numbers would be too long (256 decimal is 100,000,000 binary)
Note that I said ``some power of two,'' not ``two.'' Binary is of course terribly impractical for daily use. I was referring to something like octal or hexadecimal.
I suspect you mean pre-French, not pre-decimal. Decimal & duodecimal are a system of counting; standard and French units are systems of measurement.
No, I am quite sure I mean predecimal. Currency is a system of measurement, and was the first one to be decimalized, with the U.S. dividing the dollar (eight reales, three marks, etc.) into one hundred ``cents.'' The French merely imitated this U.S. innovation when they divided their franc into one hundred ``centimes.'' (If there was an earlier decimal currency I am unaware of it.) The term decimal refers indeed to a system of counting; it also refers to systems of measurement based on powers of ten. (I invite you to check the examples in definition 1a of ``decimal'' in the Oxford English Dictionary if you doubt me.) Predecimal currencies were often tied to other systems of measurement; the pound sterling is called that because it was originally the value of one pound of sterling silver. A mark was also originally a unit of weight, varying depending on where in Europe you were, but often two-thirds of the local pound. (One mark then might be eight troy ounces, or 160 pennyweights. Unfortunately, marks and shillings don't mix well, because a mark is then 13-1/3 shillings, or 2-2/3 crowns.) Even the franc was tied to weight; one decimal franc was originally 5.000g of 0.900 fine silver. (The U.S. dollar, while subdivided decimally, was based on legacy units of weight.)
The beauty of our current system is that units are typically sized to something useful. An inch is handy for small work; a foot for larger work; a mile for larger work still.
I beg to differ. The inch is too big to be used for any sort of fine measurement. English wrenches are an absolute nightmare with 5/8-in, 3/16-in, 7/32-in, etc. The millimeter is the appropriate unit for such measurements. For estimation of short distances, a foot is much too small. It that wall twenty feet? Twenty-two? I don't know. I can say it's about seven meters though. Similarly, for measuring land and buildings, square meters are much more useful than square feet or acres. Square feet are too small, so you're always taling in very large numbers; acres are ridiculously large units for modern suburban land divisions.
However, conversions and multiples are important, too. I am not an engineer, but I have done some work on reporting and documentation for civil engineering projects. Quick: how long does it take to discharge 24 acre-feet of grey water at a rate of 110 MGD (million gallons per day)? (Yes, acre-feet. That's a unit they actually use.) For the love of God, use sane units!
Given that our counting system is decimal, our units should be too. I've nothing against defining conventional units in other terms. For example, I would happily use a metric quart equal to a liter. That would let me measure liquid easily in units like cups, quarter-cups, and pints (the only way, incidentally, that a stout should ever be served). But the base units should be decimal and relate to each other in sane ways. If you wanted to create a new system based on the inch, such that the basic unit of mass was the mass of one cubic inch of water, and everything else followed logically, I would be game. Just make it consistent.
Or change the base of our counting system. That's fine too. But until that happens, stick to decimal units of measurement.
sadly, I don't think OGG is *currently* known to anybody except nerds or IT pros.
What I want to know is: Are there any car players for OGG? I'd like to find an in-dash CD player that will also handle OGGs on data CDs... Is there any such thing?
Any differences in sound quality aren't going to matter with 80 m.p.h. freeway noise; I'm one who actually cares about free-as-in-speech.
Consider this, a town next to your house sends frequent visitors. 99% of these visitors vandalise your town, break windows and steal. How do you stop your house being abused? Banning all people from that town is reasonable.
Sounds like English football fans. Didn't they get England banned a while back?
I wouldn't go so far as to say that can't be done in windows.. It can not out of the box AFAIK, but with free third party software it certainly can..
In the interests of comparing apples and apples, he was talking about the default tools. I am sure someone has written a GUI file-finder similar to the Windows `Find'; I just never had any reason to look for it.
As it is GWB is the first president since rutherford Hayes to break the inaugural oath before actually taking it.
That's very quotable. But before I go sticking it in a sig or something, can you explain what precisely it is you're referring to? (Reconstruction-era U.S. is not my forte.)
Because ten is a stupid number. If they were throwing things out, they should have thrown decimal numbering out and switched to duodecimal.
Well, I could also make the argument that some power of two would be a vastly superior base from a mathematical perspective. (And then I'd never have to hear about ``kibibits'' again.) For various reasons, I'm partial to hexadecimal over octal, but either is defensible.
The nice thing about base-twelve is thirds. Thirds just don't work well in base-ten.
However, no predecimal system consistently used base-twelve units. Pounds avoirdupois are base-sixteen, pounds sterling are base-twenty, subdivided by base-twelve, an Imperial pint is twenty ounces, a fathom is six feet, a mile (statute) is 1760 three-foot yards, etc. Had the SI been based on duodecimal units and accompanied by duodecimal notation (like hex but 1-B only, for example) I would enthusiastically embrace it. However, even had they based it on base-seven it would be preferable to the bastard mess still in use in the States.
Re. French revolutionary calendar, plenty of references turn up on the web, emacs has an implementation, and I've seen folks actually use them in emails and Usenet posts.
The calendar certainly was used, quite extensively-- much to the consternation of French historians, because it is (I shan't argue here) a royal (er, republican?) pain in the arse.
I was referring to the decimal clock, for the use of which I have never seen any evidence.
Their history, though, is not the most glorious...
I really hope you're actually Icelandic or Finnish or something, because no one from any Anglophone country outside Africa has any business throwing stones when it comes to ``glorious history''... I was just reading a letter of Napoléon III where he swore that the one thing they wouldn't do in Algeria was exterminate the indigènes like had been done to the American Indians. He made it possible for any Algerian Muslim or Jew to get full French citizenship, at a time when there were still chattel slaves in the U.S.
In America, you can criticize the government, but not Darwin
Right, so that is why the Dixie Chicks have recieved death threats [bbc.co.uk]?
I think people from outside the States (and many here) have difficulty grokking the fact that rural Texas and Berkeley, California, are both the U.S. Among Manhattan élites you will get yourself ostracized quickly by making racist jokes or gay bashing, but in Alabama being a gay black man could be dangerous to your health.
When it comes down to it the path of society is decided by individuals. Sure for things to occur some pre-existing social conditions have to be there (government in complete disorder in Germany and county broke). But a HUGE amount depends on the whims of powerful individuals.
Congratulations, you've just stumbled onto one of the great debates among professional historians. Traditional Marxist orthodoxy holds that everything is deterministic -- in other words, if you know the starting conditions (which are economic) you can predict the outcome. Old-style ``great white men'' political history emphasizes the contingent, the places where things supposedly could have gone either way.
We of this generation are supposedly wiser, and understand that there is usually a bit of both at work...
Hey, you know those clicking noises in the Bushman language? Are there HTML codes for those?
Well, checking the Unicode pages, I find:
LATIN LETTER DENTAL CLICK: ǀ
LATIN LETTER LATERAL CLICK: ǁ
LATIN LETTER ALVEOLAR CLICK: ǂ
LATIN LETTER RETROFLEX CLICK: ǃ
So yes, there are. I note, however, that in Zulu orthography the first two and the last can be rendered with x, c, and q, respectively. Cake. See
the Latin Extended-B code page.
I do feel Africa squandered their biggest opportunity, the cold war.
That's an interesting statement; what it brings to mind is Angola, with right-wing South Africans (U.S. proxy) fighting left-wing Cubans (Soviet proxy)... The Cold War doesn't seem like it helped Angola very much, but I'm sure that's not the model you had in mind.
What sort of opportunity did the Cold War offer Africa, and how did they squanderit?
Here: just today I tried to copy a section of text from an OpenOffice document and paste it into an email I was writing in the Mozilla mail client.It can't be done. I think in this case it's not that mozilla won't accept a middle mouse click paste, but that OpenOffice doesn't provide the proper X highlight information, or something.
With OOo 1.0.2 and Mozilla 1.0.0 it works for me (Debian Sarge, XFree86 4.2.1, IceWM 1.2.7). Well, I don't use Mozilla mail (HTML mail == evil) but I can paste into a Mozilla browser text box just fine. If you're sure it's OOo that's the problem (e.g., because you can't copy from OOo to an xterm either), and you've got a reasonably recent OOo version, file a bug! What you're seeing is not normal behavior. You don't mention what distro you're using, but if you find these problems pervasive you might consider that the problem is with your distro and not Linux or X in general.
I also get a similar problem when using jedit, except that it won't accept the middle mouse button to paste.
I can't say anything about that, except that I would expect no less from a Java application... <duck>
# Each day divided into ten hours of one hundred minutes of one hundred seconds
I don't think this part was ever implemented. I've never seen reference to it anywhere else. IIRC even the parliamentary archives I've seen would record, for example, la séance est ouverte à onze heures, i.e. using the twelve-hour clock. I don't have any stuff from the late 1790s at my disposal unfortunately, just 1789-91 and Third Republic. I was just reading the Moniteur universel (official government newspaper) from 1789, however, which is why I thought of the s/f confusion...
I can't imagine, BTW, other than sheer obstinacy, why you would consider the SI units ``insane''... Predecimal stuff is quaint and fun to read about, but I'm glad I don't have to make change in florins, crowns, farthings, etc., just as I wish we could finally get rid of feet, miles, ounces, etc. You can't fully appreciate just how ridiculous English measurement is until you get away from it for a while.
Then again, it seems to be awfully trendy to be blindly bigoted against anything Gallic these days, so maybe that's the reason...
Yes, there were French units of time to go along with the French units of weight, length, volume &c.
I don't think this is at all what you meant, but it occurs to me that seconde, as it would have been typeset in Paris in 1789, would look to a modern reader like feconde (damn lameness filter won't let me paste in a real leading-s character...).
Some kind of debate that would be.
"You're only allowed to participate in this discussion if you agree with what we tell you to agree with."
No, it's more like saying ``If you're a monarchist, and will keep trying to get a king written in, we don't need you at our constitutional convention.''
If I had originally created Application X and licensed it under the GPL, accepted patches from people who understood the application was GPL, then I can no longer close source my application.
And if you waive your copyright altogether (by placing it in public domain), you cannot take patches from anyone without getting their written waivers of their own copyright. You don't have the right to take away my copyright on my patch. GPL is different because my patch on your GPL'd code must be GPL too, so I don't need to waive anything.
I'm using Mozilla 1.2, so I don't think it's an `obsolete browser' problem.
I suspect that your taste simply differs from mine, but care to describe what you're seeing that makes it an improvement over the current page?
Well, I know for a fact that my taste differs from many people's <grin>
In this regard, I misunderstood your description to be that of the CSS-free version. I don't consider the `remix' page bland; if anything, the orange header is a bit garish IMHO.
The `remix' page seems a bit tighter, but it's not a particularly substantive change. Rather, I think a redesign should do more than change the stylesheets; I'm on the ``less is more'' side of the home-page issue. Vive le Google.
It must be something hidden like standards conformance, because the `remixed' home-page looks pretty exactly the same as the old home-page, except that the remix seems vaguely more depressing. To be honest, I rather like the old home-page; it's clean, straight-forward, and even kind of cheerful...
You must be using an obsolete or non-CSS supporting browser. Out of curiosity I looked at it with SGI's OEM NS4.5 under IRIX and it looks like a 1995-era grey-background all-text page -- but is perfectly usable. That's what graceful degradation is about. He's hiding the CSS from you if you've got a FUBAR browser.
If you're trying to copy from a program that only supports middle mouse button pasting to one that only supports a copy/paste clipboard, you just can't copy between them.
I guess I've never come across a program that doesn't understand X copy/paste (i.e., highlight and middle-click). Can you give non-trivial examples?
"We have space travel capabilities now. You can deal with us as spacefarers. Oh and by the way, could you please rescue our astronaut before he burns up on reentry?"
As others have mentioned, it was King David's Spaceship, by Niven and Pournelle.
More importantly, my inner geek wants to point out that it was ``before she burns up on reentry''...
the trains are now running on time -- metric time.
Back in high school, my physics teacher tried out a hoax on our class involving a decision by the SI people to change over to ``metric time.'' This allegedly involved replacing the second with the ``fec,'' which would have the symbol F. Minutes, hours, days, etc., would be replaced by standard SI prefixes on the fec--kF, MF, etc. He apparently did not expect any of his students to know that F was already used for the farad, and he got very upset when I called him on this...
</nostalgia> Anyway, I never knew if this was just something he had cooked up, or if it was also used by other teachers in other schools. Does it sound familiar to anyone?
Slashdot Mirror
scripsit Bob Uhl:
Note that I said ``some power of two,'' not ``two.'' Binary is of course terribly impractical for daily use. I was referring to something like octal or hexadecimal.
No, I am quite sure I mean predecimal. Currency is a system of measurement, and was the first one to be decimalized, with the U.S. dividing the dollar (eight reales, three marks, etc.) into one hundred ``cents.'' The French merely imitated this U.S. innovation when they divided their franc into one hundred ``centimes.'' (If there was an earlier decimal currency I am unaware of it.) The term decimal refers indeed to a system of counting; it also refers to systems of measurement based on powers of ten. (I invite you to check the examples in definition 1a of ``decimal'' in the Oxford English Dictionary if you doubt me.) Predecimal currencies were often tied to other systems of measurement; the pound sterling is called that because it was originally the value of one pound of sterling silver. A mark was also originally a unit of weight, varying depending on where in Europe you were, but often two-thirds of the local pound. (One mark then might be eight troy ounces, or 160 pennyweights. Unfortunately, marks and shillings don't mix well, because a mark is then 13-1/3 shillings, or 2-2/3 crowns.) Even the franc was tied to weight; one decimal franc was originally 5.000g of 0.900 fine silver. (The U.S. dollar, while subdivided decimally, was based on legacy units of weight.)
I beg to differ. The inch is too big to be used for any sort of fine measurement. English wrenches are an absolute nightmare with 5/8-in, 3/16-in, 7/32-in, etc. The millimeter is the appropriate unit for such measurements. For estimation of short distances, a foot is much too small. It that wall twenty feet? Twenty-two? I don't know. I can say it's about seven meters though. Similarly, for measuring land and buildings, square meters are much more useful than square feet or acres. Square feet are too small, so you're always taling in very large numbers; acres are ridiculously large units for modern suburban land divisions.
However, conversions and multiples are important, too. I am not an engineer, but I have done some work on reporting and documentation for civil engineering projects. Quick: how long does it take to discharge 24 acre-feet of grey water at a rate of 110 MGD (million gallons per day)? (Yes, acre-feet. That's a unit they actually use.) For the love of God, use sane units!
Given that our counting system is decimal, our units should be too. I've nothing against defining conventional units in other terms. For example, I would happily use a metric quart equal to a liter. That would let me measure liquid easily in units like cups, quarter-cups, and pints (the only way, incidentally, that a stout should ever be served). But the base units should be decimal and relate to each other in sane ways. If you wanted to create a new system based on the inch, such that the basic unit of mass was the mass of one cubic inch of water, and everything else followed logically, I would be game. Just make it consistent.
Or change the base of our counting system. That's fine too. But until that happens, stick to decimal units of measurement.
scripsit borgdows:
What I want to know is: Are there any car players for OGG? I'd like to find an in-dash CD player that will also handle OGGs on data CDs... Is there any such thing?
Any differences in sound quality aren't going to matter with 80 m.p.h. freeway noise; I'm one who actually cares about free-as-in-speech.
scripsit Anita Coney:
Read: GIF for not making a complete hash out of text and line art.
(PNG is a big step. Just getting people not to JPEG text scans at quality-4 would be a start...)
scripsit tuffy:
Hmm. Looks like a neat toy, but their Web site says it only plays MP3s.
scripsit blowdart:
Sounds like English football fans. Didn't they get England banned a while back?
scripsit fferreres:
rename (the Perl script) is too useful as is to alias rename='mv -i' IMHO, but you could add that if you wanted to.
scripsit skt:
In the interests of comparing apples and apples, he was talking about the default tools. I am sure someone has written a GUI file-finder similar to the Windows `Find'; I just never had any reason to look for it.
scripsit Zeinfeld:
That's very quotable. But before I go sticking it in a sig or something, can you explain what precisely it is you're referring to? (Reconstruction-era U.S. is not my forte.)
scripsit Bearded Pear Shaped:
I thought it was the Ankh-Morpork School of Reflected Sound as of Underground Spirits?
Well, I could also make the argument that some power of two would be a vastly superior base from a mathematical perspective. (And then I'd never have to hear about ``kibibits'' again.) For various reasons, I'm partial to hexadecimal over octal, but either is defensible.
The nice thing about base-twelve is thirds. Thirds just don't work well in base-ten.
However, no predecimal system consistently used base-twelve units. Pounds avoirdupois are base-sixteen, pounds sterling are base-twenty, subdivided by base-twelve, an Imperial pint is twenty ounces, a fathom is six feet, a mile (statute) is 1760 three-foot yards, etc. Had the SI been based on duodecimal units and accompanied by duodecimal notation (like hex but 1-B only, for example) I would enthusiastically embrace it. However, even had they based it on base-seven it would be preferable to the bastard mess still in use in the States.
The calendar certainly was used, quite extensively-- much to the consternation of French historians, because it is (I shan't argue here) a royal (er, republican?) pain in the arse.
I was referring to the decimal clock, for the use of which I have never seen any evidence.
I really hope you're actually Icelandic or Finnish or something, because no one from any Anglophone country outside Africa has any business throwing stones when it comes to ``glorious history''... I was just reading a letter of Napoléon III where he swore that the one thing they wouldn't do in Algeria was exterminate the indigènes like had been done to the American Indians. He made it possible for any Algerian Muslim or Jew to get full French citizenship, at a time when there were still chattel slaves in the U.S.
scripsit LarsWestergren:
I think people from outside the States (and many here) have difficulty grokking the fact that rural Texas and Berkeley, California, are both the U.S. Among Manhattan élites you will get yourself ostracized quickly by making racist jokes or gay bashing, but in Alabama being a gay black man could be dangerous to your health.
scripsit quantaman:
Congratulations, you've just stumbled onto one of the great debates among professional historians. Traditional Marxist orthodoxy holds that everything is deterministic -- in other words, if you know the starting conditions (which are economic) you can predict the outcome. Old-style ``great white men'' political history emphasizes the contingent, the places where things supposedly could have gone either way.
We of this generation are supposedly wiser, and understand that there is usually a bit of both at work...
scripsit feldsteins:
What do you mean no GUI worth a damn? Heretic!
Sheesh, you'd think the guy had never seen twm before...
scripsit HarveyBirdman:
Well, checking the Unicode pages, I find:
So yes, there are. I note, however, that in Zulu orthography the first two and the last can be rendered with x, c, and q, respectively. Cake. See the Latin Extended-B code page.
scripsit fulana_lover:
That's an interesting statement; what it brings to mind is Angola, with right-wing South Africans (U.S. proxy) fighting left-wing Cubans (Soviet proxy)... The Cold War doesn't seem like it helped Angola very much, but I'm sure that's not the model you had in mind.
What sort of opportunity did the Cold War offer Africa, and how did they squanderit?
scripsit EnglishTim:
With OOo 1.0.2 and Mozilla 1.0.0 it works for me (Debian Sarge, XFree86 4.2.1, IceWM 1.2.7). Well, I don't use Mozilla mail (HTML mail == evil) but I can paste into a Mozilla browser text box just fine. If you're sure it's OOo that's the problem (e.g., because you can't copy from OOo to an xterm either), and you've got a reasonably recent OOo version, file a bug! What you're seeing is not normal behavior. You don't mention what distro you're using, but if you find these problems pervasive you might consider that the problem is with your distro and not Linux or X in general.
I can't say anything about that, except that I would expect no less from a Java application... <duck>
scripsit Bob Uhl:
I don't think this part was ever implemented. I've never seen reference to it anywhere else. IIRC even the parliamentary archives I've seen would record, for example, la séance est ouverte à onze heures, i.e. using the twelve-hour clock. I don't have any stuff from the late 1790s at my disposal unfortunately, just 1789-91 and Third Republic. I was just reading the Moniteur universel (official government newspaper) from 1789, however, which is why I thought of the s/f confusion...
I can't imagine, BTW, other than sheer obstinacy, why you would consider the SI units ``insane''... Predecimal stuff is quaint and fun to read about, but I'm glad I don't have to make change in florins, crowns, farthings, etc., just as I wish we could finally get rid of feet, miles, ounces, etc. You can't fully appreciate just how ridiculous English measurement is until you get away from it for a while.
Then again, it seems to be awfully trendy to be blindly bigoted against anything Gallic these days, so maybe that's the reason...
scripsit Bob Uhl:
I don't think this is at all what you meant, but it occurs to me that seconde, as it would have been typeset in Paris in 1789, would look to a modern reader like feconde (damn lameness filter won't let me paste in a real leading-s character...).
scripsit caluml:
Some kind of debate that would be. "You're only allowed to participate in this discussion if you agree with what we tell you to agree with."
No, it's more like saying ``If you're a monarchist, and will keep trying to get a king written in, we don't need you at our constitutional convention.''
scripsit antis0c:
And if you waive your copyright altogether (by placing it in public domain), you cannot take patches from anyone without getting their written waivers of their own copyright. You don't have the right to take away my copyright on my patch. GPL is different because my patch on your GPL'd code must be GPL too, so I don't need to waive anything.
scripsit macshit:
Well, I know for a fact that my taste differs from many people's <grin>
In this regard, I misunderstood your description to be that of the CSS-free version. I don't consider the `remix' page bland; if anything, the orange header is a bit garish IMHO.
The `remix' page seems a bit tighter, but it's not a particularly substantive change. Rather, I think a redesign should do more than change the stylesheets; I'm on the ``less is more'' side of the home-page issue. Vive le Google.
scripsit macshit:
You must be using an obsolete or non-CSS supporting browser. Out of curiosity I looked at it with SGI's OEM NS4.5 under IRIX and it looks like a 1995-era grey-background all-text page -- but is perfectly usable. That's what graceful degradation is about. He's hiding the CSS from you if you've got a FUBAR browser.
scripsit EnglishTim:
I guess I've never come across a program that doesn't understand X copy/paste (i.e., highlight and middle-click). Can you give non-trivial examples?
scripsit IPFreely:
As others have mentioned, it was King David's Spaceship, by Niven and Pournelle.
More importantly, my inner geek wants to point out that it was ``before she burns up on reentry''...
scripsit joe_bruin:
Back in high school, my physics teacher tried out a hoax on our class involving a decision by the SI people to change over to ``metric time.'' This allegedly involved replacing the second with the ``fec,'' which would have the symbol F. Minutes, hours, days, etc., would be replaced by standard SI prefixes on the fec--kF, MF, etc. He apparently did not expect any of his students to know that F was already used for the farad, and he got very upset when I called him on this...
</nostalgia> Anyway, I never knew if this was just something he had cooked up, or if it was also used by other teachers in other schools. Does it sound familiar to anyone?