Global in the sense that both spellings are accurate and accepted, except by a few uptight assholes who use it as an excuse to piss all over Americans.
Accepted by who? Americans. Look in any non-American dictionary. And in Australia, you'd say "arseholes" not "assholes".
If you're in Australia, spell Australian and drive on the left. If you're in America drive on the right and spell American. If you want to disown your own culture, that's up to you. I suppose Howard is leading the way there.
Be sure to keep an up to date list of the companies you work for somewhere in the public domain. I, for one, suddenly have a strong urge to make sure you are nowhere near anything I plan to buy/use/depend on.
Selective quotation, or short attention span? You omitted the qualifictions I made. I'm not talking about a buggy air traffic control system, more like a typo in documentation. Also, I'm describing the real world.
Yeah, and denying you were wrong works _SO_ much better
As long as you can remove any evidence, yes. Or I was actually thinking of mistakes where no one else has or is likely to notice; if you can't fix it (as in a shipped product) it's really not going to help anyone, especially you, to admit it. (I'm not talking about actual dangerous flaws, of course, more cosmetic errors, typos, etc.)
as a tech person, i've always spelled using american spelling. however, my english teacher used to always pick on my use of 'color' instead of 'colour'. he was a typical brit - end of story. not open to accepting the global sense of english.
Global/= American, unless you're an American. (Speaking as an Australian who has travelled some.)
Phillipines were not an american colony but
spanish ! Hence, they are not part of the Commonwealth
After the Spanish-American War in 1898 and until WWII, the Phillipines was an American colony. Also, "Commonwealth" refers to the British Commonwealth, basically most of the current and former British possesions, except the US. Countries where they play cricket rather than baseball.
well, according to google [google.com], the difference is about 10%... hardly negligible
Ah yes... I was thinking Imperial tons (2240 lbs = 1016kg), as I learnt in primary school, not US (2000 lbs). We could also mention fluid measure (ounces, pints, quarts, gallons) which also have varying US and Imperial definitions. I'm so glad I don't have to worry about that stuff now. (I still remember 63360 inches to a mile.)
In the UK they're still forcing shops to measure in metric, and all sorts of things like that. Road signs, on the other hand, they've made no real effort to change. I can only imagine it's partly expense, and partly safety... although I can only imagine people slowing down with metric signs really, as the numbers would seem bigger in the short term.
That's why you have to bite the bullet and make the conversion complete. When you have nothing to remind you of the old units, you soon start thinking metric (as ungrammatic as "think differetn", but that's slogans for you).
Road signs were one of the easiest conversions. Either just unscrew and replace, or respray and/or sticker in situ. At least initially, all the new signs have a prominent "km" or "kph" to make it clear. For car speedos you could go to a garage and have a gearwheel changed so it clocked up in km, should be a setup option for digital ones I expect.
n the United States of America, many of us would consider that kind of broad government intervention to be a very great cost indeed.
I'd be amazed if you didn't already have some kind of weights-and measures authority, or even several. The National Institute of Standards, perhaps? Who certifies that weights of goods are correct? Who determines what units are used in school teaching? And weather predictions and road signs, to take a couple of examples, are already produced by govt bodies.
I think I can put a spin on this, though, like so:
Good for you. (No sarcasm intended.) But in my personal experience, admitting errors never evokes respect (no matter what your Sunday School teacher might have told you) and pointing out mistakes your boss has made is a mark against you, the more so if it's of the "potatoe" style obvious-to-a-schoolchild one.
A bit offtopic... I know a lot of folks here will go on about "what is wrong with the US that they won't go metric?" and it comes down to "everything is English, it'll cost too much to convert." Especially heavy manufacturing machinery.
We did that in Australia in the 1970s. Costs very little if you phase it in over a couple of years, natural maintenance and replacement takes care of most of it, then you get strict to force the last holdouts over (eg the weights and measures refuse to certify shop balances if they're calibrated in Imperial; weather reports stop giving Fahrenheit, car speedos are only in KPH). A couple of years later, you're living in a metric country. Kids only learn imperial units in passing, as a curiosity, or by osmosis from old books or American movies. Heavy machinery, screw threads and a few other things that you really do need to keep backwardly compatible take longer, but as old machinery eventually is replaced it slowly moves over. However, I wouldn't be surprised to find that most heavy machinery was originally designed to metric specs and just needs some gauges and labels replaced to be fully compliant. Consider the auto industry uses components from all over the world, and the rest of the world is metric.
Good point, but actually tons are a metric unit. One ton is 1000Kg
Usually speled "tonne" to make it clear.
It always bothered me in Star Trek when Spock would be reading off sensors of some object and say "5 million metric tons". Unless you go to 3 significant figures, it doesn't matter which kind of ton(ne); and in the 24th century I rather hope the imperial ton has gone the way of the cubit.
Dude, read the blurb again. It matters because the poster was Dan Birchall. Don't you know who that is? He's the head of NASA's mars probe program...
And it matters because in the linked blog he gives a long list of incorrect conversion factors from supposedly authoritative sources. I doubt he actually submitted the article; the Slashdot summary just makes him out to be an idiot who can't do simple arithmetic.
Calling it a recall is an excellent idea. Convincing MS and stores to handle things that way is something else entirely. Anything that cuts into margin just ain't going to happen.
I think it could, if the alternative is pissed off cutomers who insist on returning "Internet ready" PCs becasue they self-destruct the first time they try to use them. Geeks look for the cheapest and best hardware, put it together and install their own software. Non-geeks buy the whole package from a retailer, and pay extra for the privilege of not having to worry about setting it up. There is nothing wrong with this attitude, but the retailers have to make sure that what they sell actually does what they claim or imply it will do.
Of course, the best solution for a non-geek is a Macintosh. Costs more up front but considering what people are willing to spend for extras on, say, a car, it's pocket change for a quantum leap in reliability.
Re:But why would non-geeks want to run Linux?
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Linux for Non-Geeks
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Buy a new Windows computer and out of the box, it *cannot* be safely hooked up to the Internet to get the patches
If it's a "new" Windows PC, XP has a firewall built in. Turn it on. Then download the patches. Or, again, as it's "new", ask the retailer to show you how to do this, and either to patch it before you take it home &/or supply a CDR of the current patches (the "network install" free from MS's update site). If you want to think of your PC as an appliance, fine, treat problems with it the same way you would with your refrigerator, if it breaks the first day ask the dealer to fix it.
Re:But why would non-geeks want to run Linux?
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Linux for Non-Geeks
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· Score: 1
The average time between connection to the ISP and a Blaster hit was 8 seconds. Nimda was 2 and a half minutes. (Times are from a little less than a year ago) How is a non-geek going to protect a Windows system from that?
Why do you think Symantec is such a big player? I see their suites bundled with a lot of new machines, at least as much as MSOffice. Shold be safe out of the box. It nags you to get updates, or probably can do it unattended. Otherwise, one of several software firewalls (eg ZoneAlarm, which has a free version if you spend a minute to find it) are easy to set up (even for a non-geek) and stop most of these direct attacks.
For some reason new computer users (windows/linux/otherwise) always just click away at whatever button is the closest to their mouse. It comes down to them not understanding, not caring, and just wanting the damn popup to go away.
About 10 years ago we had a book shop with a database Point-of-sale system, that included details of about 20,000 books. Because this database was incredibly valuable to the business I'd set up a daily backup program (which involved 5 sets of floppies, just press the menu selection to start and feed the floppies in), and a Norton Disk Doctor check on every boot.
After making sure the staff understood how to use this I felt content. A few months later I got a call that thy had problems, the system was failing somehow. So I went back, booted, and saw an incredible number of disk errors. The staff said this was "normal", had been happening for weeks, and by pressing Escape the error messages would go away. Pulled out my hair a bit then, wondering why they had never mentioned this to me when it happened. So it turned out that the hard disk had some bad sectors. OK, so restore the backups to another PC. All 5 sets (Mon, Tue, Wed, Thurs, Fri) were corrupt, as they data had gone bad over a week earlier and the "good" sets had been overwritten, the entire database was lost. The staff went back to ringing up sales by hand. The shop went out of business soon after (sales were terrible; would have happened anyway.)
Actually, the reason for a blanket block on all mail from.cn and South America is a result of not finding a single responsible ISP in the continent.
Rubbish
1)China is not a continent.
2)You never hear about the "responsible" ones, because they don't get complaints. There are enough who willingly host spammers, and others that don't know or care how to block them, but that by no means includes every ISP.
Moreover, most major blocklist sites (like SPEWS)
I wasn't talking about SPEWS.
It seems as though you realise that you've lost the argument on blocking entire spam-friendly ISPs
Who was talking about blocking spam friendly ISPs?
What if the company or ISP has polled users and determined that no legitimate mail is coming from that country?
Fine. But have you ever heard of such a poll being taken? And how long are the results considered valid for? Was it framed as "Should we block known spammers?" or as a list of ISPs affected?
>Imagine you are living in a place where you have a choice of two and two only broadband ISPs.
Go with something other than broadband. Send your mail through some other server.
Brilliant. I thought of that. I do it. It's a real pain, and costs me money and time. I could always print it out and post my messages too.
Call your recipient and ask them to whitelist your IP address.
I tried that. They don't have the authority.
There are plenty of alternatives. There's no reason I should be inundated with spam because your ISP is unethical.
In case you didn't read the post you're replying to, MY ISP DIDN'T DO ANYTHING UNETHICAL. It just happens to be in the same country as one that might have, some years ago.
As for being inundated with spam, 95% of my spam is from Americans. You know who they are: 140 out of the 180 in ROKSO are American. Get your own house in order.
Why would Americans be blocking traffic based upon geographic location?
Every time spam comes up you'll find a bunch of posts advocating polcies like "banning.cn..kr..tw" etc, on the grounds that 1) they don't know anyone there and 2) they get a lot of spam from these TLDs. If their personal mail, go ahead. If it affects a company or an ISP, it's another thing.
The problem with spam is it's much harder to catch spammers than illegally polluting factories
No, it's pretty easy. If a spammer is selling something, he has to have a way to receive payment. In the story linked, the spammer simply directed people to directly deposit into his bank account (in Holland). He mentioned he got a lot of abusive phone calls after each spam run, so he wasn't hard to find. The problem is that individually each spammer is below the threshold to trigger action by authorities, like the FBI, that catch fraudsters etc. If they decided to make an effort and catch and prosecute some of these small spammers that would have the "heads on stakes" effect elsewhere advocated. Govts just don't care, and are heavily influenced by direct marketers to keep it that way. There's some hope though, since the "Do not call" legislation finally was enacted against similar lobbying.
Slashdot Mirror
Accepted by who? Americans. Look in any non-American dictionary. And in Australia, you'd say "arseholes" not "assholes".
If you're in Australia, spell Australian and drive on the left. If you're in America drive on the right and spell American. If you want to disown your own culture, that's up to you. I suppose Howard is leading the way there.
Selective quotation, or short attention span? You omitted the qualifictions I made. I'm not talking about a buggy air traffic control system, more like a typo in documentation. Also, I'm describing the real world.
Other posts have stated that signs are still in miles. If both are true, you must have to do a lot of mental math while you're driving.
As long as you can remove any evidence, yes. Or I was actually thinking of mistakes where no one else has or is likely to notice; if you can't fix it (as in a shipped product) it's really not going to help anyone, especially you, to admit it. (I'm not talking about actual dangerous flaws, of course, more cosmetic errors, typos, etc.)
Global /= American, unless you're an American. (Speaking as an Australian who has travelled some.)
After the Spanish-American War in 1898 and until WWII, the Phillipines was an American colony. Also, "Commonwealth" refers to the British Commonwealth, basically most of the current and former British possesions, except the US. Countries where they play cricket rather than baseball.
I don't think so.
Search at The Age: "Sorry, no articles matching color were found"
Search at The Age: "You searched for colour and found 30 matches"
Ah yes ... I was thinking Imperial tons (2240 lbs = 1016kg), as I learnt in primary school, not US (2000 lbs). We could also mention fluid measure (ounces, pints, quarts, gallons) which also have varying US and Imperial definitions. I'm so glad I don't have to worry about that stuff now. (I still remember 63360 inches to a mile.)
That's why you have to bite the bullet and make the conversion complete. When you have nothing to remind you of the old units, you soon start thinking metric (as ungrammatic as "think differetn", but that's slogans for you).
Road signs were one of the easiest conversions. Either just unscrew and replace, or respray and/or sticker in situ. At least initially, all the new signs have a prominent "km" or "kph" to make it clear. For car speedos you could go to a garage and have a gearwheel changed so it clocked up in km, should be a setup option for digital ones I expect.
I'd be amazed if you didn't already have some kind of weights-and measures authority, or even several. The National Institute of Standards, perhaps? Who certifies that weights of goods are correct? Who determines what units are used in school teaching? And weather predictions and road signs, to take a couple of examples, are already produced by govt bodies.
Good for you. (No sarcasm intended.) But in my personal experience, admitting errors never evokes respect (no matter what your Sunday School teacher might have told you) and pointing out mistakes your boss has made is a mark against you, the more so if it's of the "potatoe" style obvious-to-a-schoolchild one.
Well, I hope your boss doesn't read Slashdot...
We did that in Australia in the 1970s. Costs very little if you phase it in over a couple of years, natural maintenance and replacement takes care of most of it, then you get strict to force the last holdouts over (eg the weights and measures refuse to certify shop balances if they're calibrated in Imperial; weather reports stop giving Fahrenheit, car speedos are only in KPH). A couple of years later, you're living in a metric country. Kids only learn imperial units in passing, as a curiosity, or by osmosis from old books or American movies. Heavy machinery, screw threads and a few other things that you really do need to keep backwardly compatible take longer, but as old machinery eventually is replaced it slowly moves over. However, I wouldn't be surprised to find that most heavy machinery was originally designed to metric specs and just needs some gauges and labels replaced to be fully compliant. Consider the auto industry uses components from all over the world, and the rest of the world is metric.
Some American colony, like the Phillipines, perhaps? I think every Commonwealth country follows "metre" officially.
Usually speled "tonne" to make it clear.
It always bothered me in Star Trek when Spock would be reading off sensors of some object and say "5 million metric tons". Unless you go to 3 significant figures, it doesn't matter which kind of ton(ne); and in the 24th century I rather hope the imperial ton has gone the way of the cubit.
And it matters because in the linked blog he gives a long list of incorrect conversion factors from supposedly authoritative sources. I doubt he actually submitted the article; the Slashdot summary just makes him out to be an idiot who can't do simple arithmetic.
As he's apparently British, he can't spell "metre" either.
I think it could, if the alternative is pissed off cutomers who insist on returning "Internet ready" PCs becasue they self-destruct the first time they try to use them. Geeks look for the cheapest and best hardware, put it together and install their own software. Non-geeks buy the whole package from a retailer, and pay extra for the privilege of not having to worry about setting it up. There is nothing wrong with this attitude, but the retailers have to make sure that what they sell actually does what they claim or imply it will do.
Of course, the best solution for a non-geek is a Macintosh. Costs more up front but considering what people are willing to spend for extras on, say, a car, it's pocket change for a quantum leap in reliability.
If it's a "new" Windows PC, XP has a firewall built in. Turn it on. Then download the patches. Or, again, as it's "new", ask the retailer to show you how to do this, and either to patch it before you take it home &/or supply a CDR of the current patches (the "network install" free from MS's update site). If you want to think of your PC as an appliance, fine, treat problems with it the same way you would with your refrigerator, if it breaks the first day ask the dealer to fix it.
Why do you think Symantec is such a big player? I see their suites bundled with a lot of new machines, at least as much as MSOffice. Shold be safe out of the box. It nags you to get updates, or probably can do it unattended. Otherwise, one of several software firewalls (eg ZoneAlarm, which has a free version if you spend a minute to find it) are easy to set up (even for a non-geek) and stop most of these direct attacks.
About 10 years ago we had a book shop with a database Point-of-sale system, that included details of about 20,000 books. Because this database was incredibly valuable to the business I'd set up a daily backup program (which involved 5 sets of floppies, just press the menu selection to start and feed the floppies in), and a Norton Disk Doctor check on every boot.
After making sure the staff understood how to use this I felt content. A few months later I got a call that thy had problems, the system was failing somehow. So I went back, booted, and saw an incredible number of disk errors. The staff said this was "normal", had been happening for weeks, and by pressing Escape the error messages would go away. Pulled out my hair a bit then, wondering why they had never mentioned this to me when it happened. So it turned out that the hard disk had some bad sectors. OK, so restore the backups to another PC. All 5 sets (Mon, Tue, Wed, Thurs, Fri) were corrupt, as they data had gone bad over a week earlier and the "good" sets had been overwritten, the entire database was lost. The staff went back to ringing up sales by hand. The shop went out of business soon after (sales were terrible; would have happened anyway.)
Rubbish
1)China is not a continent.
2)You never hear about the "responsible" ones, because they don't get complaints. There are enough who willingly host spammers, and others that don't know or care how to block them, but that by no means includes every ISP.
Moreover, most major blocklist sites (like SPEWS)
I wasn't talking about SPEWS.
It seems as though you realise that you've lost the argument on blocking entire spam-friendly ISPs
Who was talking about blocking spam friendly ISPs?
What if the company or ISP has polled users and determined that no legitimate mail is coming from that country?
Fine. But have you ever heard of such a poll being taken? And how long are the results considered valid for? Was it framed as "Should we block known spammers?" or as a list of ISPs affected?
Go with something other than broadband. Send your mail through some other server.
Brilliant. I thought of that. I do it. It's a real pain, and costs me money and time. I could always print it out and post my messages too.
Call your recipient and ask them to whitelist your IP address.
I tried that. They don't have the authority.
There are plenty of alternatives. There's no reason I should be inundated with spam because your ISP is unethical.
In case you didn't read the post you're replying to, MY ISP DIDN'T DO ANYTHING UNETHICAL. It just happens to be in the same country as one that might have, some years ago.
As for being inundated with spam, 95% of my spam is from Americans. You know who they are: 140 out of the 180 in ROKSO are American. Get your own house in order.
Every time spam comes up you'll find a bunch of posts advocating polcies like "banning .cn. .kr. .tw" etc, on the grounds that 1) they don't know anyone there and 2) they get a lot of spam from these TLDs. If their personal mail, go ahead. If it affects a company or an ISP, it's another thing.
No, it's pretty easy. If a spammer is selling something, he has to have a way to receive payment. In the story linked, the spammer simply directed people to directly deposit into his bank account (in Holland). He mentioned he got a lot of abusive phone calls after each spam run, so he wasn't hard to find. The problem is that individually each spammer is below the threshold to trigger action by authorities, like the FBI, that catch fraudsters etc. If they decided to make an effort and catch and prosecute some of these small spammers that would have the "heads on stakes" effect elsewhere advocated. Govts just don't care, and are heavily influenced by direct marketers to keep it that way. There's some hope though, since the "Do not call" legislation finally was enacted against similar lobbying.