91–100 of 186 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
8601 also gives you proper week numbering (which Europeans tend to like) + weeks start on Monday, after the weekend.
Well it's all the weekend. Saturday is the last end of the week and Sunday is the front end of the week.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
What would be great would be if someone would take up UTF-8B again. I mentioned his death because otherwise you might think he lost interest in the project, but no, he lost interest in living.
> he lost interest in living I get what you're trying to accomplish with the parallel construction, but that's a pretty callous way to describe it :/
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's not arbitrary at all, it's for backwards compatibility. Previously the meter was defined in terms of the emission lines of krypton-86, which was a distance that we could measure most precisely with an interferometer. Before that it was based on the size of the earth, which could be measured with a astronomical calculations. And originally it was based on the length of a pendulum that produced a period of a 1 sec…
Wait, wouldn't you still know the length of a nanometer to with (10^-9)% of a nanometer?
So, the distances were talking about are actually at the level where quantum mechanics and the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle matters.
I dream of a world where everything is UTC, UTF-8, and metric.
I dream of a world where everything is UTC, UTF-8, and metric.
And ISO 8601. Sweet, sweet ISO 8601...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The amount of time and money to shift at this point would be astronomical wouldn't it? It would take a few generations as we would continue to have to teach imperial so people could convert when they ran across any existing media referring to the imperial system measurements. Hundred years of machines that use imperial, speedometers, odometers, books, tools, software, air conditioning, heating, manufacturing, constru…
We were almost there in the 1970s. As for "a few generations", yes, certainly. We have only to look to the mishmash of unit use in the UK. But what's wrong with taking a few generations to get there? Turning it around, we got rid of a lot of specialized units - hogshead, chain, furlong, peck, etc. (If Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers, how many many more are needed to make a bushel?) So it's clearly possib…
This is an example of American influence. Decade ago it was in centimetres.
For example, in this 2004 Siemens commercial for Russia CX65's screen size is 13 square centimetres:
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Wait, wouldn't you still know the length of a nanometer to with (10^-9)% of a nanometer?
Please do also remember that the diameter of a hydrogen atom is 10^-10 m. So, the distances were talking about are actually at the level where quantum mechanics and the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle matters.
Assuming QM's predictions are valid, we will never ever be able to to improve our measurement beyond the point where errors from the uncertainty principle dominate. Our current definition of the meter is pretty close to this limit, so personally I don't expect the meter is going to be redefined any time soon because we're already near the sort of scales where the idea of "distance" starts to get kind of fuzzy.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Funny thing about Emacs and OpenBSD... ...Emacs is the only package in the entire ports tree that can't use ASLR.
Why is it?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
1. it does have the benefit that it's cross-cultural, you can actually talk to people outside your cultural bubble 2. it's got the advantage that you're using the same measurements as all your trade partners so people don't need two production lines anymore 3. it's got the advantage that people going into science and engineering don't need to build a whole new set of unit references because they've got the one which…
> 1. it does have the benefit that it's cross-cultural, you can actually talk to people outside your cultural bubble We already do that. > 2. it's got the advantage that you're using the same measurements as all your trade partners so people don't need two production lines anymore Two production lines? For what? > 3. it's got the advantage that people going into science and engineering don't need to build a whole new…
Failure to use the metric system everywhere cost NASA a $125 million Mars orbiter just 16 years ago, and yet here you are, insisting that this is not a problem, and throwing in a non sequitur to justify the position.