It's different now, when we're talking 3D acceleration, GL, DRI, and all these cool new extensions.
Ack! You sound like a Windows user! Go away, lest you corrupt my text consoles and xterm windows!
Free software, affords free choice!
YOU, don't have to use it. The fact that others can, is great. Your text consoles will always be there. All YOU have to do, is not bother keeping "up" with the times and just keep working with what you have. You'll be happy, and so will he.
Re:How many people will rush out and upgrade?
on
XFree 4.0.3 Released
·
· Score: 1
I don't plan to upgrade to 4.0.3, because this seems to just be a bugfix release.
Okay??????
Microsoft would LOVE you! ; )
Re:How many people will rush out and upgrade?
on
XFree 4.0.3 Released
·
· Score: 1
The only time I upgrade X is:
apt-get update ; apt-get upgrade
Why did this get moderated down?
This is a show of how fantastic debians package management software is and how simple an upgrade of X could be.
It is Interesting and Insightful, could have been more Informative though, but Redundant?
Hey, if you don't like GUI's, then don't use them.
If you do and you have gripes about the GUI you use, then get stuck into that source code!
2D X does'nt ever lock up on me, in almost 4 years. However, testing some bleeding edge 3D in X has on occasion.
But I am doing something to fix that.
I'm not just hanging around here whining. For me, the open source stuff does blow away crap like MS Windows, but not necessarily other proprietary "crap". I happen the think BeOS and Solaris are great. QNX is interesting as is MacOS X.
3+ years with NO crash, running Linux and OpenBSD says something. Now that X is as fast as it is, 2D and 3D wise, the future of free OS'es is just getting brighter by the day.
Huh? The X server that most people here use has an upgrade, including improved 3D support for Matrox cards and improved anti-aliasing, and this is somehow not news?
Is this the best thing you could think of to make a first post not actually sound like a typical first post?
Come on, I wait for upgrades of XFree86 and compile from source every time. For me, this is BIG news. Much bigger than hydrogen powered cars, though I would'nt complain about that as not being news because to some nerds, it would be.
I don't doubt that you may have written some stuff worthy of being mod'ed up, but this is not. I would have scrolled past it, thinking it borderlining on Troll but saving that mod point for something more worthwhile.
"Chuck" the Demon, a play on daemon, is or has been associated with all the BSD's (at least those with BSD in their name), including OpenBSD.
OpenBSD has had a few different mascots which is kinda cool as they choose new artwork.
There's been an old rendered demon, the more familiar Chuck demon, a large devilish cop with a root burglar as his foe, the blowfish with a script kitty as his foe (along with some other pathetic fish that get eaten probably going by the names of Bill and Steve), and keeping with the blowfish theme, we've got a Japanese anime style blowfish who just does'nt cut it up against my favorite, the devlish cop.
Still, you're right, Chuck should'nt be associated with OpenBSD firstly, he should be associated with BSD in general.
You people are pathetic. Whining about usability when people have clearly been using Unix successfully for 30 years or more.
Right on, someone mod this AC up!
Unix lets me do stuff that makes NT admins scratch their heads thinking "How the hell would I do that in NT!?".
If you put in the effort to learn Unix fundamentals from a user point of view and then from an admin point of view and then read some Unix cookbook kinda stuff to get some ideas on how to actually put good use to this knowledge, you can do some inspiring stuff.
Now, the following might not sound inspirational to the Unix gurus here, or maybe even the Windows users who are not really interested, but coming from an MS DOS/Windows background to now almost 4 years with Linux and OpenBSD, it gets me very motivated thinking Unix. Then at work when I have to mostly get back into MS mode, I can see how un-flexible the World of MS really is, not to mention un-bloody-stable and insecure!
At work I had to set up a machine that scrolls our corporate web site bio's, one by one, scrolling, moving on to the next, etc. At first I tried some Windows software which recorded mouse movements to record web sessions. It was awful.
Then I tried javascript. Having never programmed any javascript, I found that scrolling local pages I made was easy, the hard bit for me was scrolling someone elses remote pages from top to bottom (with a scroll start and end delay) and then changing to the next html bio on the remote server to be scrolled (I had no write priveliges over the html being scrolled).
Sure, I could have done the same thing on a Windows client. But I wanted to do more...
* Proxy the pages on the local machine to reduce the appearance of pages downloading.
* Have this presentation automatically start from switching the machine ON.
* Have the presentation start at 8am and killed at 6pm, Monday to Friday.
* Have the local proxy updated at Midnight, Monday to Friday.
* Have the machine automatically reboot if swap space gets really low, scheduled for Midnight. (bloody Nutscrape!)
* Share the javascript config files out to the Helpdesk and Marketing dept for their admin of content.
* Have a script that extracts from the javascript config file some URL's for the proxy updates.
* Run the X display at a really weird resolution, which is native to the massive plasma display. (852x480)
* Write a script to switch the plasma screen ON and OFF via RS-232C, when required.
* Use a very powerful packaging system that would simply allow me to connect to a central server when update announcements are recieved and then update the live system along with any dependancies automatically. (Debian apt, killer!)
* Automatically check if Netscape is running and if not then run it!
* Display presentation without menus, borders or anything remotely GUI like or familar to the audience.
Some of this stuff could be done in Windows, but to tell you the truth, I think our company was sick of the Blue Screen Of Death that accompanied the old system that I replaced, giving us slightly red faces when clients were waiting in reception.
The new system is great, and has never crashed.
I feel like I am in control of it and don't worry about what surprises it has in store for me. The flexibility of Unix like OS' is only limited by your imagination, thousands of utils that can all be plugged in to each other one way or another, along with powerful daemons giving seemingly endless possibilities.
If you have a family to feed, then you might like to turn away from contracting, unless you are really good.
It comes down to your income vs. expenses, on whether you can save 6 months pay.
My point is merely that if you are going to put money in the bank for longish terms (like 6 to 12 months, like the contract terms I get), then you may as well put it in a higher interest, secure long term deposit account.
Whether it be 6,3 or whatever months.
I agree with you, I would feel safe with 3 but if you can afford 6 it would be good incase you got sick, etc.
Complex? Absolutely!
Functional? Yeah, they try and stuff like Office is pretty good.
But is the complexity required to get that functionality? And what good is that functionality when the OS, MS apps and other 3rd party apps built on MS libraries, are so damn unstable and unsecure?
smartest and most talented coders in the world
Yeah, whatever, if they are, they are being extremely badly managed. Somehow, I think they are not the most talented programmers or managers.
I've been contracting in IT for about 6 years and what you say is so true.
I'd put that 6 months salary into a long term deposit that allows regular deposits so as to be earning higher interest if the worst case scenario does not arrive.
I just worked the whole bloody weekend so I imagine that I should'nt be making a whole lot of sense right now.:)
But you've heard that talk-the-talk/walk-the-walk saying right? So you know what I mean?
The IT business has so many of these loud mouth arseholes that bullshit their way through their careers until they find themselves amongst people they can't bullshit, then they leave to go find people they *can* bullshit. I find that often the guys that really know their stuff are intraverts who don't speak as loudly as these know-all know-nothings and often either don't get heard or don't get taken as seriously as the artists of crap. Hey, look at Microsoft, need I say more?
I'm glad I at least amused you enogh to warrant your reply. ; )
In IT, I've seen guys accept roles and then quit that day due to it not meeting their expectations, perhaps realising they're a little too in over their heads.
There's a lot of people out there who talk the talk, until they meet the people who walk the walk. Then they just move on to some other role where they can continue to feel comfortable talking the talk to others who they could never respect.
I don't talk the talk, wish I could, I'm just trying to walk the walk, which is pretty hard when there is just so much stuff to learn and so little time. : (
Obviously you're not using X or VNC? You're using some security disaster like PC Anywhere?
I have worked with firms where they had many diskless X terminals on 10Mbit hubs sharing bandwidth with MS PC clients!
Worked nicely. It's not like the server end is treating the client (actually, should I say the client is treating the server?;)) as just a frame buffer!
Dude, have you ever used X or VNC Window sessions through a network? Very very fast, they were built with this in mind.
Ever seen diskless X terminals? They boot from another server, through a network and they are graphical and surprisingly quick!
We're talking about some pretty smart caching software here that copies across the network the bare minimum to get the job done.
If they've got this working well in just 4k_bits_ per second (thats about 8% of what a 56k (okay 53k) MODEM can do, then it's going to be awesome.
This actually falls well within uncompressed GSM DATA transfer rates, meaning that this can give incredible functionality to lowly PDA's, etc.
Of course, I agree that some things, like web browsing, where a lot of new (uncached) images will have to be downloaded, will be a bit of a downer. But with office productivity apps and the like, where caching can be effective, this will be great.
Imagine a PDA with the power and storage capabilities of big iron, except in your hand! Who wants to do great ammounts of browsing and multimedia stuff on a PDA anyway?
I mean hell, how fast is your browsing going to be and how huge are your multimedia experiences going to be on a PDA without this anyway, with their CPU, memory and connectivity limits?
This is basically a great way to improve much of the things that are holding these sorts of devices back anyway. So don't think of it as more silly drawbacks, think of it as great efficiency where it is needed most.
So why does'nt someone just release a patch to make it pretend it is a "legit" CDDB endorsed client?
Failing that, it would be just tragic if a bunch of people got together and wrote a script to flood their servers with bogus requests and bogus submissions to the db!?
Why just think about it, when you could research it.
The Sonic Impact S70 came out 3 years ago and the Matrox G400 came out 2 years ago.
Windows 98 came out about 4 months after the G400.
Try not to worship Linux so much. It's not the Messiah.
I'm not worshiping Linux, I also use OpenBSD, FreeBSD and Solaris 7. All of which have never crashed on me.
Windows 95, 98 and ME still don't boot from my ATAPI CDROM or my Ultra SCSI CDROM. Linux has been doing this no problem since years before I started with it.
Don't you just love it when someone compares the best of something to the worst of something else, when those somethings are either not the norm or not relevant most of the time?
I have a PC with a Diamond Sonic Impact S70 and Matrox G400.
When I install Windows 98, the sound card is NOT recognised and the G400 is merely a fast VGA card at this stage. I have to then install the sound card driver and the Matrox driver to get them working fully.
In comes Linux, Boot of a Linux CD (choose what you like: Debian, Mandrake, Red Hat, SuSE, Caldera, Corel, Turbo, etc, etc), the G400 is found and X is configured for it, as is the sound, without so much as a "huh?" from Linux.
Whats more, Linux has'nt crashed on me in 4 years! Which is why Debian will be going on my new Dell Inspiron 8000 G850U, once I get it. Windows on the other hand will merely be one of the multitudes of apps that I will be launching from a glorious X set up.
Moderators, what the hell are you doing? How can he get a +1 on something I just said, which did'nt get anything, and my first post still got nothing, which I think is "informative".
checkyoulater is right, it's MY hardware and I'll do whatever I please with it.
Chipping it should not be illegal, not even having the intent to buy pirate games should be illegal, but actually buying or making pirate games should be.
The fact is however, that the person that buys or makes pirate games for personal use (read, criminal), is the same person who is also going to ignore this law!
Why not keep the duration of minutes and seconds, so all the computers, etc currently in the World can retain accuracy without complex algorithms that introduce aliasing errors and quantization problems before the properly clocked machines come out.
How about minutes:seconds?
0000:00 being midnight
0060:00 1am
1181:47 6:38:47 pm
1439:59 23:59:59
For use by humans on watches and computer screens, and just plain old seconds for computers...
Oh, wait a second, you say Unix was built on that concept of time!?!? And what's that? Unix time is only limited by the word size used, so our Sun will go supernova before a 64bit word rolls over?
Wow! Did Microsoft innovate that? ; )
http://slashdot.org/articles/99/09/30/1437217.sh tm l
I worked for the Royal Australian Navy, repairing Gyro compass and stabilizers and also RADAR. Most of the equipment was US Navy and most of the rest was Aussie with a few others here and there, French and what not.
So, I had to deal and im-bloody-perial and metric.
64ths of an inch? Huh? For Christs sake! Metric is at least logical to work with in your head. I could'nt be bothered with imperial. A foot? Huh? Mine or yours!?!? A quart(er) of what? A litre. Huh? ; )
Of course, perhaps Americans reading this probably think I have this arse (or is that ass) backwards! Since I learnt only metric at school (with a quick look at imperial in metalwork classes), I am biased and as such, perhaps I do have it all wrong... then again... whats 7/64ths of an inch off 5 yards, 3 inches and 60/64ths of an inch? ; )
Slashdot Mirror
It's different now, when we're talking 3D acceleration, GL, DRI, and all these cool new extensions.
Ack! You sound like a Windows user! Go away, lest you corrupt my text consoles and xterm windows!
Free software, affords free choice!
YOU, don't have to use it. The fact that others can, is great. Your text consoles will always be there. All YOU have to do, is not bother keeping "up" with the times and just keep working with what you have. You'll be happy, and so will he.
I don't plan to upgrade to 4.0.3, because this seems to just be a bugfix release.
Okay??????
Microsoft would LOVE you! ; )
The only time I upgrade X is:
apt-get update ; apt-get upgrade
Why did this get moderated down?
This is a show of how fantastic debians package management software is and how simple an upgrade of X could be.
It is Interesting and Insightful, could have been more Informative though, but Redundant?
To each, his own.
Hey, if you don't like GUI's, then don't use them.
If you do and you have gripes about the GUI you use, then get stuck into that source code!
2D X does'nt ever lock up on me, in almost 4 years. However, testing some bleeding edge 3D in X has on occasion.
But I am doing something to fix that.
I'm not just hanging around here whining. For me, the open source stuff does blow away crap like MS Windows, but not necessarily other proprietary "crap". I happen the think BeOS and Solaris are great. QNX is interesting as is MacOS X.
3+ years with NO crash, running Linux and OpenBSD says something. Now that X is as fast as it is, 2D and 3D wise, the future of free OS'es is just getting brighter by the day.
Huh? The X server that most people here use has an upgrade, including improved 3D support for Matrox cards and improved anti-aliasing, and this is somehow not news?
Is this the best thing you could think of to make a first post not actually sound like a typical first post?
Come on, I wait for upgrades of XFree86 and compile from source every time. For me, this is BIG news. Much bigger than hydrogen powered cars, though I would'nt complain about that as not being news because to some nerds, it would be.
I don't doubt that you may have written some stuff worthy of being mod'ed up, but this is not. I would have scrolled past it, thinking it borderlining on Troll but saving that mod point for something more worthwhile.
"Chuck" the Demon, a play on daemon, is or has been associated with all the BSD's (at least those with BSD in their name), including OpenBSD.
OpenBSD has had a few different mascots which is kinda cool as they choose new artwork.
There's been an old rendered demon, the more familiar Chuck demon, a large devilish cop with a root burglar as his foe, the blowfish with a script kitty as his foe (along with some other pathetic fish that get eaten probably going by the names of Bill and Steve), and keeping with the blowfish theme, we've got a Japanese anime style blowfish who just does'nt cut it up against my favorite, the devlish cop.
Still, you're right, Chuck should'nt be associated with OpenBSD firstly, he should be associated with BSD in general.
You people are pathetic. Whining about usability when people have clearly been using Unix successfully for 30 years or more.
Right on, someone mod this AC up!
Unix lets me do stuff that makes NT admins scratch their heads thinking "How the hell would I do that in NT!?".
If you put in the effort to learn Unix fundamentals from a user point of view and then from an admin point of view and then read some Unix cookbook kinda stuff to get some ideas on how to actually put good use to this knowledge, you can do some inspiring stuff.
Now, the following might not sound inspirational to the Unix gurus here, or maybe even the Windows users who are not really interested, but coming from an MS DOS/Windows background to now almost 4 years with Linux and OpenBSD, it gets me very motivated thinking Unix. Then at work when I have to mostly get back into MS mode, I can see how un-flexible the World of MS really is, not to mention un-bloody-stable and insecure!
At work I had to set up a machine that scrolls our corporate web site bio's, one by one, scrolling, moving on to the next, etc. At first I tried some Windows software which recorded mouse movements to record web sessions. It was awful.
Then I tried javascript. Having never programmed any javascript, I found that scrolling local pages I made was easy, the hard bit for me was scrolling someone elses remote pages from top to bottom (with a scroll start and end delay) and then changing to the next html bio on the remote server to be scrolled (I had no write priveliges over the html being scrolled).
Sure, I could have done the same thing on a Windows client. But I wanted to do more...
* Proxy the pages on the local machine to reduce the appearance of pages downloading.
* Have this presentation automatically start from switching the machine ON.
* Have the presentation start at 8am and killed at 6pm, Monday to Friday.
* Have the local proxy updated at Midnight, Monday to Friday.
* Have the machine automatically reboot if swap space gets really low, scheduled for Midnight. (bloody Nutscrape!)
* Share the javascript config files out to the Helpdesk and Marketing dept for their admin of content.
* Have a script that extracts from the javascript config file some URL's for the proxy updates.
* Run the X display at a really weird resolution, which is native to the massive plasma display. (852x480)
* Write a script to switch the plasma screen ON and OFF via RS-232C, when required.
* Use a very powerful packaging system that would simply allow me to connect to a central server when update announcements are recieved and then update the live system along with any dependancies automatically. (Debian apt, killer!)
* Automatically check if Netscape is running and if not then run it!
* Display presentation without menus, borders or anything remotely GUI like or familar to the audience.
Some of this stuff could be done in Windows, but to tell you the truth, I think our company was sick of the Blue Screen Of Death that accompanied the old system that I replaced, giving us slightly red faces when clients were waiting in reception.
The new system is great, and has never crashed.
I feel like I am in control of it and don't worry about what surprises it has in store for me. The flexibility of Unix like OS' is only limited by your imagination, thousands of utils that can all be plugged in to each other one way or another, along with powerful daemons giving seemingly endless possibilities.
Open your mind!
If you have a family to feed, then you might like to turn away from contracting, unless you are really good.
It comes down to your income vs. expenses, on whether you can save 6 months pay.
My point is merely that if you are going to put money in the bank for longish terms (like 6 to 12 months, like the contract terms I get), then you may as well put it in a higher interest, secure long term deposit account.
Whether it be 6,3 or whatever months.
I agree with you, I would feel safe with 3 but if you can afford 6 it would be good incase you got sick, etc.
Complex? Absolutely!
Functional? Yeah, they try and stuff like Office is pretty good.
But is the complexity required to get that functionality? And what good is that functionality when the OS, MS apps and other 3rd party apps built on MS libraries, are so damn unstable and unsecure?
smartest and most talented coders in the world
Yeah, whatever, if they are, they are being extremely badly managed. Somehow, I think they are not the most talented programmers or managers.
The proof, is in the pudding.
This should be Score:5, Insightful!
I've been contracting in IT for about 6 years and what you say is so true.
I'd put that 6 months salary into a long term deposit that allows regular deposits so as to be earning higher interest if the worst case scenario does not arrive.
Thats cool,
:)
I just worked the whole bloody weekend so I imagine that I should'nt be making a whole lot of sense right now.
But you've heard that talk-the-talk/walk-the-walk saying right? So you know what I mean?
The IT business has so many of these loud mouth arseholes that bullshit their way through their careers until they find themselves amongst people they can't bullshit, then they leave to go find people they *can* bullshit. I find that often the guys that really know their stuff are intraverts who don't speak as loudly as these know-all know-nothings and often either don't get heard or don't get taken as seriously as the artists of crap. Hey, look at Microsoft, need I say more?
I'm glad I at least amused you enogh to warrant your reply. ; )
BFN.
In IT, I've seen guys accept roles and then quit that day due to it not meeting their expectations, perhaps realising they're a little too in over their heads.
There's a lot of people out there who talk the talk, until they meet the people who walk the walk. Then they just move on to some other role where they can continue to feel comfortable talking the talk to others who they could never respect.
I don't talk the talk, wish I could, I'm just trying to walk the walk, which is pretty hard when there is just so much stuff to learn and so little time. : (
; )
some of the remote desktop stuff I do
;)) as just a frame buffer!
Obviously you're not using X or VNC? You're using some security disaster like PC Anywhere?
I have worked with firms where they had many diskless X terminals on 10Mbit hubs sharing bandwidth with MS PC clients!
Worked nicely. It's not like the server end is treating the client (actually, should I say the client is treating the server?
Dude, have you ever used X or VNC Window sessions through a network? Very very fast, they were built with this in mind.
Ever seen diskless X terminals? They boot from another server, through a network and they are graphical and surprisingly quick!
We're talking about some pretty smart caching software here that copies across the network the bare minimum to get the job done.
If they've got this working well in just 4k_bits_ per second (thats about 8% of what a 56k (okay 53k) MODEM can do, then it's going to be awesome.
This actually falls well within uncompressed GSM DATA transfer rates, meaning that this can give incredible functionality to lowly PDA's, etc.
Of course, I agree that some things, like web browsing, where a lot of new (uncached) images will have to be downloaded, will be a bit of a downer. But with office productivity apps and the like, where caching can be effective, this will be great.
Imagine a PDA with the power and storage capabilities of big iron, except in your hand! Who wants to do great ammounts of browsing and multimedia stuff on a PDA anyway?
I mean hell, how fast is your browsing going to be and how huge are your multimedia experiences going to be on a PDA without this anyway, with their CPU, memory and connectivity limits?
This is basically a great way to improve much of the things that are holding these sorts of devices back anyway. So don't think of it as more silly drawbacks, think of it as great efficiency where it is needed most.
Bye for now.
So why does'nt someone just release a patch to make it pretend it is a "legit" CDDB endorsed client?
Failing that, it would be just tragic if a bunch of people got together and wrote a script to flood their servers with bogus requests and bogus submissions to the db!?
; )
Why just think about it, when you could research it.
The Sonic Impact S70 came out 3 years ago and the Matrox G400 came out 2 years ago.
Windows 98 came out about 4 months after the G400.
Try not to worship Linux so much. It's not the Messiah.
I'm not worshiping Linux, I also use OpenBSD, FreeBSD and Solaris 7. All of which have never crashed on me.
Windows 95, 98 and ME still don't boot from my ATAPI CDROM or my Ultra SCSI CDROM. Linux has been doing this no problem since years before I started with it.
I guess you think Microsoft is the "Messiah"?
Don't you just love it when someone compares the best of something to the worst of something else, when those somethings are either not the norm or not relevant most of the time?
I have a PC with a Diamond Sonic Impact S70 and Matrox G400.
When I install Windows 98, the sound card is NOT recognised and the G400 is merely a fast VGA card at this stage. I have to then install the sound card driver and the Matrox driver to get them working fully.
In comes Linux, Boot of a Linux CD (choose what you like: Debian, Mandrake, Red Hat, SuSE, Caldera, Corel, Turbo, etc, etc), the G400 is found and X is configured for it, as is the sound, without so much as a "huh?" from Linux.
Whats more, Linux has'nt crashed on me in 4 years! Which is why Debian will be going on my new Dell Inspiron 8000 G850U, once I get it. Windows on the other hand will merely be one of the multitudes of apps that I will be launching from a glorious X set up.
Yeah, that is exactly what I just said.
Moderators, what the hell are you doing? How can he get a +1 on something I just said, which did'nt get anything, and my first post still got nothing, which I think is "informative".
His post is -1 redundant.
Bizare.
RAID-0 LinuxBIOS!!! Whoohoo, boot Linux in 1.5 seconds with even more functionality!? ; )
LinuxBIOS would be super cool to boot firewall/gateways with no disks at all!
Which is not on be default so the OpenBSD page can still retain the "Three years without a remote hole in the default install!"!
Jun also found and fixed this OpenBSD hole in IPSEC AH IPv4 option handling code...
http://www.openbsd.org/errata.html#ipsec_ah
yesterday.
checkyoulater is right, it's MY hardware and I'll do whatever I please with it.
Chipping it should not be illegal, not even having the intent to buy pirate games should be illegal, but actually buying or making pirate games should be.
The fact is however, that the person that buys or makes pirate games for personal use (read, criminal), is the same person who is also going to ignore this law!
The may have already been covered, but are both systems tought in US schools now?
Why not keep the duration of minutes and seconds, so all the computers, etc currently in the World can retain accuracy without complex algorithms that introduce aliasing errors and quantization problems before the properly clocked machines come out.
How about minutes:seconds?
0000:00 being midnight
0060:00 1am
1181:47 6:38:47 pm
1439:59 23:59:59
For use by humans on watches and computer screens, and just plain old seconds for computers...
Oh, wait a second, you say Unix was built on that concept of time!?!? And what's that? Unix time is only limited by the word size used, so our Sun will go supernova before a 64bit word rolls over?
Wow! Did Microsoft innovate that? ; )
Remember this?
h tm l
http://slashdot.org/articles/99/09/30/1437217.s
I worked for the Royal Australian Navy, repairing Gyro compass and stabilizers and also RADAR. Most of the equipment was US Navy and most of the rest was Aussie with a few others here and there, French and what not.
So, I had to deal and im-bloody-perial and metric.
64ths of an inch? Huh? For Christs sake! Metric is at least logical to work with in your head. I could'nt be bothered with imperial. A foot? Huh? Mine or yours!?!? A quart(er) of what? A litre. Huh? ; )
Of course, perhaps Americans reading this probably think I have this arse (or is that ass) backwards! Since I learnt only metric at school (with a quick look at imperial in metalwork classes), I am biased and as such, perhaps I do have it all wrong... then again... whats 7/64ths of an inch off 5 yards, 3 inches and 60/64ths of an inch? ; )