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Admin
You, sir, have made my day.
Admin
1 mile is... On land: 1609.344 m On sea: 1852 m On the track: 1500 m -or- 1600 m (US) In Scandinavia: 10 000 m
(Even more) obsolete are... Nautical (UK): 1853.184 m Nautical (US): 1853.249 m Scots: varied from town to town Irish: 2043.86 m Portuguese: 2087.3 m Roman: ~ 1479 m
Danish & German: 7532.5 m Austria: 7586 m Dutch: 1 hour trip, taken to be: : 5555 m (=French lieue marine) : 5660 m (Amsterdam) : 6280 m (Rhineland) Russian: 7468 m German (sea): 7407.41 m * Dutch (Snellius): 7157 m *
Norse: 11 298 m Old Swedish: 10 687 m Old old Swedish: 6~15 km (varied by place) Croatian: 11 130 m
Has anyone mentioned dry/fluid and long/short/troy already?
Admin
It's a quantum reality...not really 1/1000th of a bit, just that bit is being used for 999 other things simultaneously.
captcha: iusto-When you forget what you are doing right in the middle of doing it.
Admin
Admin
What have you got against furlongs?
(1 furlong = 220 yards, 1 mile = 8 furlongs. Still used in horse racing.)
Admin
And in the case of a Bit, 0 is the absence of information. So no, 0 is not "less than" 1. 0 is less than 1 if the binary sequence is representing a number (100 is less than 101). But by itself, it has no intrinsic value. 0 and 1 are just states. A state has no meaning unless the symbol that the state represents has meaning. 100 means nothing. If you use it as a digit, it represents a base10 4 and as such has meaning. But if you use it as a bit field, it could mean FILE_NOT_FOUND. You can't tell the meaning of a bit by analyzing the bit. You can with binary numbers, but not all bits/bytes are binary numbers (they are enumerations of binary digits, but they are not necessarily numeric)...
</pedant>Admin
James T. Kirk: Mr.Scott. Have you always multiplied your repair estimates by a factor of four? Montgomery Scott: Certainly, Sir. How else can I keep my reputation as a miracle worker?
Admin
Nothing, he was great as John Connor in Terminator 2.
Admin
I guess the lesson here is to keep the boss in the loop so he can tell the director. I do know that one of the first lessons my kids will learn is what a cargo cult is and how to recognize one.
Admin
Actually, I did not represent their position as such. I merely pointed out that NotaDBAs claim that imperial units are in some special human scale is irrelevant UNLESS they are different for each person. At no stage did I express any preference for either system, and I am not doing so now.
Admin
Somebody didn't read the comment he's quoting.
Admin
20 ft 90 in, duh.
Admin
Admin
Even better (from ST:TNG "Relics")
Scotty: “Starfleet captains are like children. They want everything right now and they want it their way. But the secret is to give them only what they need, not what they want.” Geordi: “Yeah, well, I told the captain I’d have this analysis done in an hour.” Scotty: “How long will it really take?” Geordi: “An hour.” Scotty: “You didn’t tell him now long it would really take, did you?” Geordi: “Of course I did.” Scotty: “Laddie, you got a lot to learn if you want people to think of you as a miracle worker!”
Admin
Admin
eric@buildhost:~$ su -c 'vi /usr/include/stdlib.h'
... /* Happy debugging, douchebags */ #define NULL 4
Admin
Admin
I still think it's funny that hard drive manufacturers claim even multiples of, say, 1000 in their disk capacities since they can only have an integer multiple of 512 (soon to be 4096) bytes. They are obviously rounding as it is.
There is actually no* integer power of ten equal to an integer times a power of two**, so all hard drive capacities are bogus to begin with. And what about SSDs now - they are most definitely not in even powers of ten capacity since they are addressable by an integer number of bits.
Besides that, we're talking about the PDP-11/70. When that computer was being manufactured, computer MB were always 2^20 bytes (and nobody cared that it wasn't "pure" SI).
(*I'm fairly certain of this since I'm pretty sure log-base-10 of 2 is an irrational number.)
(**Ok pedants, 10^0 is indeed equal to 2^0.)
Admin
When you turned on the disk caching, it didn't just start caching files. You had to identify and flag each and every file that needed to be cached. If you didn't flag them, nothing was cached. When nearly all PDP-11 people turned on disk caching, this is what they did. At least, everybody that I knew.
What I did was different. After playing around with the canonical approach and marking the most used files for disk caching, there was still not much improvement in performance, and I got tired of wasting my time flaggint the files. So I then used the option to cache every file on the drive.
Even that made little difference.
I started reading about the way disk cache was used in RSTS/E. It wasn't what I had expected. What I had expected was that whenever it read a block from file, it put it in cache until the cache was full and if the cache was full, it would look for blocks that could be expired, expire them, and add the block to the cache. And if there were none past the expiration time, expire the least recently used and cache the new block.
But that's not what it did. Instead, it seemed to cache only a limited amount of blocks per file, maybe just one or two blocks. When reading a block, it would first look for an expired block and replace it with the new block if it found one. If there was no expired block, the new block wasn't cached. So if you needed to read it again a second later, you had to get it from the disk drive again. And again. And again.
With some programs I wrote, I started doing my own caching by reading the block and keeping it in memory until I was through with it. But with the limited amount of memory that was available, you couldn't really use that very much.
Digging through the release notes, I found a patch for the disk cache time and started playing with it. By dropping the time from thirty seconds down to three to five seconds, the stale blocks expired faster and usually you didn't need them again after three to five seconds, anyway. That is what made the difference and made the computer fly.
I told several other people about it at the local RSTS/E LUG, but they preferred to continue to identify specific files for caching.
Admin
27 ft, 6 in - calculation was done in about a second and a half. That was an easy one, though. (Showing my work: 2'9" = 2.75 ft. Move the decimal point and convert back.)
One of the advantages of base 12 - for anything but 5, 7, and 11 you get to easily fractionalize anything less than a foot. And for those 3 you can guesstimate or do other math tricks. for example, 10*2'7" is 25'10" (or 2" less than 26')
Admin
Admin
That's a good story, but unscrupulous behavior from Eric. In my personal experience, I've tried doing things like that. It always backfires somehow. Sure, Kevin might not be able to find his keyboard with both hands and a map, but when you know the VP of finance, you don't need to know where the keyboard is. Sooner or later someone else will discover what Eric did and relate that to Kevin.
-- Furry cows moo and decompress.
Admin
Admin
Admin
Admin
Eric76, I was responding to:
"In-memory disk caching was enabled and performance... didn't change at all. Eric, a stalwart veteran of 15 months at this time, couldn't accept that. After some research, he found a patch that altered the disk caching behavior."
I guess the moral is that sometimes even &*^!'s like Kevin can be "right" and there is a way to do what they want even if it is "obviously" impossible when first requested.
I've hit a number like that in my current job where the boss is of the opinion that anything he asks for is, by definition, reasonable. I'm old enough and senior enough to get away with telling him that his more stupid requests are either impractical (can be done but the cost/benefit is way off the curve), or that his request violates standard Windows usability principles (and hence will make the product difficult for new users to understand why it acts differently to all other Windows programs". He accepts that .. then asks someone one of the junior programmers who can't say no to do it.
This means that I get to fix the mess up later when the junior fails to get it to work as he expected or the customers start to complain or ....
His requests are so often reversed later that I've become used to just commenting code out rather than deleting it.
Unfortunately for my ego I do come across the odd one that turns out to have been possible :-)
Admin
Admin
Back in college I was tired of waiting on a stupid slow compiler on a shared system (VAX?). I dug into the system enough to figure out how to run the thing as a background task--it wouldn't be any faster but it wouldn't lock up my terminal while it was doing it.
I try out my script--and the whole classroom freezes. I wasn't the one who messed up the priorities, that's how the system was configured.
Admin
Not quite - it's my argument that doudecimal is not particularly hard to do multiplication in; certainly not enough harder to do addition or multiplication in vs a decimal system to give up the benefits of easier fractionalization. Because the example given multiplied by 10, "converting base" was easier than anything else for that particular problem.
A harder example would have been something where the multiplicative factor was not a regular fraction in decimal or duodecimal (say 7) and the length was not a regular fraction (say, um, 5'11") - which is 35'+(6'+5") = 41'5", which took longer to type than to figure out, and I picked the length semi-randomly.
Most of this I did not learn in school, but from various people and authors demonstration "math tricks" (including some examples of making change in novels set in pre-decimalization England; which made a lot less sense before I looked up some of the slang for monetary units). But it isn't hard to teach - particularly if you have memorized the multiplicative tables out to 12x12, which I recommend doing AFTER you do the roots of multiplication rather than memorizing first, though - that way you can generalize from there. Needless to say, despite being a couple generations younger, I enjoy Tom Lehrer's New Math...
Admin
+10 for the Dr Who reference.
Admin
quote user="Ian Argent"]Most of this I did not learn in school, but from various people and authors demonstration "math tricks"[/quote] So you need "math tricks" in order to compute almost as quickly as one does naturaly with decimals? What an advantage!
Do you really need to do divisions that often? I don't think I need to -- halves perhaps which are easy enough in decimal.
Admin
Admin
You have to stay away from indiscreet binary digits if you don't want your boss to find out what you're up to.
Admin
a bit is either a 0 or a 1.... what is 1/1000 of a bit? and, no, you do not have anything that takes 0.005 bits.
Admin
Senior citizens now buy milk by the (Imperial) quart to put on their cereal. If milk were to come in cartons of only 1 litre (0.87987663 Imperial quarts), they would be forced to buy two cartons to make up the shortfall, and the milk would go bad before they could use it up. So clearly the "natural" Imperial units are vastly superior to the new-fangled French SI ones.
I suppose that the argument could also be extended to US seniors, now buying milk in cartons of 1 US quart. Cartons of 1 litre (1.05668821 US quarts) would force them to buy too much, leading again to spoilage.
"...on day-to-day activities on a human scale"? Like the length of the king's arm, which is just about 1 metre, like a quart which is very close to a litre, like the 1,000 paces of a Roman soldier, the basis of the mile... Regardless of the measurement system, we humans will find units that are convenient for us to use in measuring our heights, our trips, our beer, and so on.
(On a related front, a local bar recently discovered why all bar inventories in Canada usually come up short, something like this: Canadian booze mostly comes in Imperial quarts of 40 Imperial ounces of 28.4130742 mL each, so you might expect to get 40 one-ounce shots from a bottle. But almost all the shot glasses used here are made in the US, and measure one US ounce of 29.5735296 mL. Thus, you can get only 38.4 (US) one-ounce shots from a Canadian 40-(Imperial)ounce bottle. http://www.cbc.ca/canada/british-columbia/story/2010/12/22/bc-shot-glass-discrepancy.html)