Whatever the political problems the US has they are miniscule in comparison to the problems in India.
As an example, the Indian parliament rejected a measure requiring MPs to disclose criminal history; they almost passed a disclosure requirement for "serious" crimes like robbery, rape, homicide, but then rejected that too!
The BJP is racist and is openly supported by Hindu nationalists that publicly incite riot and have been responsible for hundreds of deaths of Muslims.
Taking criticism of the US political system from Indians is like taking tolerance classes from the Nazi party. If you can't clean your own house, what gives you the moral authority to criticize the American political system? Some supernational sense of poltical correctness?
India's not a poor country, it's just a really, really corrupt one.
It's a tough choice, I know, between the ideologically bankrupt and wholly corrupt Congress party and the racists in the BJP and their above-the-law backers like Thackarey and his thugs.
When you guys get that sorted even reasonably well, we'll be willing to listen to criticism from you.
No, the situation I'm referring to are the all the mid-to-large businesses that have some el-cheapo ISP that gives them a/28 or something. They stick a mail server, a web server, and a firewall on the/28 and NAT everything else.
"Everything else" typically includes multistate WANs and thousands of network assets. They then also want to interconnect with other networks and assert that "10.0.0.0/8" belongs to *them* -- I shit you not, I have worked with vendors in the business of selling networked ASP services who have tried to tell me that "10.0.0.0/8 is our address block -- you shouldn't be using it."
This is an example of the overuse of NAT -- in these cases there should be MORE use of global addresses, not less, as RFC 1918 addresses are supposed to be for private nets that will not be connected to other networks.
I guess my previous post was trying to create a contrast between wasteful use of global addresses and overuse of private addresses when global addresses would be more flexible.
One company that I've worked with uses a routable/16 (same size as a class B) externally and a routable/16 internally and NATs between the two of them.
What's super annoying is that we have some permanent connectivity to them and they give out different IPs depending on the source of the DNS query. We're not fully integrated with them, so it makes for loads of fun trying to do resolution correctly.
I think it's a waste of addresses. Give back the public-facing/16 they use, use the private/16 globally and use some other NAT scheme or other RFC1918 addressing internally where needed.
But even RFC1918 is a problem as everybody thinks that 10.0.0.0/8 is "theirs" and then you do NAT-NAT, which breaks most troubleshooting tools.
I have a crazy idea for codecs: Embed the codec itself into the header of the media file so that the player can play the movie without having to know about the codec or codec version ahead of time.
Of course this can't work due to the number of and type of codec systems in various players, but perhaps if a framework was made where by the codec was embedded in some symbolic format so that it could be compiled by the player.
It's an interesting idea that at least allows for a lot of flexibility in codecs without having it hardcoded into the player.
No, the university should rent plots of land where students can learn to grow their own pot, and have classes where they build their own bongs (like real jedi) from materials donated by the community. University's all about education. (Oh dear God, I can't even think that without laughing).
They did this when I was in college almost 20 years ago. The land was actually park land adjacent to the college. A steep hill with southwestern exposure, lots of cover foliage, and poor visibility provided excellent growing areas. It was typically thought of as a no-credit independent study lab extension to a botany class, with gardening supplies generously provided by the groundskeeping department.
You had to pay a lab fee, but the University provided excellent bong materials, usually out of high-quality Pyrex glass. Screens were extra, provided by off-campus vendors. Assembly again was a no-credit independent study lab extension. Some students went the liberal arts path on this part, using the skills learned in a ceramics class rather than the technology-centric lab equipment.
You were usually evaluated by a jury of your peers who graded your final project at an end of the growing season. There was an interim evaluation of your glasswork/ceramics after final exams in the spring.
A bad case of falling behindism?
on
IT at the CIA
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
"Falling Behindism" is a term that I and my old boss created for the creeping paranoia that says, no matter how hard you're working at it, you're falling behind technologically and are not keeping up. The corallary is that you can't ever catch up and are doomed to obsolensence.
I think everyone largely suffered from this during the late 90s, when, if you weren't paying attention for a week, you got two full revs behind on your applications and missed an OS rev entirely.
The reality is usually more nuanced and perceptions of technological sophistication are very skewed by trends. Having an advanced widget doesn't prevent falling behindism if the buzz is about using anti-widgets instead.
I think it's also a problem to look at the state of technology across broad fields (OS, systems, networks, applications) and see yourself behind on all of them. It's a false standard, since it's nearly impossible to get any decent sized organization current on everything (or anything) -- and even if you could, you'd garner some risk due to new problems not yet discovered.
Re:Gator's memory footprint and other amusements
on
Gator Examined
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
What the hell, some of the cameras look kind of interesting. I mean, at least I'm clicking on an ad that has some techno appeal.
It's not like I'm clicking on a popup for grocery coupons or some lame travel service or something.
Re:Gator's memory footprint and other amusements
on
Gator Examined
·
· Score: 2, Funny
I hate myself for doing it, but I have once in a while clicked on an X10 camera ad.
And computing is so fundamentally simple. Its a game of N-Dimensional topology bounded by finite vectors in every dimension. There's no mystery involved. You just need to maintain a meta-model of the system and you can generate the rest.
Christ, if that's simple, I'd hate to hear you describe complicated.
Contributions to the document repository were considered in performance evaluations. The resources were aggressively managed (vetted, categorized, reviewed documents to prevent "staleness") by knowledgable individuals for each practice area and there were a number of groups which were extremely focused on reselling knowledge.
This is good, but its only half the battle. Not only do you have to reward participation in the knowledge management system (contribution, vetting) you have to do it on an equal basis with participation in the "primary" field.
For example, if you have a bonus schedule that gives attorneys an extra $10k for meeting the KMS participation guidelines, you have to somehow integrate it into the bonus schedule that rewards billable hours.
If you don't, then people will see a double-edged sword -- you pay me to be an attorney, and I meet or exceed all my goals there, but in doing so I can't meet my KMS participation goals -- therefore I see all those goals as bogus because I can't meet both goals and the punishment for not meeting my primary attorney goals is greater (and the rewards also greater). The opposite can happen as well -- you're rewarding me for my KMS participation, but penalizing me for also not meeting billable hours goals too. Or people just do a cost-benefit and figure that the KMS time is only worth 50% of the equivilent billable time and go for the billable instead.
Re:hopefully this will be for more than just uni's
on
Computing's Lost Allure
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
The idea is to look for someone who is independantly motivated toward self-improvement. Unfortunately, you can also end up with a serious case of tunnel vision who doesn't know anything about anything else.
It's also can be a drag to manage the job-is-my-hobby set, as they want to have pedantic arguments over every last detail and over technology choices constantly. More than once I've had to explain to people that worked for me that a large group of people with broader knowledge than them (about politics, cost, other technologies, et al) had a made a decision on technology "X" and that "X" wasn't up for debate, but the best implementation of "X" was.
Some of these people are zealots for "Y", some of these people are zealots against "X", some of these people think that using a crossover cable between '386s in the basement makes them some kind of expert in computer systems generally.
While I value their opinions and their willingness to inform themselves, there are times where they need to stuff a sock in it and do the job, even if it means something against their judgement.
Well rounded people generally don't have this problem, but they can have the problem of not enough interest to obtain depth -- it's a two way street sometimes, but the well-rounded types tend to be able to focus on getting the job done rather than needless bickering.
How can we as a
company change our policies to be in accordance with some law,
that is being rigidly interpreted by someone, somewhere?
Some possible answers:
Just wait a while. There will be a dupe about this, featuring a competing interpretation. Pick the one you like best.
Donate to the Republican party. Even if you are violating the law, you'll get better treatment.
Contact a real lawyer who specializes in employment law and ask them, and stop relying on Slashdot stories and their referenced articles for anything other than work day timefillers and bar-room argument fodder.
Outdoor-rated meter sockets should be something you can get at the building store. They should be standardized so that the utility power meter just plugs into the meter socket. Cabling from pole to socket is the power company's issue, cabling from meter socket to your panel is your issue (and the electrical inspectors!).
This much I've learned from us changing our electric service from overhead to underground. But even the private utility we have has a bunch of forms to fill out (with maps!) and then there's a bunch of waiting and other bureaucracy to deal with as well.
Utilities generally are a pain, but the ones that are run by the government are even more annoying as they act as if they were a branch of government.
Re:He's the Norton SystemWorks guy!
on
I, Spammer
·
· Score: 1
I thought that this was some kind of distributed vending/marketing thing that Symantec was at least involved in by allowing the product to be sold this way, and Spammers had picked up on it due to name branding and profit potential.
Spam 120 million, get 5000 orders, and rake in $20 per order, $100k. Not bad.
Outsourcing these guys to India may be seen in the same light as sweatshops for Nike -- sure it sucks but can you find Americans willing to do the work for the money?
If your idea of money is pocket change, of course, they'll have to get slave labor from some dictatorship.
If they're willing to pay a wage that lets you live with some dignity, someone will do the work.
I had a WMP11 from Linksys that used the new Broadcum chipset and I couldn't get it to work in any of the Intel i815 systems I tried it in.
The Compaq system melted down as soon as the driver was loaded -- by melted down, the screen went black except for small, wavy diagonal green lines, as if it was a TV on the fritz.
The HP system would load the drivers OK, but the drivers didn't think there was any card installed!
It was my first exposure to wireless, and now I'm kind of soured on it.
What do Compaq et al quote for bank interleave?
on
Memory Timings Analysis
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
The last server shindig I went to for Compaq had all these "advanced" memory options (hotswap, interleave, RAID for RAM [and for RAM only, it wasn't a solid-state disk system]).
Does it really turn out that 4 way interleave is kind of bogus and only a 2-8% increase in performance? I suppose 8% might mean a lot, but on average it could be just 4% or so.
While overstated, I wonder what the power safety capabilities are in some of the already-available implementations of this.
I'm not as worried about shock, but about unintentional shorts burning out switch ports or misplugged equipment. It'd be awesome if there were software-resettable breakers on the switches so that you wouldn't lose line cards. I had the misfortune of accidentally shorting a couple of Merlin phone system ports and those ports are dead, dead, dead forever.
I also wonder what it does to existing wiring codes and cable plants if any significant power starts to become present on data cabling. It'd suck to become dependent on this power only to have data cabling drops become more costly due to tighter code restrictions on where they can be placed.
I could swear there was a cheat similar to this in MOHAA. It allowed the cheater not infinite but a lot more than 100 hit points. They'd die if you hit them enough, and if they weren't using any other cheats its hard to detect as you have to nail them with a couple of grenades at close range just to notice; otherwise up close melees seem to be just a case of not-fast-enough reaction on your part.
I work in a pretty small IT shop and I'm the only one that does what I do, the rest have other specialties. When I'm in situations where I'm immersed in other IT people like myself I always remark on how much I *dislike* those people, even though we share a lot of the same interests.
I find the same thing to be true in a lot of areas -- a lot of the people that I find that like X I don't like, even though we both like X.
The people I do like and spend time with have more subtle and abstract similarities from a personality perspective, and in ordinary ways are quite different from me, which is usually a good thing.
I find what interests me in people is uniqueness of perspective and depth of feeling. People with John Q. Public opinions and no feeling about them don't turn me on. People that feel passionately about something unusual I find fascinating, even if I find their opinions unappealing.
I'm familiar with someone who embraces a lot of pretty scary far-right attitudes on politics, race, and so on, but he's capable of explaining them in an intelligent and thoughtful way. At the end of the day I disagree with him, but I still think he's very interesting.
Re:Any new news on eliminating pennies?
on
Making Change
·
· Score: 1
I hate to say it, but I think making coins work is something you just do; scrap the paper, issue the coins and let people bitch for a while and get over it. I think once people adapt to it, they'll never go back to paper $1s and $5s.
The usual complaints are about the weight of the coins. I think it has more to do with wallets and pocketbooks sold in the US not being designed for accessing or holding an additional 5-10 coins, or people not being used to reaching into their pockets for dollar coins.
Most of these are "but I'm not used to it" type complaints, since they're almost always true in reverse. A whole wallet full of $1s is equally cumbersome, awkward to count and so on.
They could do a couple of things to make it easier to use them. The first is size: just because the Eisenhower dollar was so freaking huge doesn't mean that larger demonination coins have to be huge. Make them just slightly (as in about 1.5mm diameter) larger than a quarter.
The second is color. Make them another color than silver. The gold dollar here is a good example. Consider a two-tone color scheme similar to the Canadian $2 coin -- the $5 could be gold with a silver center, and the $1 silver with a gold center. They could also consider other ways of coloring the metal.
The third example is shape/feel. Make the edges of them unique (smooth, polygonal, but not serrated like the quarter). Consider a hole in the center or multiple holes. Holes have the advantage of making the coins lighter as well. A non-metallic insert (plastic?) might also make the coin more distinguishable.
The fourth would be eliminating the penny. This would eliminate a too-common coin with no real purchasing power that merely takes up space and has a high transaction cost. With this coin removed, people would have less reason to complain about too many coins or too much metal bulk.
Slashdot Mirror
Whatever the political problems the US has they are miniscule in comparison to the problems in India.
As an example, the Indian parliament rejected a measure requiring MPs to disclose criminal history; they almost passed a disclosure requirement for "serious" crimes like robbery, rape, homicide, but then rejected that too!
The BJP is racist and is openly supported by Hindu nationalists that publicly incite riot and have been responsible for hundreds of deaths of Muslims.
Taking criticism of the US political system from Indians is like taking tolerance classes from the Nazi party. If you can't clean your own house, what gives you the moral authority to criticize the American political system? Some supernational sense of poltical correctness?
Give me a break.
India's not a poor country, it's just a really, really corrupt one.
It's a tough choice, I know, between the ideologically bankrupt and wholly corrupt Congress party and the racists in the BJP and their above-the-law backers like Thackarey and his thugs.
When you guys get that sorted even reasonably well, we'll be willing to listen to criticism from you.
No, the situation I'm referring to are the all the mid-to-large businesses that have some el-cheapo ISP that gives them a /28 or something. They stick a mail server, a web server, and a firewall on the /28 and NAT everything else.
"Everything else" typically includes multistate WANs and thousands of network assets. They then also want to interconnect with other networks and assert that "10.0.0.0/8" belongs to *them* -- I shit you not, I have worked with vendors in the business of selling networked ASP services who have tried to tell me that "10.0.0.0/8 is our address block -- you shouldn't be using it."
This is an example of the overuse of NAT -- in these cases there should be MORE use of global addresses, not less, as RFC 1918 addresses are supposed to be for private nets that will not be connected to other networks.
I guess my previous post was trying to create a contrast between wasteful use of global addresses and overuse of private addresses when global addresses would be more flexible.
I know for a fact this is true.
/16 (same size as a class B) externally and a routable /16 internally and NATs between the two of them.
/16 they use, use the private /16 globally and use some other NAT scheme or other RFC1918 addressing internally where needed.
One company that I've worked with uses a routable
What's super annoying is that we have some permanent connectivity to them and they give out different IPs depending on the source of the DNS query. We're not fully integrated with them, so it makes for loads of fun trying to do resolution correctly.
I think it's a waste of addresses. Give back the public-facing
But even RFC1918 is a problem as everybody thinks that 10.0.0.0/8 is "theirs" and then you do NAT-NAT, which breaks most troubleshooting tools.
I have a crazy idea for codecs: Embed the codec itself into the header of the media file so that the player can play the movie without having to know about the codec or codec version ahead of time.
Of course this can't work due to the number of and type of codec systems in various players, but perhaps if a framework was made where by the codec was embedded in some symbolic format so that it could be compiled by the player.
It's an interesting idea that at least allows for a lot of flexibility in codecs without having it hardcoded into the player.
No, the university should rent plots of land where students can learn to grow their own pot, and have classes where they build their own bongs (like real jedi) from materials donated by the community. University's all about education. (Oh dear God, I can't even think that without laughing).
They did this when I was in college almost 20 years ago. The land was actually park land adjacent to the college. A steep hill with southwestern exposure, lots of cover foliage, and poor visibility provided excellent growing areas. It was typically thought of as a no-credit independent study lab extension to a botany class, with gardening supplies generously provided by the groundskeeping department.
You had to pay a lab fee, but the University provided excellent bong materials, usually out of high-quality Pyrex glass. Screens were extra, provided by off-campus vendors. Assembly again was a no-credit independent study lab extension. Some students went the liberal arts path on this part, using the skills learned in a ceramics class rather than the technology-centric lab equipment.
You were usually evaluated by a jury of your peers who graded your final project at an end of the growing season. There was an interim evaluation of your glasswork/ceramics after final exams in the spring.
"Falling Behindism" is a term that I and my old boss created for the creeping paranoia that says, no matter how hard you're working at it, you're falling behind technologically and are not keeping up. The corallary is that you can't ever catch up and are doomed to obsolensence.
I think everyone largely suffered from this during the late 90s, when, if you weren't paying attention for a week, you got two full revs behind on your applications and missed an OS rev entirely.
The reality is usually more nuanced and perceptions of technological sophistication are very skewed by trends. Having an advanced widget doesn't prevent falling behindism if the buzz is about using anti-widgets instead.
I think it's also a problem to look at the state of technology across broad fields (OS, systems, networks, applications) and see yourself behind on all of them. It's a false standard, since it's nearly impossible to get any decent sized organization current on everything (or anything) -- and even if you could, you'd garner some risk due to new problems not yet discovered.
What the hell, some of the cameras look kind of interesting. I mean, at least I'm clicking on an ad that has some techno appeal.
It's not like I'm clicking on a popup for grocery coupons or some lame travel service or something.
I hate myself for doing it, but I have once in a while clicked on an X10 camera ad.
And computing is so fundamentally simple. Its a game of N-Dimensional topology bounded by finite vectors in every dimension. There's no mystery involved. You just need to maintain a meta-model of the system and you can generate the rest.
Christ, if that's simple, I'd hate to hear you describe complicated.
It can and has been anything versus anything.
Contributions to the document repository were considered in performance evaluations. The resources were aggressively managed (vetted, categorized, reviewed documents to prevent "staleness") by knowledgable individuals for each practice area and there were a number of groups which were extremely focused on reselling knowledge.
This is good, but its only half the battle. Not only do you have to reward participation in the knowledge management system (contribution, vetting) you have to do it on an equal basis with participation in the "primary" field.
For example, if you have a bonus schedule that gives attorneys an extra $10k for meeting the KMS participation guidelines, you have to somehow integrate it into the bonus schedule that rewards billable hours.
If you don't, then people will see a double-edged sword -- you pay me to be an attorney, and I meet or exceed all my goals there, but in doing so I can't meet my KMS participation goals -- therefore I see all those goals as bogus because I can't meet both goals and the punishment for not meeting my primary attorney goals is greater (and the rewards also greater). The opposite can happen as well -- you're rewarding me for my KMS participation, but penalizing me for also not meeting billable hours goals too. Or people just do a cost-benefit and figure that the KMS time is only worth 50% of the equivilent billable time and go for the billable instead.
The idea is to look for someone who is independantly motivated toward self-improvement. Unfortunately, you can also end up with a serious case of tunnel vision who doesn't know anything about anything else.
It's also can be a drag to manage the job-is-my-hobby set, as they want to have pedantic arguments over every last detail and over technology choices constantly. More than once I've had to explain to people that worked for me that a large group of people with broader knowledge than them (about politics, cost, other technologies, et al) had a made a decision on technology "X" and that "X" wasn't up for debate, but the best implementation of "X" was.
Some of these people are zealots for "Y", some of these people are zealots against "X", some of these people think that using a crossover cable between '386s in the basement makes them some kind of expert in computer systems generally.
While I value their opinions and their willingness to inform themselves, there are times where they need to stuff a sock in it and do the job, even if it means something against their judgement.
Well rounded people generally don't have this problem, but they can have the problem of not enough interest to obtain depth -- it's a two way street sometimes, but the well-rounded types tend to be able to focus on getting the job done rather than needless bickering.
Some possible answers:
How bizzare.
Outdoor-rated meter sockets should be something you can get at the building store. They should be standardized so that the utility power meter just plugs into the meter socket. Cabling from pole to socket is the power company's issue, cabling from meter socket to your panel is your issue (and the electrical inspectors!).
This much I've learned from us changing our electric service from overhead to underground. But even the private utility we have has a bunch of forms to fill out (with maps!) and then there's a bunch of waiting and other bureaucracy to deal with as well.
Utilities generally are a pain, but the ones that are run by the government are even more annoying as they act as if they were a branch of government.
I thought that this was some kind of distributed vending/marketing thing that Symantec was at least involved in by allowing the product to be sold this way, and Spammers had picked up on it due to name branding and profit potential.
Spam 120 million, get 5000 orders, and rake in $20 per order, $100k. Not bad.
Outsourcing these guys to India may be seen in the same light as sweatshops for Nike -- sure it sucks but can you find Americans willing to do the work for the money?
If your idea of money is pocket change, of course, they'll have to get slave labor from some dictatorship.
If they're willing to pay a wage that lets you live with some dignity, someone will do the work.
I had a WMP11 from Linksys that used the new Broadcum chipset and I couldn't get it to work in any of the Intel i815 systems I tried it in.
The Compaq system melted down as soon as the driver was loaded -- by melted down, the screen went black except for small, wavy diagonal green lines, as if it was a TV on the fritz.
The HP system would load the drivers OK, but the drivers didn't think there was any card installed!
It was my first exposure to wireless, and now I'm kind of soured on it.
Rather than ripping the pages out, wouldn't it be easier to just cut off the binding with some kind of a bandsaw?
They both trash the book, but this should only be a problem for really rare books.
Has something to do with music.
The last server shindig I went to for Compaq had all these "advanced" memory options (hotswap, interleave, RAID for RAM [and for RAM only, it wasn't a solid-state disk system]).
Does it really turn out that 4 way interleave is kind of bogus and only a 2-8% increase in performance? I suppose 8% might mean a lot, but on average it could be just 4% or so.
While overstated, I wonder what the power safety capabilities are in some of the already-available implementations of this.
I'm not as worried about shock, but about unintentional shorts burning out switch ports or misplugged equipment. It'd be awesome if there were software-resettable breakers on the switches so that you wouldn't lose line cards. I had the misfortune of accidentally shorting a couple of Merlin phone system ports and those ports are dead, dead, dead forever.
I also wonder what it does to existing wiring codes and cable plants if any significant power starts to become present on data cabling. It'd suck to become dependent on this power only to have data cabling drops become more costly due to tighter code restrictions on where they can be placed.
I could swear there was a cheat similar to this in MOHAA. It allowed the cheater not infinite but a lot more than 100 hit points. They'd die if you hit them enough, and if they weren't using any other cheats its hard to detect as you have to nail them with a couple of grenades at close range just to notice; otherwise up close melees seem to be just a case of not-fast-enough reaction on your part.
Amen brother!
I work in a pretty small IT shop and I'm the only one that does what I do, the rest have other specialties. When I'm in situations where I'm immersed in other IT people like myself I always remark on how much I *dislike* those people, even though we share a lot of the same interests.
I find the same thing to be true in a lot of areas -- a lot of the people that I find that like X I don't like, even though we both like X.
The people I do like and spend time with have more subtle and abstract similarities from a personality perspective, and in ordinary ways are quite different from me, which is usually a good thing.
I find what interests me in people is uniqueness of perspective and depth of feeling. People with John Q. Public opinions and no feeling about them don't turn me on. People that feel passionately about something unusual I find fascinating, even if I find their opinions unappealing.
I'm familiar with someone who embraces a lot of pretty scary far-right attitudes on politics, race, and so on, but he's capable of explaining them in an intelligent and thoughtful way. At the end of the day I disagree with him, but I still think he's very interesting.
I hate to say it, but I think making coins work is something you just do; scrap the paper, issue the coins and let people bitch for a while and get over it. I think once people adapt to it, they'll never go back to paper $1s and $5s.
The usual complaints are about the weight of the coins. I think it has more to do with wallets and pocketbooks sold in the US not being designed for accessing or holding an additional 5-10 coins, or people not being used to reaching into their pockets for dollar coins.
Most of these are "but I'm not used to it" type complaints, since they're almost always true in reverse. A whole wallet full of $1s is equally cumbersome, awkward to count and so on.
They could do a couple of things to make it easier to use them. The first is size: just because the Eisenhower dollar was so freaking huge doesn't mean that larger demonination coins have to be huge. Make them just slightly (as in about 1.5mm diameter) larger than a quarter.
The second is color. Make them another color than silver. The gold dollar here is a good example. Consider a two-tone color scheme similar to the Canadian $2 coin -- the $5 could be gold with a silver center, and the $1 silver with a gold center. They could also consider other ways of coloring the metal.
The third example is shape/feel. Make the edges of them unique (smooth, polygonal, but not serrated like the quarter). Consider a hole in the center or multiple holes. Holes have the advantage of making the coins lighter as well. A non-metallic insert (plastic?) might also make the coin more distinguishable.
The fourth would be eliminating the penny. This would eliminate a too-common coin with no real purchasing power that merely takes up space and has a high transaction cost. With this coin removed, people would have less reason to complain about too many coins or too much metal bulk.