I disagree... and yes, I'll probably get flamed for it.
I really think the entire concept of approximations and randomness is just flawed. Isn't it entirely possible, and in fact more likely, that there are simply other factors involved that we have no way of currently measuring or understanding?
For example, a quantum theory can determine something has a 60:40 chance of two possible outcomes and repeated experiments can then confirm this. Does this mean the universe is really acting in a "random" fashion, or is it just that there's a variable we're NOT measuring or even conceiving that if we DID know about, we could precisely determine the result?
A4 is fine, as another poster pointed out and I far prefer it to Letter.
What gets me about paper in the US is when you talk about paper weight (okay, maybe most people DON'T talk about paper weight, but they do in my industry). What is so hard about gsm (grams per square meter)? The US paper weights are different numbers for the same weight depending on the TYPE of paper! Even if you HAVE to use an imperial system, couldn't you just use pounds per square foot (psf) or something else easy for me to convert in my head without lookup tables?
So, when you say "mils" do you mean millimeters or milliliters? Here in Australia at least, either... If we're talking about a liquid, we mean millilitres, but if we're talking distance, we mean millimetres. It's extremely easy to glean from the context which one is meant. If there is ever any possibility of confusion, we'd just use the full word. ("a can of coke is three seventy five mls", "the keyboard is so flat, only five mls off the table", "the rain gauge filled up five millimetres")
As a note, it's never actually written "mils" - I think the grandparent poster was just writing it that way to give an idea of pronunciation. For writing, we'd stick to "mm" and "ml" (or occasionally "mms" and "mls" informally, but I personally avoid that)
Incidently, why use microns instead of micrometers? Personally, I never use "microns", only "micrometres"... but I do feel I'm in the minority doing that.
As another note, pay attention to the spelling - "re", not "er". A "meter" is a device for measuring something, whereas a "metre" is a distance. "Micrometer" is a tool used in mechanical engineering, "micrometre" is a very small distance - and the pronunciation of these two words are quite different (roughly "mi-cro-me-tre" vs "mi-crom-e-ter").
I grew up in New Zealand, but have lived the last few years in both Europe and Australia. I agree about the lack of a commonly used 10cm unit (quite clearly, a decimetre) being a little odd, but it's not really a big deal. There's nothing stopping you rounding things to the nearest 10cm (eg "it's roughly 50cm long").
What I miss here in Australia and when I visit NZ is the lack of centilitre that I got so used to in Europe. Sure, it's the same sort of thing, where you just say "a shot glass is 30ml", but "3cl" is just nice. Or a can of coke being 33cl (yes, 330ml, smaller than the NZ 375ml).
I've gotta go back to Europe... *sigh*
As for your thoughts on the base 12, I agree, the divisions are nicer... but how often do you actually need to divide by those fractions? I find I very rarely divide by anything other than 2, 4 or 5 in "day to day life"... all of which are pretty easy in base 10 (0.5, 0.25, 0.2). Dividing by three is something is occasionally needed in day to day life (3 people sharing a food bill for example) but often the number you're dealing with don't divide nicely no matter what system you're using (the food bill is $26.55 for example...)
If I had mod points, I'd mod you up. This is something I've been trying to tell people for a LONG time (every time I have this discussion - be it on slashdot or elsewhere)... just because we use metric, it doesn't mean we can't use fractions! A "half metre" makes perfect sense... and most people in Europe are more than familiar with buying half-litres of beer (although that said, it sounds you do something different in Sweden! 40cL, I'm not familiar with - generally 30cL or a half-litre (50cL) when I'm in Europe)
As a note, I do the same thing with height - estimate to the nearest 5cm.
Metric doesn't necessarily mean you have to use decimal places... there's NOTHING wrong with saying "half a metre" or "one third of a metre". Metric just generally makes it MUCH easier to do conversion, especially between different types of units (litres of water expressed in cubic centimetres for example... how many cubic inches to a pint?)
Hmmm... good luck keeping up with your:
- Dialup net access that's still in common use
- Hideously expensive broadband access (related to first point probably)
- 4 star hotels that don't have cat5 run to the rooms for net access
- EXTREMELY poor public wireless coverage
- Lack of touchscreens in public places (vending machines, train ticket machines, info kiosks)
- Cars that get terrible "mileage"
- Cellphone networks that have poor coverage and many old standards still in use
- Money that's made out of tearable paper that is destroyed by water (okay, most of the world still uses this type, but not AU or NZ - it's plastic notes here)
- Currency value that's dropping like a stone
- Mostly cash based society (so few EFTPOS terminals in small shops!)
- CRT screens everywhere instead of LCD, plasma etc
- Slow postal system
- Thermal printers for receipts, lottery tickets and so on
- Thermal printing fax machines
- Probably many other things I haven't noticed yet
Sure, you may have some centres of "high tech" and the occasional cool devices, but as a nation, you're WAY behind the rest of the world in general.
And before you respond to any of my points with one-off "but my local xxx has a touchscreen info kiosk" or whatever, I'm talking about how common these things are... they're just second nature and EXPECTED elsewhere, there they're considered novelties.
Actually the "PC" could stand for: "Print Cartridge" - uncommon, since this can also mean the drum/toner assembly. "Paper Cartridge" - moderately common, mainly on very small and nasty printers. "Print Cassette" - uncommon, simply because it's a silly term. "Paper Cassette" - common
If you're talking HP LaserJet printers, which are very common and a model that do display this exact message, it stands for "Paper Cartridge", which reinforces my point above;)
Dealing with models that have displays like this, I recommend playing with the "@PJL RDYMSG DISPLAY=" command. Lots of fun making the printer say "RADIATION LEAK" or "I LOVE YOU" or other such things when people walk up to it. I wrote a quick and dirty Windows app for doing this more quickly/easily quite a while back, and it still amuses me when I'm in one of those sort of moods at work... I'll make the source and binary available somewhere eventually (once I've tidied it up, added some more functions, etc), but if you want a quick commandline version, http://www.odetocode.com/Humor/68.aspx has some source code.
I know you were just referencing a great movie, but this line has always bugged me. It's not that bloody hard to figure out that it means, "Load Letter sized paper in the Paper Cassette". I have always thought that as a "computer guy" he shouldn't have uttered this line.
Picture for a moment, two universes "side by side" in a dimension we can not physically see, but effectively "overlaid" in all dimensions we can measure/see. No interactions take place between these two universes other than gravity (for reasons that are exaplainable, but beyond the scope of this post).
The influence of the gravitational pull from the one universe would certainly have the exact same features/constructs as what is described here (clumped in parts, not in others etc)
Because these two universes interact gravitationally, it would make sense that matter and "dark matter" would tend to be found in the same places as well, which is exactly what has been observed. The occasional area where they're not found together (dark matter without matter) is also not so hard to comprehend (as would be matter without dark matter if we found that as well).
For those of you who think I'm talking nonsense - this is a dramatic oversimplification of what brane theory (related to string theory/M theory) would have to say on the subject. For those of who you think it's not science because it's not provable, you're probably right... but it's an avenue that I think requires some scientific thought put in to it so that one day it may well become "true" science.
Back in the days of my later classic Amigas (A1200 and A4000), mostly IRC - I was far too addicted in my youth... Also MUDding, general web browsing, messing around with graphics (in DPaint), music (OctaMED) and learning to code (mostly in C, but meddled with a few other languages as well).
Before all that, I ran a BBS on an earlier classic Amiga (A600), and before THAT (my A500 days) I was too young to do much other than play games.
My current AmigaOne, I regrettably don't use for much serious stuff, but once the Firefox port is finished, it'll likely become my main webbrowser and email system at the very least. As far as email clients go, I already prefer YAM ("Yet Another Mailer" - great software) to most other email clients, but I can't justify leaving the system on 24/7 just for email. When I do power it on at the moment (at least once a week), I have a couple of little coding projects on the go - mostly part of the community effort to get the brand new OS up to scratch with handy little utilities that are needed (check out os4depot.net for examples of the sorts of apps I mean)
I live in Aussieland (although I'm not really an Aussie) and am fairly passionate about my Amiga... that said, I'm really more or less OS agnostic. I'll use whatever suits the task at hand best. Which means my Windows boxes for games/wordprocessing/development(work), my Macs for browsing/chatting/graphics/ftp-serving/music, my Linux box for serious network tasks and my Amiga for actually having fun and messing around with stuff.
Once the Firefox port is finished, I'll likely switch to my Amiga for all general webbrowsing, email (I already prefer YAM to other mail clients, but don't use it right now) and other basic internet usage... just lack of a decent browser like Firefox is holding me back from that.
Being posted by an anonymous coward, the parent may go unnoticed by many. If any mods notice this comment, please mod the parent up! (informative or interesting - it's both!)
Ummmm... huh? Booting with WB loaded to a basic intuition screen with a CLI in it was SNAPPY on every model of Amiga ever. Sluggish is hardly a word I'd ever use to describe any aspects of AmigaOS except on severely underpowered systems with every fancy add-on under the sun (which you can hardly blame the OS itself for)
Browser: Check (although not a very good one by most people's standards until the Firefox port is finished) USB key: Check Safety from malware: As long as it remains a niche OS with hardly any users, I'd say yep - safe as houses..mod files native: Well, as native as they were on any platform. They weren't a "native" format for Amiga, just very popular!
It's quite interesting, because I hear comments like this a lot, but my personal experience is quite different. I hardly ever plugged my Amiga in to the TV (too low quality) and have never been much of a gamer so graphics and sound are only a "bonus" as far as I'm concerned. I always liked my Amigas (from my A500 through to my trusty A4000 that I had for ages through to my current AmigaOne) just because the OS is so damn easy and elegant.
You currently can't... nor will you be able to unless someone adds PPC support to "your favourite Amiga Emulator" (I assume you mean UAE here...) as well as hacking it to make it look like it has the hardware license key (AKA "annoying dongle chip on the motherboard that everyone hates since it forces you to use that proprietary hardware where otherwise you could run the OS on pretty much any appropriately specced PPC system, but is actually a good thing because it prevents piracy, which is what damn near killed Amiga in the first place")
I have to wonder how much overhead is in version 4. Has it grown as bloated as windows, linux or osx
Well, the ISO image of AmigaOS4 I downloaded from Hyperion (the guys that wrote it) is 46MB... so it's a LOT larger than AmigaOS3, but still tiny compared to many other modern systems. I'm not at home right now (live in Australia, currently on holiday in Europe), so memory usage I can't check, but I vaguely recall that of the 512MB I have in my AmigaOne, only about 20 or so is used once the system is booted, services are running (yes, I run a webserver, ftp server and VNC server on my Amiga) and all my random startup apps are going.
Essentially you still have to "set it up" and "give it a size" though. AmigaOS's RAMDisk is a bit different. It's "just there" and doesn't have a size per se. It's whatever size you're using. When it's empty, it takes no memory. When you put 256MB of data in it, it's 256MB. When you delete 50MB of that, it's now only 206MB. Basically it's completely dynamic and requires no user management.
Hmmm... might want to read up a bit more - it doesn't run on Classic Amigas. If you buy an old Amiga from eBay, don't expect to run AmigaOS4 on it! (it'd be somewhat similar to expecting to run OSX on a 68k Mac)
Okay, true... NEW hardware is currently vapour, but my Micro AmigaOne isn't THAT old yet (bought it shortly after it's release - don't recall exactly when, but only a couple of years back now)... I'll get at least a couple more years of service out of it yet (and hell, there are still MANY people using their Classic Amigas - now THAT'S old hardware)
Slashdot Mirror
I would like to ask your permission to copy this and make use of it on a website I plan on putting up in the not too distant future...
No, the odds are exactly 100%... we exist.
I disagree... and yes, I'll probably get flamed for it.
I really think the entire concept of approximations and randomness is just flawed. Isn't it entirely possible, and in fact more likely, that there are simply other factors involved that we have no way of currently measuring or understanding?
For example, a quantum theory can determine something has a 60:40 chance of two possible outcomes and repeated experiments can then confirm this. Does this mean the universe is really acting in a "random" fashion, or is it just that there's a variable we're NOT measuring or even conceiving that if we DID know about, we could precisely determine the result?
A4 is fine, as another poster pointed out and I far prefer it to Letter.
What gets me about paper in the US is when you talk about paper weight (okay, maybe most people DON'T talk about paper weight, but they do in my industry). What is so hard about gsm (grams per square meter)? The US paper weights are different numbers for the same weight depending on the TYPE of paper! Even if you HAVE to use an imperial system, couldn't you just use pounds per square foot (psf) or something else easy for me to convert in my head without lookup tables?
As a note, it's never actually written "mils" - I think the grandparent poster was just writing it that way to give an idea of pronunciation. For writing, we'd stick to "mm" and "ml" (or occasionally "mms" and "mls" informally, but I personally avoid that)
Incidently, why use microns instead of micrometers? Personally, I never use "microns", only "micrometres"... but I do feel I'm in the minority doing that.
As another note, pay attention to the spelling - "re", not "er". A "meter" is a device for measuring something, whereas a "metre" is a distance. "Micrometer" is a tool used in mechanical engineering, "micrometre" is a very small distance - and the pronunciation of these two words are quite different (roughly "mi-cro-me-tre" vs "mi-crom-e-ter").
I grew up in New Zealand, but have lived the last few years in both Europe and Australia. I agree about the lack of a commonly used 10cm unit (quite clearly, a decimetre) being a little odd, but it's not really a big deal. There's nothing stopping you rounding things to the nearest 10cm (eg "it's roughly 50cm long").
What I miss here in Australia and when I visit NZ is the lack of centilitre that I got so used to in Europe. Sure, it's the same sort of thing, where you just say "a shot glass is 30ml", but "3cl" is just nice. Or a can of coke being 33cl (yes, 330ml, smaller than the NZ 375ml).
I've gotta go back to Europe... *sigh*
As for your thoughts on the base 12, I agree, the divisions are nicer... but how often do you actually need to divide by those fractions? I find I very rarely divide by anything other than 2, 4 or 5 in "day to day life"... all of which are pretty easy in base 10 (0.5, 0.25, 0.2). Dividing by three is something is occasionally needed in day to day life (3 people sharing a food bill for example) but often the number you're dealing with don't divide nicely no matter what system you're using (the food bill is $26.55 for example...)
If I had mod points, I'd mod you up. This is something I've been trying to tell people for a LONG time (every time I have this discussion - be it on slashdot or elsewhere)... just because we use metric, it doesn't mean we can't use fractions! A "half metre" makes perfect sense... and most people in Europe are more than familiar with buying half-litres of beer (although that said, it sounds you do something different in Sweden! 40cL, I'm not familiar with - generally 30cL or a half-litre (50cL) when I'm in Europe)
As a note, I do the same thing with height - estimate to the nearest 5cm.
It's not only the English that drive on the left...
m l
http://www.pubquizhelp.34sp.com/misc/leftdrive.ht
Metric doesn't necessarily mean you have to use decimal places... there's NOTHING wrong with saying "half a metre" or "one third of a metre". Metric just generally makes it MUCH easier to do conversion, especially between different types of units (litres of water expressed in cubic centimetres for example... how many cubic inches to a pint?)
Hmmm... good luck keeping up with your:
- Dialup net access that's still in common use
- Hideously expensive broadband access (related to first point probably)
- 4 star hotels that don't have cat5 run to the rooms for net access
- EXTREMELY poor public wireless coverage
- Lack of touchscreens in public places (vending machines, train ticket machines, info kiosks)
- Cars that get terrible "mileage"
- Cellphone networks that have poor coverage and many old standards still in use
- Money that's made out of tearable paper that is destroyed by water (okay, most of the world still uses this type, but not AU or NZ - it's plastic notes here)
- Currency value that's dropping like a stone
- Mostly cash based society (so few EFTPOS terminals in small shops!)
- CRT screens everywhere instead of LCD, plasma etc
- Slow postal system
- Thermal printers for receipts, lottery tickets and so on
- Thermal printing fax machines
- Probably many other things I haven't noticed yet
Sure, you may have some centres of "high tech" and the occasional cool devices, but as a nation, you're WAY behind the rest of the world in general.
And before you respond to any of my points with one-off "but my local xxx has a touchscreen info kiosk" or whatever, I'm talking about how common these things are... they're just second nature and EXPECTED elsewhere, there they're considered novelties.
Actually the "PC" could stand for:
;)
"Print Cartridge" - uncommon, since this can also mean the drum/toner assembly.
"Paper Cartridge" - moderately common, mainly on very small and nasty printers.
"Print Cassette" - uncommon, simply because it's a silly term.
"Paper Cassette" - common
If you're talking HP LaserJet printers, which are very common and a model that do display this exact message, it stands for "Paper Cartridge", which reinforces my point above
Dealing with models that have displays like this, I recommend playing with the "@PJL RDYMSG DISPLAY=" command. Lots of fun making the printer say "RADIATION LEAK" or "I LOVE YOU" or other such things when people walk up to it. I wrote a quick and dirty Windows app for doing this more quickly/easily quite a while back, and it still amuses me when I'm in one of those sort of moods at work... I'll make the source and binary available somewhere eventually (once I've tidied it up, added some more functions, etc), but if you want a quick commandline version, http://www.odetocode.com/Humor/68.aspx has some source code.
I know you were just referencing a great movie, but this line has always bugged me. It's not that bloody hard to figure out that it means, "Load Letter sized paper in the Paper Cassette". I have always thought that as a "computer guy" he shouldn't have uttered this line.
Picture for a moment, two universes "side by side" in a dimension we can not physically see, but effectively "overlaid" in all dimensions we can measure/see. No interactions take place between these two universes other than gravity (for reasons that are exaplainable, but beyond the scope of this post).
The influence of the gravitational pull from the one universe would certainly have the exact same features/constructs as what is described here (clumped in parts, not in others etc)
Because these two universes interact gravitationally, it would make sense that matter and "dark matter" would tend to be found in the same places as well, which is exactly what has been observed. The occasional area where they're not found together (dark matter without matter) is also not so hard to comprehend (as would be matter without dark matter if we found that as well).
For those of you who think I'm talking nonsense - this is a dramatic oversimplification of what brane theory (related to string theory/M theory) would have to say on the subject. For those of who you think it's not science because it's not provable, you're probably right... but it's an avenue that I think requires some scientific thought put in to it so that one day it may well become "true" science.
Back in the days of my later classic Amigas (A1200 and A4000), mostly IRC - I was far too addicted in my youth... Also MUDding, general web browsing, messing around with graphics (in DPaint), music (OctaMED) and learning to code (mostly in C, but meddled with a few other languages as well).
Before all that, I ran a BBS on an earlier classic Amiga (A600), and before THAT (my A500 days) I was too young to do much other than play games.
My current AmigaOne, I regrettably don't use for much serious stuff, but once the Firefox port is finished, it'll likely become my main webbrowser and email system at the very least. As far as email clients go, I already prefer YAM ("Yet Another Mailer" - great software) to most other email clients, but I can't justify leaving the system on 24/7 just for email. When I do power it on at the moment (at least once a week), I have a couple of little coding projects on the go - mostly part of the community effort to get the brand new OS up to scratch with handy little utilities that are needed (check out os4depot.net for examples of the sorts of apps I mean)
Yep - judging MacOS, Unix and Windows from 1985 specs, I'm glad I don't use any of those platforms either!
I live in Aussieland (although I'm not really an Aussie) and am fairly passionate about my Amiga... that said, I'm really more or less OS agnostic. I'll use whatever suits the task at hand best. Which means my Windows boxes for games/wordprocessing/development(work), my Macs for browsing/chatting/graphics/ftp-serving/music, my Linux box for serious network tasks and my Amiga for actually having fun and messing around with stuff.
Once the Firefox port is finished, I'll likely switch to my Amiga for all general webbrowsing, email (I already prefer YAM to other mail clients, but don't use it right now) and other basic internet usage... just lack of a decent browser like Firefox is holding me back from that.
Being posted by an anonymous coward, the parent may go unnoticed by many. If any mods notice this comment, please mod the parent up! (informative or interesting - it's both!)
Ummmm... huh? Booting with WB loaded to a basic intuition screen with a CLI in it was SNAPPY on every model of Amiga ever. Sluggish is hardly a word I'd ever use to describe any aspects of AmigaOS except on severely underpowered systems with every fancy add-on under the sun (which you can hardly blame the OS itself for)
Browser: Check (although not a very good one by most people's standards until the Firefox port is finished) .mod files native: Well, as native as they were on any platform. They weren't a "native" format for Amiga, just very popular!
USB key: Check
Safety from malware: As long as it remains a niche OS with hardly any users, I'd say yep - safe as houses.
It's quite interesting, because I hear comments like this a lot, but my personal experience is quite different. I hardly ever plugged my Amiga in to the TV (too low quality) and have never been much of a gamer so graphics and sound are only a "bonus" as far as I'm concerned. I always liked my Amigas (from my A500 through to my trusty A4000 that I had for ages through to my current AmigaOne) just because the OS is so damn easy and elegant.
You currently can't... nor will you be able to unless someone adds PPC support to "your favourite Amiga Emulator" (I assume you mean UAE here...) as well as hacking it to make it look like it has the hardware license key (AKA "annoying dongle chip on the motherboard that everyone hates since it forces you to use that proprietary hardware where otherwise you could run the OS on pretty much any appropriately specced PPC system, but is actually a good thing because it prevents piracy, which is what damn near killed Amiga in the first place")
Well, the ISO image of AmigaOS4 I downloaded from Hyperion (the guys that wrote it) is 46MB... so it's a LOT larger than AmigaOS3, but still tiny compared to many other modern systems. I'm not at home right now (live in Australia, currently on holiday in Europe), so memory usage I can't check, but I vaguely recall that of the 512MB I have in my AmigaOne, only about 20 or so is used once the system is booted, services are running (yes, I run a webserver, ftp server and VNC server on my Amiga) and all my random startup apps are going.
Essentially you still have to "set it up" and "give it a size" though. AmigaOS's RAMDisk is a bit different. It's "just there" and doesn't have a size per se. It's whatever size you're using. When it's empty, it takes no memory. When you put 256MB of data in it, it's 256MB. When you delete 50MB of that, it's now only 206MB. Basically it's completely dynamic and requires no user management.
Hmmm... might want to read up a bit more - it doesn't run on Classic Amigas. If you buy an old Amiga from eBay, don't expect to run AmigaOS4 on it! (it'd be somewhat similar to expecting to run OSX on a 68k Mac)
Hmm... My AmigaOne isn't vapour!
Okay, true... NEW hardware is currently vapour, but my Micro AmigaOne isn't THAT old yet (bought it shortly after it's release - don't recall exactly when, but only a couple of years back now)... I'll get at least a couple more years of service out of it yet (and hell, there are still MANY people using their Classic Amigas - now THAT'S old hardware)