The only people who get screwed are the people who signed up for the proprietary version up front.
And, in theory, the only people who get screwed by Microsoft are those who signed up for Windows. But it turns out that if you have a large enough impact on the software ecosystem, you can make life miserable for those around you, even though your neighbors want nothing to do with you.
I recall reading that high-end digital cameras have now caught up to, and maybe even surpassed, the resolution and color accuracy of chemical film. Digital also gets you instant review, perfect copies (and, as a consequence, longer storage life), the ability to store many more photos in a given space, easier transmission/sharing, and the ability to run off draft quality copies quickly while still allowing for high-quality professional prints.
What does chemical film offer? The only thing I can think of is for someone with a significant investment in chemical film, it's costly to switch.
Mine says 26 AUG 1993. The only thing I'm missing is the detachable cord. Not quite as classic as Mr. Z's XT keyboard, on the other hand, the layout doesn't suck.;)
I've still got my IBM Model M (P/N 52G9658), well-known to be the Best Keyboard Ever. You can have it when you pry it from my cold dead hands. Which will be tough, because it can double as a weapon.
Only problem is hooking it up to a cell phone. Haven't found a way to do that yet. Some might also claim it's too big and bulky to use with a cell phone, but I don't think they have their priorities right.
Your comment and others like it remind me of some wisdom gleaned from xkcd: "The universe is probably littered with the one-planet graves of cultures which made the sensible economic decision that there's no good reason to go into space--each discovered, studied, and remembered by the ones who made the irrational decision."
Larry Niven made a better point: "The dinosaurs are extinct because they didn't have a space program." That doesn't require as much forward-thinking -- space colonization is a *long* way off, but meteor defense is a bit more immediate.
That said, private companies like SpaceX seem to be doing a better job at creating launchers than NASA was, largely because any NASA effort has to also be a corporate welfare program for established aerospace companies. I think we're better off letting NASA develop exploration vehicles and science payloads, and let private industry handle the trucking.
Sure, it's wrong. A two-by-four ain't really 2 inches by 4 inches, either. Chances are your 12 ounce cup isn't really 12 ounces, too.
You might point out that a two-by-four *used* to measure 2x4, but the principle still applies: What we call something doesn't have to be its measurement, even if what we call it sounds like a measurement.
Base 10 isn't as convenient as some other bases would be, but we've been using base 10 for so long it's never going to change. You're complaining about how people measure liquids. Try getting people to change how they *count*.
Base 12, in particular, would have worked a lot better. You can divide it cleanly in five ways (halves, thirds, quarters, sixths, twelfths). Base ten only divides cleanly three ways (halves, fifths, tenths). You can even count in base 12 on your fingers; just bring your thumb in again at the end. But it was not to be. Sigh.
It starts with 1am, 2am, 3am... 10am, 11am... what would you expect next? Well, considering it's a base 12 system, you'd expect 12am, followed by 1pm. Nooooo, what you get is 12pm, 1pm, 2pm... WTF? Did we do a #define 12 0 and found a compiler that allowed that?
AM = ante meridiem = before midday PM = post meridiem = after midday
The Romans numbered the hours from noon in each direction. What we call "10:00 AM" today was "2 a.m." for them -- two hours before midday.
At some point, people decided it was easier to always count forward. I'd guess the invention of mechanical clocks might have had something to do with that. But they kept the a.m./p.m. convention for writing down times. It refers to which half of the day you're in; it's *not* another decimal place in the time itself. The confusion around turnover prolly wasn't such a big deal back then: Digital clocks hadn't been invented yet, and precise timekeeping was rare. It usually wasn't needed when the fasting thing around was a horse.
In practical terms, it wouldn't help that, either, because you'd still have to qualify it with, "Do you mean 1 PM UTC, or 1 PM your time (because most people align their schedule to the sun and so haven't adopted UTC)".
And before anyone drags out the metric system as an example of global standardization that worked, the metric unit of time is the second. We should all be using kiloseconds; this "hour" thing has no basis in la Systeme International d'unites.
The Russian rail system (spanning about UTC+2 through UTC+11) ditched time zones in favour of using Moscow time on all its time tables.
Ah, but they're still using time zones. The fact that they've decided to use just one time zone still counts. The first "time zone" was British railway time, and there was only one. That's still a critical difference vs every city and town have its own local noon.
But it was because their destinations were far enough away to routinely cross what are now time zones (such that the departing and arriving local-noons were appreciably different), not that they outran the sun. The day/night terminator sweeps across earth's surface at 1000mph.
"outran the Sun" was perhaps a bit of poetic license -- but only a bit. Before rapid transportation, differences in local times didn't matter because by the time you traveled far enough for the difference to matter, enough time had passed that the difference didn't matter anyway. By the time you got to the next time zone, hours or even days had passed. At that scale, nobody cares about differences in local noon. Rail roads changed that; suddenly you could get there before the issue because moot. Would "outran time" be more accurate?:)
Submitter gets it wrong anyway. From TFS: "Time zones are a relic of the past, when different parts of the world were isolated, and 12 p.m. was whenever the sun was directly above your specific location."
Um, no. Time zones were *created* to deal with the problem of local noon being whenever the sun was directly above your specific location. That's what the world used for thousands of years, until rapid transit and communications made that impractical. With the coming of railroads, for the first time, people were frequently outrunning the sun. Time zones became a necessity. You can't have a rail time table if everybody's clock is different.
Also, I think the proposal is just moving the problem around. Currently we have to think, "Okay, they're 3 hours ahead of me, so 9 AM here is 12 PM there." With this proposal, we'd have to think, "Okay, they're 3 hours ahead of me, so when I'm starting work they're going to lunch".
And nobody's stopping anyone from doing everything on UTC. I know at least one person who sets his schedule that way.
DST -- as others have said -- that we can do without.
"Private contractors cannot afford the screw ups."
You ever work for a private contractor? I assure you, they screw up all the time. Sometimes it costs them, sometimes they dodge it. Sometimes they learn, sometimes they don't. Cronyism, nepotism, favoritism, bureaucracy, inertia, etc., all exist in the corporate world, too.
SpaceX succeeds because they're new and small and nimble and aren't tied to existing dead weight. And more power to them for it.
The main advantage of private industry is that (ideally) there are opportunities for competitors to replace the defective ones. (It doesn't always work that way in practice, due to startup costs, network effects, etc., of course.)
Aerospace has high startup costs, so it's been a tough one. Fortunately, with SpaceX, some investors with very deep pockets have decided to have a go. They've also gotten funding from the government, but so far have largely avoided getting tied into any existing pork, which is great.
"Although NASA subcontracts for 'parts' and equipment, they are pretty much a top down organization, much like Apple in that respect. It doesn't mean they aren't in full control of their projects. Without NASA, we wouldn't have been the first on the Moon."
The contractors in the Apollo program did a lot of their own engineering. I remember watching a documentary about the LEM, and how Grumman had to solve a lot of challenges, flowing change requests up to NASA. Sure NASA was heavily involved, but it wasn't like all ideas originated from the top.
I don't intend this post as a knock against NASA, just your perception of them.
From TFS: "But perhaps in the future we will consider a personal computer anything a person does computing on..."
That's what the term "personal computer" means in the first place. Person. Computer. It's not that big a leap to get from where we are to... where we are.
You are going to roll out a $1000 lock it need to at least give you the same kind of security you'd get from one of those. They may not be perfect, but you can't stick a wire in them to get by them at least.
What's interesting is that Kaba Mas also makes the X-09, which is the current DoD uber-lock used for classified stuff. It is, by all reports, extremely hard to subvert.
* Self-powered. No battery or external power supply needed.
* The exposed side has an LCD and a dial. Everything else is inside the security boundary. If you break the dial off you just make entry harder.
* The LCD is designed to only be viewable by someone standing right at the lock. Someone standing next to you can't snoop the numbers.
* The rate at which the dial causes numbers to change varies randomly with each step of the combination. Someone standing next to you can't derive the numbers from the rate at which you turn the dial.
* If the dial is turned too at regular a pace, the lock assumes you're an auto-dialer and shuts down.
* Repeated wrong combinations result in progressively longer lockout delays.
* You can view how many unsuccessful attempts have been made (allows you to audit to see if someone's tried to get in).
"You know, the ones where the character (usually a young, bright geek) rips the cover off the card swipe/keypad unit, shorts a few wires, and opens the door?"
I swear to FSM I've done this.
I was meeting a friend of mine at a place. Door is protected by a keypad lock. When we get there he then realizes they just issued all new codes for the year, he can't remember his yet, and the paper with the new code is back at his place. I look at the box the keypad is mounted in, and notice it has two exposed screws.
I whip out my Leatherman and take the keypad off. There are four wires running to the keypad. I try randomly shorting two of the pins on the connector.
*click*
I couldn't believe it actually worked. I know the keypads we have at work are much better than that. The exposed keypads and scanners only transmit codes back to the control unit. The relays for the door releases are in the control unit, and the door releases are wired separately. Ripping open the keypad gets you very little.
I never said the OS is a bad thing. Please don't put words in my mouth.
I note that PopeRatzo never said *you* said the OS was a bad thing.
My actual intent was that it seems like something I would want to be used for official purposes only.
And that is what the objection is to: The idea that things ought to be restricted in their use because they can also be used by bad people. Just about anything can be used for good or ill; if you attempt to control anything that might potentially be misused or abused, there's nothing left.
Slashdot Mirror
The only people who get screwed are the people who signed up for the proprietary version up front.
And, in theory, the only people who get screwed by Microsoft are those who signed up for Windows. But it turns out that if you have a large enough impact on the software ecosystem, you can make life miserable for those around you, even though your neighbors want nothing to do with you.
(It works that way for actual ecosystems, too.)
Analog is still better.
I recall reading that high-end digital cameras have now caught up to, and maybe even surpassed, the resolution and color accuracy of chemical film. Digital also gets you instant review, perfect copies (and, as a consequence, longer storage life), the ability to store many more photos in a given space, easier transmission/sharing, and the ability to run off draft quality copies quickly while still allowing for high-quality professional prints.
What does chemical film offer? The only thing I can think of is for someone with a significant investment in chemical film, it's costly to switch.
IBM Model M (P/N 52G9658)
Those late bloomers were made in 1996.
Mine says 26 AUG 1993. The only thing I'm missing is the detachable cord. Not quite as classic as Mr. Z's XT keyboard, on the other hand, the layout doesn't suck. ;)
I've still got my IBM Model M (P/N 52G9658), well-known to be the Best Keyboard Ever. You can have it when you pry it from my cold dead hands. Which will be tough, because it can double as a weapon.
Only problem is hooking it up to a cell phone. Haven't found a way to do that yet. Some might also claim it's too big and bulky to use with a cell phone, but I don't think they have their priorities right.
Model M Forever!
Your choice of media apparently isn't covering central Vermont and New Hampshire.
This is America, we don't care about some foreign countries nobody's ever heard of before.
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2401270&cid=37231920
Your comment and others like it remind me of some wisdom gleaned from xkcd:
"The universe is probably littered with the one-planet graves of cultures which made the sensible economic decision that there's no good reason to go into space--each discovered, studied, and remembered by the ones who made the irrational decision."
Larry Niven made a better point: "The dinosaurs are extinct because they didn't have a space program." That doesn't require as much forward-thinking -- space colonization is a *long* way off, but meteor defense is a bit more immediate.
That said, private companies like SpaceX seem to be doing a better job at creating launchers than NASA was, largely because any NASA effort has to also be a corporate welfare program for established aerospace companies. I think we're better off letting NASA develop exploration vehicles and science payloads, and let private industry handle the trucking.
1 pint = half a liter
Sure, it's wrong. A two-by-four ain't really 2 inches by 4 inches, either. Chances are your 12 ounce cup isn't really 12 ounces, too.
You might point out that a two-by-four *used* to measure 2x4, but the principle still applies: What we call something doesn't have to be its measurement, even if what we call it sounds like a measurement.
Base 10 isn't as convenient as some other bases would be, but we've been using base 10 for so long it's never going to change. You're complaining about how people measure liquids. Try getting people to change how they *count*.
Base 12, in particular, would have worked a lot better. You can divide it cleanly in five ways (halves, thirds, quarters, sixths, twelfths). Base ten only divides cleanly three ways (halves, fifths, tenths). You can even count in base 12 on your fingers; just bring your thumb in again at the end. But it was not to be. Sigh.
In the parent post: s/fasting/fastest/
It starts with 1am, 2am, 3am... 10am, 11am... what would you expect next? Well, considering it's a base 12 system, you'd expect 12am, followed by 1pm. Nooooo, what you get is 12pm, 1pm, 2pm... WTF? Did we do a #define 12 0 and found a compiler that allowed that?
AM = ante meridiem = before midday
PM = post meridiem = after midday
The Romans numbered the hours from noon in each direction. What we call "10:00 AM" today was "2 a.m." for them -- two hours before midday.
At some point, people decided it was easier to always count forward. I'd guess the invention of mechanical clocks might have had something to do with that. But they kept the a.m./p.m. convention for writing down times. It refers to which half of the day you're in; it's *not* another decimal place in the time itself. The confusion around turnover prolly wasn't such a big deal back then: Digital clocks hadn't been invented yet, and precise timekeeping was rare. It usually wasn't needed when the fasting thing around was a horse.
In practical terms, it wouldn't help that, either, because you'd still have to qualify it with, "Do you mean 1 PM UTC, or 1 PM your time (because most people align their schedule to the sun and so haven't adopted UTC)".
And before anyone drags out the metric system as an example of global standardization that worked, the metric unit of time is the second. We should all be using kiloseconds; this "hour" thing has no basis in la Systeme International d'unites.
The Russian rail system (spanning about UTC+2 through UTC+11) ditched time zones in favour of using Moscow time on all its time tables.
Ah, but they're still using time zones. The fact that they've decided to use just one time zone still counts. The first "time zone" was British railway time, and there was only one. That's still a critical difference vs every city and town have its own local noon.
But it was because their destinations were far enough away to routinely cross what are now time zones (such that the departing and arriving local-noons were appreciably different), not that they outran the sun. The day/night terminator sweeps across earth's surface at 1000mph.
"outran the Sun" was perhaps a bit of poetic license -- but only a bit. Before rapid transportation, differences in local times didn't matter because by the time you traveled far enough for the difference to matter, enough time had passed that the difference didn't matter anyway. By the time you got to the next time zone, hours or even days had passed. At that scale, nobody cares about differences in local noon. Rail roads changed that; suddenly you could get there before the issue because moot. Would "outran time" be more accurate? :)
At first pass I read the headline as "Emergency Gravity Disallowed".
My thought was, "Wow, this Hurricane Irene hysteria has really gotten out of hand. People are even afraid the gravity's going to get knocked out."
Submitter gets it wrong anyway. From TFS: "Time zones are a relic of the past, when different parts of the world were isolated, and 12 p.m. was whenever the sun was directly above your specific location."
Um, no. Time zones were *created* to deal with the problem of local noon being whenever the sun was directly above your specific location. That's what the world used for thousands of years, until rapid transit and communications made that impractical. With the coming of railroads, for the first time, people were frequently outrunning the sun. Time zones became a necessity. You can't have a rail time table if everybody's clock is different.
Also, I think the proposal is just moving the problem around. Currently we have to think, "Okay, they're 3 hours ahead of me, so 9 AM here is 12 PM there." With this proposal, we'd have to think, "Okay, they're 3 hours ahead of me, so when I'm starting work they're going to lunch".
And nobody's stopping anyone from doing everything on UTC. I know at least one person who sets his schedule that way.
DST -- as others have said -- that we can do without.
Flowing at a rate of 1mm/hour, this is more like a gigantic seepage of ground water.
You forget that I was present at an undersea, unexplained mass sponge migration.
It's just like the Grand Canyon is the European name for it, while its proper name, given by Native Americans, is Weemoteeuktuk.
There are no Native Americans. We're all immigrants peoples here. Now, some of them got here a lot sooner than others...
"Private contractors cannot afford the screw ups."
You ever work for a private contractor? I assure you, they screw up all the time. Sometimes it costs them, sometimes they dodge it. Sometimes they learn, sometimes they don't. Cronyism, nepotism, favoritism, bureaucracy, inertia, etc., all exist in the corporate world, too.
SpaceX succeeds because they're new and small and nimble and aren't tied to existing dead weight. And more power to them for it.
The main advantage of private industry is that (ideally) there are opportunities for competitors to replace the defective ones. (It doesn't always work that way in practice, due to startup costs, network effects, etc., of course.)
Aerospace has high startup costs, so it's been a tough one. Fortunately, with SpaceX, some investors with very deep pockets have decided to have a go. They've also gotten funding from the government, but so far have largely avoided getting tied into any existing pork, which is great.
"Although NASA subcontracts for 'parts' and equipment, they are pretty much a top down organization, much like Apple in that respect. It doesn't mean they aren't in full control of their projects. Without NASA, we wouldn't have been the first on the Moon."
The contractors in the Apollo program did a lot of their own engineering. I remember watching a documentary about the LEM, and how Grumman had to solve a lot of challenges, flowing change requests up to NASA. Sure NASA was heavily involved, but it wasn't like all ideas originated from the top.
I don't intend this post as a knock against NASA, just your perception of them.
From TFS: "But perhaps in the future we will consider a personal computer anything a person does computing on..."
That's what the term "personal computer" means in the first place. Person. Computer. It's not that big a leap to get from where we are to... where we are.
You are going to roll out a $1000 lock it need to at least give you the same kind of security you'd get from one of those. They may not be perfect, but you can't stick a wire in them to get by them at least.
What's interesting is that Kaba Mas also makes the X-09, which is the current DoD uber-lock used for classified stuff. It is, by all reports, extremely hard to subvert.
Neat stuff.
"It is important to realize that any lock can be picked with a big enough hammer." -- Sun System & Network Admin Manual
"You know, the ones where the character (usually a young, bright geek) rips the cover off the card swipe/keypad unit, shorts a few wires, and opens the door?"
I swear to FSM I've done this.
I was meeting a friend of mine at a place. Door is protected by a keypad lock. When we get there he then realizes they just issued all new codes for the year, he can't remember his yet, and the paper with the new code is back at his place. I look at the box the keypad is mounted in, and notice it has two exposed screws.
I whip out my Leatherman and take the keypad off. There are four wires running to the keypad. I try randomly shorting two of the pins on the connector.
*click*
I couldn't believe it actually worked. I know the keypads we have at work are much better than that. The exposed keypads and scanners only transmit codes back to the control unit. The relays for the door releases are in the control unit, and the door releases are wired separately. Ripping open the keypad gets you very little.
I never said the OS is a bad thing. Please don't put words in my mouth.
I note that PopeRatzo never said *you* said the OS was a bad thing.
My actual intent was that it seems like something I would want to be used for official purposes only.
And that is what the objection is to: The idea that things ought to be restricted in their use because they can also be used by bad people. Just about anything can be used for good or ill; if you attempt to control anything that might potentially be misused or abused, there's nothing left.
Hope that clears things up for you.