internet Service rather than merely letting you use a few select protocols. Surely in the capitalist western utopia market forces will dictate that there is someone providing the service you need.
> How expensive IS laundry in the UK?
Nearly free. In advanced societies like the UK, most people have washing machines of their own and don't need to use public machines.
Or know any of the opposite sex.
It gets worse. Apparently VERISIGN owns Illuminet, one of the larger providers of comms services in the US.
Is it car wax or is it dessert topping?
Hell no!
I run several mailing lists, free of charge. They currently require virtually no effort from me at all to maintain. I will not put in the effort required to jump through the challenge-response hoops - even if it's only a minute or so per challenge, that would amount to many hours of my time wasted. And I dread to think what it would be like for people who run larger lists with thousands or hundreds of thousands of subscribers.
So in the couple of occasions when I have seen that stupidity, I simply unsubscribe the user and, if they have an account on my system, delete the account and all their data.
I think you misunderstand me. Either that or I didn't write very clearly. I did not mean to give the impression that the choice between using payware and freeware is an all-or-nothing choice.
:-) But I still use free software too, because commercial OSes and applications do not always provide sufficient convenience to outweigh the cost.
>Ok, so why are you not using Windows or MacOSX?
I *am* using OS X where it is appropriate
> AND if you are paying for Windows or MacOSX
> then why would you use the software in
> question? Because there are already pay for
> software variants that do that job quite well.
Just because I pay for some software - where the convenience is greater than the cost - doesn't mean I will always choose payware. Instead, I'll choose the product which provides the greatest value. Sometimes that means paying money (for Photoshop, for instance). Sometimes it means not paying money (like with Apache).
According to a nice man I spoke to at the Public Records Office, it's *not* on DVD. And they can't sell copies for various copyrighty reasons. Although apparently the PRO and BBC want to and are trying to figger out how.
> Lets put it this way. If I had the ability to
> pay nothing or a something and the difference
> was an installer then I would pay nothing.
You might not, but many would. I would, for large complex applications with lots of dependencies. That's because my time is valuable and I would rather spend my time *using* the software (or reading a good book) rather than fighting to get the software installed.
And the ability to read Latin isn't exactly unusual. What's harder is reading millenium-old handwriting.
So what if it hurts US retailers? When you consider that they have to ship goods X thousand miles, they should never have been competitive anyway without tax evasion on the part of their customers.
And anyway, if you actually add up the taxes paid by Europeans and USians, they're approximately equal once you include the zillion state, county, etc taxes in the US. That is at least true when comparing US and UK.
If the photograph accompanying the CBS article is of "good" handwriting, then it deserves to die. The A is misformed, the D and G are too similar, I looks like an illiterate ampersand, J and Z are too similar, with what we can see of T also looking too much like a J. M and N are misformed, and U and V are too similar. Looking at the lowercase letters, f looks too similar to J and j. Some of the letters - particularly G - are misformed to the extent of being illegible.