If you want to be like that, a candle also runs on potential energy (in this case, chemical potential energy, stored in C-H and C-C bonds in hydrocarbon wax).
No. It's mass * gravitational acceleration * height, not mass * speed * height.
Your 10 000 kg. of concrete falling under gravity (at 10 m/sec) through a distance of 1 metre would produce 100 000 J of energy.
The weight won't actually pick up the full 10 m/s every second because some of the PE it lost on the way down is being used elsewhere and so isn't available as KE, but it's still subject to that amount of acceleration.
Put it another way: You'd have to do 100000J of Work to get it up there, no matter how slowly it came down.
This makes a lot of sense, in a perverse kind of way.
I've always said that piracy doesn't damage the people whose products are pirated. Think about it this way: John Thomas wants a lightweight office suite to write letters, do his accounts and keep track of his music collection. In a world where there is no piracy and no Open Source, he could buy Microsoft Office for £500, or he could buy something called CheapOffice for £50 and save £450. Or -- if we bring piracy into the equation -- he could pirate Microsoft Office and save £500, or he could pirate CheapOffice and save £50. It's a no-brainer: he is going to pirate Microsoft Office. Multiply that by all the John Thomases out there and the makers of CheapOffice end up going out of business, entirely due to piracy -- and yet nobody ever has to make one single pirate copy of CheapOffice!
Now factor in Open Source software, which costs nothing (until you need help with it). John Thomas could get OpenOffice.org for nothing, again saving £500 vs. the cost of Microsoft Office. But the modern manifestation of the caveman hunter-gatherer instinct says "paying full price for something is cheating". If you pay nothing for OpenOffice.org, which costs nothing, you're effectively paying the full price. Whereas if you pay nothing for Microsoft Office, which costs £500, you're paying £500 less than the full price.
Large businesses aren't so driven by primitive instincts. They could choose between Microsoft Office, CheapOffice and OpenOffice.org on their own merits. Microsoft, however, play dirty tricks: they keep the file formats used by Office a closely-guarded secret, thus preserving an unfair advantage over CheapOffice and OpenOffice.org (who have to rely on a process akin to trying to learn to speak French by sitting in a café in Paris, listening to what people ask for and seeing what they get given). They also spread Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt about the legality of using products whose authors have given their blessing to the world to distribute them far and wide and use them often.
On the other hand, I see a photo posted somewhere on the net and I can run my software to see if it is really mine.
On the third hand, someone gets hold of a photo taken by you, runs it through exiv2 to remove the data that shows it was yours, posts it on the net and you have no way to see if it really was yours.
And if they have a version with the metadata removed, they have a lot more explaining to do
Image-processing software routinely strips out "excess baggage" from images. Proprietary image-processing software can't resist putting in some of its own.
But surely if this player was released to market less than a year ago, then that means any example of this player is less than a year old -- which means by law it must still be covered under the manufacturer's guarantee.
Treat the player as faulty, and take it back to the store where it was purchased. Take the disc that it won't play, and show that it works on another player (which is bound to be a different model). Make very sure that you know your rights under the law (print them out if necessary), because sales assistants are generally full of s#!t despite the fact that it is us poor sods who pay their wages.
As much as 80% of e-mail that purports to be from leading brands, banks and ISPs is spoofed, according to a report released in late January by the Authentication and Online Trust Alliance (AOTA).
You really think it's as little as that?
I'd be very surprised if it was any less than 98% fake.
You'd think so, wouldn't you? But if you run lilo from within a chroot (ext3 / ext2 file system), it doesn't seem to affect the boot block straightaway: if you reboot straight after running lilo without exiting the chroot, you still get LI. If you exit the chroot and then reboot, it works.
Strictly speaking, the foregoing should be in the past tense, because I haven't had it happen to me for awhile. And maybe that behaviour was confined to the versions of kernel, lilo and chroot we were using then. At any rate, one extra press of ctrl+D and the forced sync that follows (and which would have had to be done anyway, just as part of the "main" sync due to rebooting rather than separately) is a small price to pay for having it work everytime.
2. No one uses lilo for at least five years now.
Unless they were already using lilo before grub became popular, and decided to stick with something that wasn't broken and didn't need fixing.....
About 90% of copies of Windows out there are pirated, and so won't be auto-updated. Of the 10% of copies out there that are genuine, about 90% belong to clueless users who won't bother to use the automatic update service. That leaves probably about 1% of the total number of Windows boxes out there likely to get updated.
Also, the ADSL router must be programmed to forward ports. Even if a daemon is running on a Linux box, there's no guarantee that it can be seen from the outside world.
Don't the staff in your co-lo already know the procedure for dealing with LI inside-out? Boot from nearest available CD with a kernel on it, make a mountpoint, mount usual / partition there, chroot into it, run lilo (which doesn't actually alter boot block yet, just makes record in cache), exit chroot environment (to force decaching, now boot block gets written: if you reboot from while you are still within the chroot, the boot block may not be changed and you will have to repeat the procedure) and reboot.
We've all forgotten to run lilo -- anyone who says they haven't probably hasn't compiled and installed a kernel. And that's why decent co-location facilities have people on hand, 24*7*52.
Given the ease of getting a ready-compiled compiler anyway, there's not a lot of point in not leaving a compiler on a machine where you might occasionally have to compile something. It's just cutting off your balls to annoy your dick. If someone has got into your machine, you're already shafted. Not having a compiler around is really only delaying the inevitable.
What would be a bit more interesting would be if you had a special hacked kernel/GCC combo, so that your kernel would only run binaries that had been created with your special GCC. And even then, it's probably enough to keep the "occasional use only" stuff on a partition that is usually kept unmounted. (Especially if you had a specially-hacked fdisk binary that would not report the existence of this partition and kept the real fdisk in your "occasional use only" space.)
The point in favor of OSS is that (1) there are several people, independent of the original author and independent of one another, who are in a position to discover any potential exploit; (2) whoever discovers an exploit has no good reason not to announce it straight away; and (3) discoveries tend to happen in parallel anyway (vide the almost simultaneous invention of the filament light bulb by Joseph Swan and Thomas Edison, or the telephone by Alexander Graham Bell and Elisha Grey, inter alia); so even if the first person to discover an exploit doesn't announce it, the second person to discover it might well announce it.
Whereas if you had one of those trendy microkernel thingies, you'd basically end up giving userspace programs unfettered access to hardware. Remind me again, how that is better than performing basic sanity checking within kernel space?
The only way that the computer-using public can be properly protected from the most egregious excesses of the computer industry is for Government to mandate that every piece of computer software must be supplied with Source Code, or not at all.
Just because you get the Source Code doesn't mean you would have to get distribution rights (see PGP usage licence, Skype / Flash developers' licences and pre-GPL Java licences for examples of licences which grant access to Source Code while restricting distribution). And lack of Source Code hasn't done much to stop Office and Windows from being pirated.
Mandatory provision of Source Code would enable third party code auditing, which is important from the user's perspective. A whole secondary industry could grow up around auditing code and supplying upgrades (and these companies would be ideally placed to monitor licence compliance; in fact, for them to supply upgrades to improperly-licenced software would constitute Aiding and Abetting piracy. There's already a non-computer parallel: try and buy a TV set from a high street vendor without some sort of evidence that you have a fully paid-up TV licence).
No doubt there will be howls of protest from software vendors, who have been getting away for far too long with shipping inferior product under the disguise afforded by not supplying the Source Code. Fuck what they think. Users outnumber vendors, and the needs of the many must outweigh the whims and caprices of the few.
That'd be one way to do it. Another way would be to introduce compulsory and non-discriminatory licencing. That way, if Nintendo ever got a bit sloppy, somebody else would be guaranteed the right to make a console which could play existing Wii games. Not that anybody would be likely to at first, because the Nintendo brand is going to be all over the promotional materials -- there's being late to the party, and then there's the stragglers mistaking you for the cab they ordered. But a few stories of Wiis catching fire or blowing LOpTs in TV sets or freezing up in mid-game would stir up interest among third parties, and the "not buying the same make again" factor would work against Nintendo.
I think the knowledge that a big enough balls-up could ruin them if they mishandled it would keep manufacturers on their toes. At the moment, there is little to no incentive for a monopolist not to exploit the very people who pay their wages. To my mind, the existence of that monopoly is a privilege -- and a privilege can be withdrawn if it is abused.
In the software world, I think it would be enough to mandate the supply of Source Code with software. Probably not with distribution rights, but be brutally honest: the lack of Source Code hasn't really done much to cut down on piracy of Windows and Office. But a user's rights to inspect software they have bought and paid for, and to modify it so as to better suit their requirements, should be protected by law. The needs of the many (users) outweigh the whims and caprices of the few (vendors). It also creates a nice healthy secondary industry: third-party developers creating plugins for software to fix problems created by the vendors.
Product unreliability ordinarily doesn't benefit manufacturers, because most consumers are smart enough not to buy the same make next time; but the situation is inverted when the manufacturer of the unreliable products holds a monopoly. And sometimes it doesn't even need to be a full monopoly: you can have several players ostensibly competing in a free market. But that freedom is often just an illusion.
Think about it: If John Thomas's Panasonic stereo breaks, and he already has lots of CDs, he might buy a Philips next time -- after all, it will plug into the same mains socket and play all the same discs. If John Thomas's Glow-worm boiler packs up in the middle of winter, he might replace it with a Worcester or Baxi boiler -- which will use the same gas and electricity, and plumb in just fine to his existing radiators and hot water system. If John Thomas's Ford Focus breaks down one time too many, he might trade it in for a Vauxhall Astra -- it will use the same fuel and can be driven on the same roads.
But if John Thomas's Wii breaks, and he already owns several Wii games, he has precious little choice but to buy another one from Nintendo. The games may well have cost more than the console -- it would be a waste not to have anything on which to play them.
Despite outward appearances, Nintendo, Sony and Microsoft aren't really competing in a free market; because their products are not interchangeable in practice -- unlike CD players, gas boilers or cars. Once you have invested in a game on one platform, it can only be used on that platform -- you can't replace your Wii with a PS3 and take your games across. And if you ask the vendors to replace your Wii games with PS3 equivalents, they'll laugh at you. (A store will probably exchange a few unopened games bought in ignorance as a gift for someone who has a different console than you thought; but even then it's technically ex gratia, not a statutory right.)
And if John Thomas's copy of Microsoft Word pisses him off one time too many, and he has many documents already in.doc format that he needs to be able to access, he can't replace it with anything else and still be sure that his documents will render correctly. Even worse, if his sister Fanny buys a brand new computer that comes with a brand new version of Word, John's copy now most probably won't be able to read documents saved by Fanny in future (unless she saves them as an older version, which is deliberately made awkward and throws up dire warnings) -- so he is all but forced to buy his own new copy of Microsoft Word.
None of my measuring devices read like that.
oz. - lbs.
fl.oz. - quarts, pints
inches - feet
Then I respectfully suggest that you go out and buy some new measuring instruments (or start using the other numbers on the ones you already have).
An inch is about as long as the first segment of your index finger. A foot is around the lenght of your foot. etc.
Which is still fucking bollocks. An inch is too big to be any use, and a foot is too small to be of any use. A centimetre is about the width of a fingernail, which gives you a reasonable resolution even sticking to whole numbers; and a metre is about as far as you can comfortably hold your hands apart (or -- you aren't seeing what I've just seen, so you probably won't get this -- a double pace in a tight goth skirt), which is actually big enough to be useful. Also, a ratio of 100:1 is easy to visualise; and when you do the maths on a calculator, the fractions of a metre expressed in decimal notation and rounded to two or three places give you excess centimetres or millimetres. Or, hundreds of centimetres (or thousands of millimetres) give you metres.
Or let me put it this way: I'll have finished marking all the positions of my shelves and gone and put the kettle on for a brew, while you're still twatting about, converting fractions of a foot to inches and decimals of an inch to sixteenths.
How would anyone ever manage to drill a hole, if the drill bits in a standard 19-piece HSS set were labelled:
1/1000, 3/2000, 1/500, 1/400, 3/1000, 7/2000, 1/250, 9/2000, 1/200, 11/2000, 3/500, 13/2000, 7/1000, 3/400, 1/125, 17/2000, 9/1000, 19/2000 and 1/100?
It may be mathematically correct, but it's nowhere near as convenient as how they actually are labelled in real life.
Keep ratios (and irrational quantities such as roots, trig functions, pi and e) for abstract mathematical concepts (and intermediate stages of long calculations), by all means. But real-world quantities are best expressed in the decimal notation; simply because weighing scales, measuring jugs and tape measures are all fixed-precision, decimal devices. The difference is one of range: kitchen scales might go up to 5kg. in steps of 1g., whereas laboratory scales are more likely to go up to 10g. in steps of 1mg. A kitchen measuring jug may go up to 1l. in steps of 25ml., whereas a chemist's burette goes up to 25ml. in steps of 0.05ml. And a steel tape measure may go up to 7m50 in steps of 1mm., whereas a micrometer is more likely to go up to 25mm. in steps of 0.01mm.
There is more than a grain of truth in this. Some early computers (of the drum-memory era) used a 6-bit exponent (i.e., a 64-bit virtual word) for floating-point operations. And 64-bit processors are commonplace nowadays.....
Slashdot Mirror
If you want to be like that, a candle also runs on potential energy (in this case, chemical potential energy, stored in C-H and C-C bonds in hydrocarbon wax).
No. It's mass * gravitational acceleration * height, not mass * speed * height.
Your 10 000 kg. of concrete falling under gravity (at 10 m/sec) through a distance of 1 metre would produce 100 000 J of energy.
The weight won't actually pick up the full 10 m/s every second because some of the PE it lost on the way down is being used elsewhere and so isn't available as KE, but it's still subject to that amount of acceleration.
Put it another way: You'd have to do 100000J of Work to get it up there, no matter how slowly it came down.
Yes, a clock powered by gravity would be a really cool idea! How about arranging for it to give a signal on the hour and half-hour?
That's too simple.
This makes a lot of sense, in a perverse kind of way.
I've always said that piracy doesn't damage the people whose products are pirated. Think about it this way: John Thomas wants a lightweight office suite to write letters, do his accounts and keep track of his music collection. In a world where there is no piracy and no Open Source, he could buy Microsoft Office for £500, or he could buy something called CheapOffice for £50 and save £450. Or -- if we bring piracy into the equation -- he could pirate Microsoft Office and save £500, or he could pirate CheapOffice and save £50. It's a no-brainer: he is going to pirate Microsoft Office. Multiply that by all the John Thomases out there and the makers of CheapOffice end up going out of business, entirely due to piracy -- and yet nobody ever has to make one single pirate copy of CheapOffice!
Now factor in Open Source software, which costs nothing (until you need help with it). John Thomas could get OpenOffice.org for nothing, again saving £500 vs. the cost of Microsoft Office. But the modern manifestation of the caveman hunter-gatherer instinct says "paying full price for something is cheating". If you pay nothing for OpenOffice.org, which costs nothing, you're effectively paying the full price. Whereas if you pay nothing for Microsoft Office, which costs £500, you're paying £500 less than the full price.
Large businesses aren't so driven by primitive instincts. They could choose between Microsoft Office, CheapOffice and OpenOffice.org on their own merits. Microsoft, however, play dirty tricks: they keep the file formats used by Office a closely-guarded secret, thus preserving an unfair advantage over CheapOffice and OpenOffice.org (who have to rely on a process akin to trying to learn to speak French by sitting in a café in Paris, listening to what people ask for and seeing what they get given). They also spread Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt about the legality of using products whose authors have given their blessing to the world to distribute them far and wide and use them often.
- I steal your camera (complete with your iris data).
- I take a child pr0n photograph, which gets watermarked with your iris.
- I return the camera to you before you even notice it missing.
- I send the photo (with your iris data embedded) to The Authorities.
- You get fingered as a nonce.
Never mind guilty until proven innocent; in the News of the World-reader mindset, you'll be guilty even despite being proven innocent.Yeah, because there's no such thing as a metadata-stripper for jpeg files, is there?
It can probably be done in about four lines of Perl code, including the #!/usr/bin/perl header.
But surely if this player was released to market less than a year ago, then that means any example of this player is less than a year old -- which means by law it must still be covered under the manufacturer's guarantee.
Treat the player as faulty, and take it back to the store where it was purchased. Take the disc that it won't play, and show that it works on another player (which is bound to be a different model). Make very sure that you know your rights under the law (print them out if necessary), because sales assistants are generally full of s#!t despite the fact that it is us poor sods who pay their wages.
I'd be very surprised if it was any less than 98% fake.
Strictly speaking, the foregoing should be in the past tense, because I haven't had it happen to me for awhile. And maybe that behaviour was confined to the versions of kernel, lilo and chroot we were using then. At any rate, one extra press of ctrl+D and the forced sync that follows (and which would have had to be done anyway, just as part of the "main" sync due to rebooting rather than separately) is a small price to pay for having it work everytime. Unless they were already using lilo before grub became popular, and decided to stick with something that wasn't broken and didn't need fixing
You fail it.
A forgotten root password can generally be recovered from in one reboot -- or none if you already have a root console open.
About 90% of copies of Windows out there are pirated, and so won't be auto-updated. Of the 10% of copies out there that are genuine, about 90% belong to clueless users who won't bother to use the automatic update service. That leaves probably about 1% of the total number of Windows boxes out there likely to get updated.
Also, the ADSL router must be programmed to forward ports. Even if a daemon is running on a Linux box, there's no guarantee that it can be seen from the outside world.
Don't the staff in your co-lo already know the procedure for dealing with LI inside-out? Boot from nearest available CD with a kernel on it, make a mountpoint, mount usual / partition there, chroot into it, run lilo (which doesn't actually alter boot block yet, just makes record in cache), exit chroot environment (to force decaching, now boot block gets written: if you reboot from while you are still within the chroot, the boot block may not be changed and you will have to repeat the procedure) and reboot.
We've all forgotten to run lilo -- anyone who says they haven't probably hasn't compiled and installed a kernel. And that's why decent co-location facilities have people on hand, 24*7*52.
Uh, no.
Given the ease of getting a ready-compiled compiler anyway, there's not a lot of point in not leaving a compiler on a machine where you might occasionally have to compile something. It's just cutting off your balls to annoy your dick. If someone has got into your machine, you're already shafted. Not having a compiler around is really only delaying the inevitable.
What would be a bit more interesting would be if you had a special hacked kernel/GCC combo, so that your kernel would only run binaries that had been created with your special GCC. And even then, it's probably enough to keep the "occasional use only" stuff on a partition that is usually kept unmounted. (Especially if you had a specially-hacked fdisk binary that would not report the existence of this partition and kept the real fdisk in your "occasional use only" space.)
The point in favor of OSS is that (1) there are several people, independent of the original author and independent of one another, who are in a position to discover any potential exploit; (2) whoever discovers an exploit has no good reason not to announce it straight away; and (3) discoveries tend to happen in parallel anyway (vide the almost simultaneous invention of the filament light bulb by Joseph Swan and Thomas Edison, or the telephone by Alexander Graham Bell and Elisha Grey, inter alia); so even if the first person to discover an exploit doesn't announce it, the second person to discover it might well announce it.
Whereas if you had one of those trendy microkernel thingies, you'd basically end up giving userspace programs unfettered access to hardware. Remind me again, how that is better than performing basic sanity checking within kernel space?
The only way that the computer-using public can be properly protected from the most egregious excesses of the computer industry is for Government to mandate that every piece of computer software must be supplied with Source Code, or not at all.
Just because you get the Source Code doesn't mean you would have to get distribution rights (see PGP usage licence, Skype / Flash developers' licences and pre-GPL Java licences for examples of licences which grant access to Source Code while restricting distribution). And lack of Source Code hasn't done much to stop Office and Windows from being pirated.
Mandatory provision of Source Code would enable third party code auditing, which is important from the user's perspective. A whole secondary industry could grow up around auditing code and supplying upgrades (and these companies would be ideally placed to monitor licence compliance; in fact, for them to supply upgrades to improperly-licenced software would constitute Aiding and Abetting piracy. There's already a non-computer parallel: try and buy a TV set from a high street vendor without some sort of evidence that you have a fully paid-up TV licence).
No doubt there will be howls of protest from software vendors, who have been getting away for far too long with shipping inferior product under the disguise afforded by not supplying the Source Code. Fuck what they think. Users outnumber vendors, and the needs of the many must outweigh the whims and caprices of the few.
That'd be one way to do it. Another way would be to introduce compulsory and non-discriminatory licencing. That way, if Nintendo ever got a bit sloppy, somebody else would be guaranteed the right to make a console which could play existing Wii games. Not that anybody would be likely to at first, because the Nintendo brand is going to be all over the promotional materials -- there's being late to the party, and then there's the stragglers mistaking you for the cab they ordered. But a few stories of Wiis catching fire or blowing LOpTs in TV sets or freezing up in mid-game would stir up interest among third parties, and the "not buying the same make again" factor would work against Nintendo.
I think the knowledge that a big enough balls-up could ruin them if they mishandled it would keep manufacturers on their toes. At the moment, there is little to no incentive for a monopolist not to exploit the very people who pay their wages. To my mind, the existence of that monopoly is a privilege -- and a privilege can be withdrawn if it is abused.
In the software world, I think it would be enough to mandate the supply of Source Code with software. Probably not with distribution rights, but be brutally honest: the lack of Source Code hasn't really done much to cut down on piracy of Windows and Office. But a user's rights to inspect software they have bought and paid for, and to modify it so as to better suit their requirements, should be protected by law. The needs of the many (users) outweigh the whims and caprices of the few (vendors). It also creates a nice healthy secondary industry: third-party developers creating plugins for software to fix problems created by the vendors.
Anyone who buys software and doesn't insist to have the Source Code, is going to get a harsh lesson one day.
Product unreliability ordinarily doesn't benefit manufacturers, because most consumers are smart enough not to buy the same make next time; but the situation is inverted when the manufacturer of the unreliable products holds a monopoly. And sometimes it doesn't even need to be a full monopoly: you can have several players ostensibly competing in a free market. But that freedom is often just an illusion.
Think about it: If John Thomas's Panasonic stereo breaks, and he already has lots of CDs, he might buy a Philips next time -- after all, it will plug into the same mains socket and play all the same discs. If John Thomas's Glow-worm boiler packs up in the middle of winter, he might replace it with a Worcester or Baxi boiler -- which will use the same gas and electricity, and plumb in just fine to his existing radiators and hot water system. If John Thomas's Ford Focus breaks down one time too many, he might trade it in for a Vauxhall Astra -- it will use the same fuel and can be driven on the same roads.
But if John Thomas's Wii breaks, and he already owns several Wii games, he has precious little choice but to buy another one from Nintendo. The games may well have cost more than the console -- it would be a waste not to have anything on which to play them.
Despite outward appearances, Nintendo, Sony and Microsoft aren't really competing in a free market; because their products are not interchangeable in practice -- unlike CD players, gas boilers or cars. Once you have invested in a game on one platform, it can only be used on that platform -- you can't replace your Wii with a PS3 and take your games across. And if you ask the vendors to replace your Wii games with PS3 equivalents, they'll laugh at you. (A store will probably exchange a few unopened games bought in ignorance as a gift for someone who has a different console than you thought; but even then it's technically ex gratia, not a statutory right.)
And if John Thomas's copy of Microsoft Word pisses him off one time too many, and he has many documents already in .doc format that he needs to be able to access, he can't replace it with anything else and still be sure that his documents will render correctly. Even worse, if his sister Fanny buys a brand new computer that comes with a brand new version of Word, John's copy now most probably won't be able to read documents saved by Fanny in future (unless she saves them as an older version, which is deliberately made awkward and throws up dire warnings) -- so he is all but forced to buy his own new copy of Microsoft Word.
Or let me put it this way: I'll have finished marking all the positions of my shelves and gone and put the kettle on for a brew, while you're still twatting about, converting fractions of a foot to inches and decimals of an inch to sixteenths.
I agree wholeheartedly.
How would anyone ever manage to drill a hole, if the drill bits in a standard 19-piece HSS set were labelled:
1/1000, 3/2000, 1/500, 1/400, 3/1000, 7/2000, 1/250, 9/2000, 1/200, 11/2000, 3/500, 13/2000, 7/1000, 3/400, 1/125, 17/2000, 9/1000, 19/2000 and 1/100?
It may be mathematically correct, but it's nowhere near as convenient as how they actually are labelled in real life.
Keep ratios (and irrational quantities such as roots, trig functions, pi and e) for abstract mathematical concepts (and intermediate stages of long calculations), by all means. But real-world quantities are best expressed in the decimal notation; simply because weighing scales, measuring jugs and tape measures are all fixed-precision, decimal devices. The difference is one of range: kitchen scales might go up to 5kg. in steps of 1g., whereas laboratory scales are more likely to go up to 10g. in steps of 1mg. A kitchen measuring jug may go up to 1l. in steps of 25ml., whereas a chemist's burette goes up to 25ml. in steps of 0.05ml. And a steel tape measure may go up to 7m50 in steps of 1mm., whereas a micrometer is more likely to go up to 25mm. in steps of 0.01mm.
There is more than a grain of truth in this. Some early computers (of the drum-memory era) used a 6-bit exponent (i.e., a 64-bit virtual word) for floating-point operations. And 64-bit processors are commonplace nowadays .....