And that's what tape drives really aren't. If you want the last file on the tape, you have to wait for the drive to seek past everything else, and that's a real pain.
Let's see... SunOS was predictable enough. Started with 1.0, made its way up to 4.1 before the Solaris 2 fork started, but they kept referring to it as SunOS through 4.1.x even though those versions were, sort of, Solaris 1. Then Solaris 2 (SunOS 5.0) shows up for Sparc, followed by Solaris 2 for X86 (based on Interactive UNIX 4.1, which Sun had borged) a few months later... takes them a few more dot-releases and a couple years to get to a "common" codebase, then they decide to just give the number after the dot, then they decide to slap month and year after it... *head explodes*
But then, even that isn't as unpredictable as Microsoft... they did so well numbering DOS versions sequentially, then had to go with three different naming schemes for Windows, all of which appear to have been guided by consumption of large amounts of controlled substances.
Client: 1.01, 1.03, 1.04, 2.03, 2.1, 2.11, 3.0, 3.1, 3.11, 95, 98, 98SE, Millennium, XP Home
Translation and localization is certainly a very interesting topic - not just for developers, but for users. You're lucky - you live in a major industrialized nation that Microsoft can't really afford to ignore or treat as second-rate. So, in Japan, you get your MSDN and everything like that in Japanese.
Not everyone is so lucky. Microsoft Middle East (based in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, overseeing operations in the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Bahrain, Yemen, Lebanon, Jordan, Cyprus, Malta, Egypt and Pakistan) has hardly any content on its web sites (including the Middle East edition of MSDN) in anything but English. Nevermind that Arabic is the official language of the majority of those nations.
Because I went through American schools, I suppose.:)
The thought process of the people who promulgate lists of conversion factors (several of which were linked to from my page) appears to be something like this:
We have an exact conversion factor from inches to cm, but if we provide the kids a conversion factor from inches to m, that'll save them the trouble of moving the decimal over, so let's do that!
Well... very roughly. Like, to one significant digit. It's closer to being sixty miles than to seventy, so if someone says "how many miles is 100 kilometers, just guess the nearest multiple of 10," then you're fine.
If they actually wanted the nearest integer amount of miles, you'd be looking for 62, not 60. Going 60 miles is good, but doesn't finish a 100km race.
(You'd actually be closer to right if you remembered that 80 kilometers is roughly 50 miles, since 80 km converted to mi and rounded to the nearest integer is 50, and 50 mi converted to km and rounded to the nearest integer is 80. This is what stuck in my head from dual-standard speedometers.)
Unless your meter-o-meter is this one from engineersupply.com (one of the sites linked to in my list), which describes it as having "a 1 meter circumference wheel (39.14 inches)."
But then again... maybe their inch-o-meters are off, too?
Personally, I find parsecs far more arbitrary.
on
Our Friend, The Meter
·
· Score: 1
If you want something really arbitrary, how about the parsec?
It's based on stellar parallax as measured from Earth - good thing all our observatories are on Earth, huh? Oh, wait, there are those ones in orbit... stellar parallax is a little different for those, yeah. And if we go back to the moon, well, it'll be different there... and on Mars... and so on.
Bleah. At least light traveling in a vacuum should be the same on other celestial bodies.
Got me. Really. I've submitted much more interesting stuff in the past (no, you never saw it), but the/. guys work in strange ways, and if they choose to accept this one, oh well. Their site, they can do what they want.:)
Re:It matters because--"right" Dan Birchall
on
Our Friend, The Meter
·
· Score: 4, Funny
Erm, well, NASA is actually where I'm planning to work next*, now that I've learned how many inches are in a meter, and can thus be trusted not to cause "problems."
*No, really, honest.
Re:At first i thought this post was stupid
on
Our Friend, The Meter
·
· Score: 4, Informative
2.54 is not rounded, inches cm is where a "precise" conversion is available.
And that looks like a relatively good division, yeah. I tried to get an answer out of Perl using:
prinft("%.70f\n",100/2.54);
which returned:
39.37007874015748143392556812614202499389648437500 0000000000000000000000
But Jeff "Bud" Fields did it by hand (which may or may not give better results than asking Perl for lots of precision) and got (quoting him):
39.37007874015748031456 and then a repeating pattern of 65354330708661417322834645
I had hoped it'd resolve nicely as it did in Perl, since 2.54 ends with a "4," but unfortunately the factors of 254 are 2 and 127 and 127 had to go be prime on me. Bleah.
The U.S. is gradually adopting the metric system. It's just not happening by government mandate.
Sure, sure, here on the island, there are plenty of dual-standard distance markers. "5mi / 8km" or whatever. Not every one, mind you. I think we might even have dual-standard elevation markers... yuppers, my 100km bike ride earlier this year took me past a couple of thosethings.
But most of it - weights, measures, etc - is being driven by business... which I suspect is in turn being driven by NAFTA, globalization, etc. Why have a factory to make 0.5l bottles for sale in Canada/Mexico and one to make 16oz bottles for sale in the US? Thus we wind up with metric volumes for bottled water, etc.
I'm sure there are people on Slashdot for whom I might someday do some work.
I think I can put a spin on this, though, like so:
"Why yes, I did learn in 2004 that I had been operating with an incorrect conversion factor for going from inches to meters. At that time I researched the extent of use of such incorrect factors, made public my findings, and of course corrected my own notes so as to avoid error in any further calculations.
"By the way, Mr. $BOSSNAME, I notice that $COMPANY's web site currently states that a meter is $INCORRECTNUM inches..."
Shouldn't be a problem at all, you see? And if that doesn't work, I can always say, "Look, at least I've realized I was wrong and found the right answer, unlike these teachers, professors, rocket scientists, engineers...":)
I'm still being astounded that amidst the expected discussion of metric, there's this fervent metadiscussion of whether I did in fact post it.
Of course, even though I'm making it clear that I did post it, there's the possibility that I am not who I say I am. Although, why I would choose to impersonate me is beyond the reach of my imagination.
And of course there's the possibility that I am who I say, but not who others say. Which is, in fact, more than a possibility -- at least one poster has attributed to me a status which I haven't held for quite some time.
Or... maybe I'm me, but only in Imperial/SAE, and in Metric I'm something ever so slightly different than me, due to the inevitable conversion/rounding errors.
This evening, I learned that one meter equals 39.3700787 inches. While this may come as no surprise to some people, it was one to me - for years, I had mistakenly believed a meter was 39.77 inches, and now I know it's basically 39.37.
Of course, I'm not alone in my confusion. A bit of research on Google revealed quite a few different conversions from meters to inches. Here are some of them:
39.34 inches according to a page about photography, and another about a role-playing game. Hey, it's only a game, their meters can be whatever length they want.
Does it? The CNN piece I linked to indicated that it probably swung through Mars's gravitational field and might now be orbiting the Sun - do they have it tracked now?
Or are you referring to "what happened" in the sense of "it got fux0red?"
Throw in "pan, tilt and zoom" for most network-capable security cameras nowadays. Oh, and a built-in webserver, and live video through a Java applet, and...:)
Slashdot Mirror
(Of course, it may lead to the other extreme...)
And that's what tape drives really aren't. If you want the last file on the tape, you have to wait for the drive to seek past everything else, and that's a real pain.
Let's see... SunOS was predictable enough. Started with 1.0, made its way up to 4.1 before the Solaris 2 fork started, but they kept referring to it as SunOS through 4.1.x even though those versions were, sort of, Solaris 1. Then Solaris 2 (SunOS 5.0) shows up for Sparc, followed by Solaris 2 for X86 (based on Interactive UNIX 4.1, which Sun had borged) a few months later... takes them a few more dot-releases and a couple years to get to a "common" codebase, then they decide to just give the number after the dot, then they decide to slap month and year after it... *head explodes*
But then, even that isn't as unpredictable as Microsoft... they did so well numbering DOS versions sequentially, then had to go with three different naming schemes for Windows, all of which appear to have been guided by consumption of large amounts of controlled substances.
Client: 1.01, 1.03, 1.04, 2.03, 2.1, 2.11, 3.0, 3.1, 3.11, 95, 98, 98SE, Millennium, XP Home
NT Client: 3.1, 3.5, 3.51, 4.0, 2000, XP Pro
NT Server: 3.1, 3.51, 4.0, 2000, 2003
I think my Cannondale cyclocross bicycle gets better mileage, but I don't drink gasoline so it's not an apples-to-apples comparison.
Finally, a ship they can use to seek out and disturb R'lyeh...
Not everyone is so lucky. Microsoft Middle East (based in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, overseeing operations in the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Bahrain, Yemen, Lebanon, Jordan, Cyprus, Malta, Egypt and Pakistan) has hardly any content on its web sites (including the Middle East edition of MSDN) in anything but English. Nevermind that Arabic is the official language of the majority of those nations.
The thought process of the people who promulgate lists of conversion factors (several of which were linked to from my page) appears to be something like this:
We have an exact conversion factor from inches to cm, but if we provide the kids a conversion factor from inches to m, that'll save them the trouble of moving the decimal over, so let's do that!
Either that, or "wow, we're getting an awful lot of people looking at the measuring wheels today..." has an effect...
If they actually wanted the nearest integer amount of miles, you'd be looking for 62, not 60. Going 60 miles is good, but doesn't finish a 100km race.
(You'd actually be closer to right if you remembered that 80 kilometers is roughly 50 miles, since 80 km converted to mi and rounded to the nearest integer is 50, and 50 mi converted to km and rounded to the nearest integer is 80. This is what stuck in my head from dual-standard speedometers.)
But then again... maybe their inch-o-meters are off, too?
It's based on stellar parallax as measured from Earth - good thing all our observatories are on Earth, huh? Oh, wait, there are those ones in orbit... stellar parallax is a little different for those, yeah. And if we go back to the moon, well, it'll be different there... and on Mars... and so on.
Bleah. At least light traveling in a vacuum should be the same on other celestial bodies.
See, now, you're thinking far too clearly there.
Got me. Really. I've submitted much more interesting stuff in the past (no, you never saw it), but the /. guys work in strange ways, and if they choose to accept this one, oh well. Their site, they can do what they want. :)
*No, really, honest.
And that looks like a relatively good division, yeah. I tried to get an answer out of Perl using:
which returned: 39.3700787401574814339255681261420249938964843750But Jeff "Bud" Fields did it by hand (which may or may not give better results than asking Perl for lots of precision) and got (quoting him):
I had hoped it'd resolve nicely as it did in Perl, since 2.54 ends with a "4," but unfortunately the factors of 254 are 2 and 127 and 127 had to go be prime on me. Bleah.Sure, sure, here on the island, there are plenty of dual-standard distance markers. "5mi / 8km" or whatever. Not every one, mind you. I think we might even have dual-standard elevation markers... yuppers, my 100km bike ride earlier this year took me past a couple of those things.
But most of it - weights, measures, etc - is being driven by business... which I suspect is in turn being driven by NAFTA, globalization, etc. Why have a factory to make 0.5l bottles for sale in Canada/Mexico and one to make 16oz bottles for sale in the US? Thus we wind up with metric volumes for bottled water, etc.
This may, or may not, prove or disprove that I am the "right" Dan Birchall.
Metadiscussion is great.
I think I can put a spin on this, though, like so:
"Why yes, I did learn in 2004 that I had been operating with an incorrect conversion factor for going from inches to meters. At that time I researched the extent of use of such incorrect factors, made public my findings, and of course corrected my own notes so as to avoid error in any further calculations.
"By the way, Mr. $BOSSNAME, I notice that $COMPANY's web site currently states that a meter is $INCORRECTNUM inches..."
Shouldn't be a problem at all, you see? And if that doesn't work, I can always say, "Look, at least I've realized I was wrong and found the right answer, unlike these teachers, professors, rocket scientists, engineers..." :)
I'm still being astounded that amidst the expected discussion of metric, there's this fervent metadiscussion of whether I did in fact post it. Of course, even though I'm making it clear that I did post it, there's the possibility that I am not who I say I am. Although, why I would choose to impersonate me is beyond the reach of my imagination. And of course there's the possibility that I am who I say, but not who others say. Which is, in fact, more than a possibility -- at least one poster has attributed to me a status which I haven't held for quite some time. Or... maybe I'm me, but only in Imperial/SAE, and in Metric I'm something ever so slightly different than me, due to the inevitable conversion/rounding errors.
Aaaaaand... here's the full content with all the links, for those who prefer to only click on links that go to Slashdot.
This evening, I learned that one meter equals 39.3700787 inches. While this may come as no surprise to some people, it was one to me - for years, I had mistakenly believed a meter was 39.77 inches, and now I know it's basically 39.37.
Of course, I'm not alone in my confusion. A bit of research on Google revealed quite a few different conversions from meters to inches. Here are some of them:
Or are you referring to "what happened" in the sense of "it got fux0red?"
Beagle II was lost even though people used metric.
I'm thinking of Axis and comparable netcams.