Machinist's rulers commonly have one side calibrated in 1/10 of inches. The grid size for most 'standard' through-hole electronic components is a 1/10" grid. That's the spacing for DIP IC's.
One hundred pennies in a dollar is not only arbitrary, it's outright incorrect. There are 100 cents in a dollar. I think there were 24 pennies in the old English shilling. (weren't there 12 shillings in a pound?)
Anyway, this points out that, again the United States is well ahead of the rest of the world. We standardized on the Cent (1/100) of a dollar, long before any other part of the world had a modern decimal coinage. Hell, the UK didn't go decimal until the 1960s.
Using a powers-of-ten for all unit shifts is awkward. Lots of things end up measuring in ugly awkward units, because a factor of ten is too coarse for them.
It's almost like the initial buzz one gets when one gets a calculator. The whole bunch of metric system advocates are like the dweeb in science class who records everything to twelve places because his calcuator goes that far, even though he's using instruments with only 3% accuracy.
And these are just a few off-hand issues with the metric system. There are many, many more.
2. A system of measure is for use by people. Therefore it should have historical precedent. A 'cup' is a convenient measure because by human scale it's a typical unit of consumption. Twelve inches in a foot is convenient because it divides evenly by both 3 and by four. How do I divide a meter evenly into thirds??
Why is uniformity important? What do you mean 'uniformity' in the first place? We could standardize on any units of measure agreed upon.
Architects tend to not like suburban development. The very idea of taking a prefabbed structure and replicating it in multiple places goes against one of the cornerstones of good architecture, which is...
bzaaat!.... which is, individually billable blueprints.
Shit, I have more things I regret having said in my youth than you probably ever will.
I once called the University of Minnesota Board of Regents 'motherfuckers' on a bullhorn while standing in the hall outside their monthly meeting.
I once pissed off everybody at a rally because I set the effegy of the university president on fire too soon, and it interrupted 'the message' of somebody's speech.
Hell, I'm painfully thankful that it's possible to delete old posts off the Deja (whatever the hell they call it now. Google?) usenet archive.
Some of us laugh at anybody stupid enough to get a tattoo in the first place.
But it's permament. It shows that I have ideas that actually mean something!
No, in fact it's a desperate way of trying to say something final, that you'll regret some day in the future when you're more mature.
Anybody who is a true nerd is instead pondering the possibility of going back to school. Restorative surgery (to remove body piercing and other mutilations) and tattoo removal are going to be a booming business in less than a decade.
The fact that 'Linux Lands Big Bank Account' is a headline here is evidence enough that the 'migration to Linux' is very, very slow. It's the 'Man bites dog' story, face it. Your triumphant attitude seems a bit hasty.
The 'Microsoft browser' 'One App' solution is kinda what Microsoft wants companies to use. Contrary to all the discussion on this and other OSS forums, Microsoft does not target IIS at the whole Internet. IIS and it's integration with MS Office provides a good way for companies to use 'web technologies' in their internal office systems. Yeesh. I am sounding like a marketing guy from Microsoft now. But it's true. The 'Web Based Interface' is what Netscape claimed was gonna be, it should be no surprise that Microsoft stole that football and ran with it.
What makes you think you have to run OpenWindows on Solaris?
I am running FVWM2 and liking it a lot. Clean, fast, easy to maintain, and there's a binary distribution right on the Sunfreeware server. Sun just started distributing a release candidate GNOME binary distribution, if you like eye candy and don't mind the glacial speed.
I get the benefit of dual headed 24 bit accelerated color on my SS10BSX box. None of the freenixes come close at all to supporting the cgfourteen framebuffers properly.
So, what you're saying is you bought $60K robots from a company that wrote closed source drivers that only run on one growing-old version of Linux. And the company doesn't even exist anymore.
You must be in government, or in a government funded lab, because if there were people at the top worrying about making money they'd be kicking your butt.
Re:Peer 2 Peer killing print publishing??
on
Cringely on P2P
·
· Score: 1
I think the 'work' of his that he's talking about beong 'stolen' is his documentary work. His 'Pirates of Silicon Valley' documentary is available for sale on the PBS website that hosts his column, and he has some other documentary work. If people buy it off the website he collects a royalty. If they download the video from a P2P he gets nothing.
I'm thinking of the future: IPV6, authenticated packets. Routers that drop packets with forged headers, all that good stuff.
The whole it's too cheap to meter arguement falls apart when it becomes cheaper and cheaper to meter. Especially when there are new market players coming on the scene that will like it just fine to vend their wares over metered bandwidth. Those online pay-per-view outfits that loom in the future, for instance.
Re:Cringely is becoming Crufty
on
Cringely on P2P
·
· Score: 1
I just borrowed my friend's Wallace and Grommit VHS tapes and recorded and burned VCDs of them.
It isn't like W&G has the resolution and production quality where a VCD degrades it. But then I am one of those people who looks at the content, instead of obsessing about the quality of the medium. I.e.: there is some great music worth listening to that was recorded with only one microphone.
Hell, I saw somebody selling a compilation of O'Reilly PDFs on Cd right on eBay not long ago. Even had a link on the bid page to his wobbly little web page where he was hawking 'em like a little dickins.
I don't think it was a sustainable effort, though. The site appears to have gone away.
Re:Out of the loop
on
Cringely on P2P
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Per-byte metered bandwidth would do a lot to stop P2P.
Who's gonna want to pay for someone else uploading over their wire?
You're far too partisan a person to be arguing about anybody else's objectivity.
It's fine for you to continue your advocacy. Do it on the merits of what you advocate. Don't be a hypocrite and make unfounded claims about the other side.
The Linux on those WalMart computers, while it seems exciting to the Linux Advocacy community, is a lot like the color bitmap they put inside a picture fram e you buy at the store. Sure, there's probably a hopeless geek somewhere who buys that picture frame and puts it on his desk to pretend it's his girlfriend. But it's just filler to the 'mainstream' just like the Linux installed on the WalMart computers.
And when you go into the store to look at new hardware to buy, you have to dig around and make certian you buy from that little segment of hardware at the store that is well supported by Linux.
Most people just look at the prices, and the features of the gear.
I know. I engaged in 'total immersion Linux use' for over a year, a number of years back. I got enough stuff done. I also saved a lot of money because there were so few do-dads and addins to blow money on. I bought bunches of O'Reilly books, etc. instead.
I'm not fooling myself that the hardware support was there. It wasn't. It's a tricky balancing act running Linux on 'current' hardware. Since I haven't run Linux on my x86 hardware in awhile, I KNOW lots of it isn't supported.
I'd rather run real Unix on Sparc hardware to get my Unix tasks done. It's much nicer (and Ultra 1's are damned cheap these days on eBay)
You must be new here. This is a pretty cultish place. Preaching to the choir and all that.
I used to think Linux was a cool project about software. But so many people whose fundamental thrust is hate-Microsoft have crowded into the room that it's not even very interesting anymore.
Slashdot Mirror
Machinist's rulers commonly have one side calibrated in 1/10 of inches. The grid size for most 'standard' through-hole electronic components is a 1/10" grid. That's the spacing for DIP IC's.
You're the one who is talking about bong hits. I'm just confused. What's a bong hit??
One hundred pennies in a dollar is not only arbitrary, it's outright incorrect. There are 100 cents in a dollar. I think there were 24 pennies in the old English shilling. (weren't there 12 shillings in a pound?)
Anyway, this points out that, again the United States is well ahead of the rest of the world. We standardized on the Cent (1/100) of a dollar, long before any other part of the world had a modern decimal coinage. Hell, the UK didn't go decimal until the 1960s.
Why does the metric system make a lot of sense?
Using a powers-of-ten for all unit shifts is awkward. Lots of things end up measuring in ugly awkward units, because a factor of ten is too coarse for them.
It's almost like the initial buzz one gets when one gets a calculator. The whole bunch of metric system advocates are like the dweeb in science class who records everything to twelve places because his calcuator goes that far, even though he's using instruments with only 3% accuracy.
And these are just a few off-hand issues with the metric system. There are many, many more.
1. Water isn't an element.
2. A system of measure is for use by people. Therefore it should have historical precedent. A 'cup' is a convenient measure because by human scale it's a typical unit of consumption. Twelve inches in a foot is convenient because it divides evenly by both 3 and by four. How do I divide a meter evenly into thirds??
Why is uniformity important? What do you mean 'uniformity' in the first place? We could standardize on any units of measure agreed upon.
bzaaat!
Shit, I have more things I regret having said in my youth than you probably ever will.
I once called the University of Minnesota Board of Regents 'motherfuckers' on a bullhorn while standing in the hall outside their monthly meeting.
I once pissed off everybody at a rally because I set the effegy of the university president on fire too soon, and it interrupted 'the message' of somebody's speech.
Hell, I'm painfully thankful that it's possible to delete old posts off the Deja (whatever the hell they call it now. Google?) usenet archive.
It's 'brave' to get a tattoo? Good god.
Pardon me, but sitting here living in this inexpensive but nice house I have that was built in 1900, this all sounds like Trailer Park stuff.
Some of us laugh at anybody stupid enough to get a tattoo in the first place.
But it's permament. It shows that I have ideas that actually mean something!
No, in fact it's a desperate way of trying to say something final, that you'll regret some day in the future when you're more mature.
Anybody who is a true nerd is instead pondering the possibility of going back to school. Restorative surgery (to remove body piercing and other mutilations) and tattoo removal are going to be a booming business in less than a decade.
The fact that 'Linux Lands Big Bank Account' is a headline here is evidence enough that the 'migration to Linux' is very, very slow. It's the 'Man bites dog' story, face it. Your triumphant attitude seems a bit hasty.
The 'Microsoft browser' 'One App' solution is kinda what Microsoft wants companies to use. Contrary to all the discussion on this and other OSS forums, Microsoft does not target IIS at the whole Internet. IIS and it's integration with MS Office provides a good way for companies to use 'web technologies' in their internal office systems. Yeesh. I am sounding like a marketing guy from Microsoft now. But it's true. The 'Web Based Interface' is what Netscape claimed was gonna be, it should be no surprise that Microsoft stole that football and ran with it.
What makes you think you have to run OpenWindows on Solaris?
I am running FVWM2 and liking it a lot. Clean, fast, easy to maintain, and there's a binary distribution right on the Sunfreeware server. Sun just started distributing a release candidate GNOME binary distribution, if you like eye candy and don't mind the glacial speed.
I get the benefit of dual headed 24 bit accelerated color on my SS10BSX box. None of the freenixes come close at all to supporting the cgfourteen framebuffers properly.
So, what you're saying is you bought $60K robots from a company that wrote closed source drivers that only run on one growing-old version of Linux. And the company doesn't even exist anymore.
You must be in government, or in a government funded lab, because if there were people at the top worrying about making money they'd be kicking your butt.
I think the 'work' of his that he's talking about beong 'stolen' is his documentary work. His 'Pirates of Silicon Valley' documentary is available for sale on the PBS website that hosts his column, and he has some other documentary work. If people buy it off the website he collects a royalty. If they download the video from a P2P he gets nothing.
I'm thinking of the future: IPV6, authenticated packets. Routers that drop packets with forged headers, all that good stuff.
The whole it's too cheap to meter arguement falls apart when it becomes cheaper and cheaper to meter. Especially when there are new market players coming on the scene that will like it just fine to vend their wares over metered bandwidth. Those online pay-per-view outfits that loom in the future, for instance.
I just borrowed my friend's Wallace and Grommit VHS tapes and recorded and burned VCDs of them.
It isn't like W&G has the resolution and production quality where a VCD degrades it. But then I am one of those people who looks at the content, instead of obsessing about the quality of the medium. I.e.: there is some great music worth listening to that was recorded with only one microphone.
Hell, I saw somebody selling a compilation of O'Reilly PDFs on Cd right on eBay not long ago. Even had a link on the bid page to his wobbly little web page where he was hawking 'em like a little dickins.
I don't think it was a sustainable effort, though. The site appears to have gone away.
Per-byte metered bandwidth would do a lot to stop P2P.
Who's gonna want to pay for someone else uploading over their wire?
Well, that about sums up the basis of faith of a lot of religious zealots, too. They had a 'visitation' and/or witnessed a miracle.
So you're in fine company with a bunch of people with rosary beads who saw blood drip from a statue.
Dude,
You're far too partisan a person to be arguing about anybody else's objectivity.
It's fine for you to continue your advocacy. Do it on the merits of what you advocate. Don't be a hypocrite and make unfounded claims about the other side.
YAP (Yet Another Phoenix) also lacks the form and finish they are probably looking for. But it certainly follows a certain naming tradition.
The Linux on those WalMart computers, while it seems exciting to the Linux Advocacy community, is a lot like the color bitmap they put inside a picture fram e you buy at the store. Sure, there's probably a hopeless geek somewhere who buys that picture frame and puts it on his desk to pretend it's his girlfriend. But it's just filler to the 'mainstream' just like the Linux installed on the WalMart computers.
then download the Kernel and role your own, thats the beauty of Open Source.
That's also one of the real problems with Linux.
Forks, forks. Everywhere forks.
It drives a lot of us out of Linux and to the BSDs and even *gasp* commercial Unix. I for one run only Solaris and NetBSD anymore on my Unix systems.
And when you go into the store to look at new hardware to buy, you have to dig around and make certian you buy from that little segment of hardware at the store that is well supported by Linux.
Most people just look at the prices, and the features of the gear.
I know. I engaged in 'total immersion Linux use' for over a year, a number of years back. I got enough stuff done. I also saved a lot of money because there were so few do-dads and addins to blow money on. I bought bunches of O'Reilly books, etc. instead.
I'm not fooling myself that the hardware support was there. It wasn't. It's a tricky balancing act running Linux on 'current' hardware. Since I haven't run Linux on my x86 hardware in awhile, I KNOW lots of it isn't supported.
I'd rather run real Unix on Sparc hardware to get my Unix tasks done. It's much nicer (and Ultra 1's are damned cheap these days on eBay)
You must be new here. This is a pretty cultish place. Preaching to the choir and all that.
I used to think Linux was a cool project about software. But so many people whose fundamental thrust is hate-Microsoft have crowded into the room that it's not even very interesting anymore.