California was debating requiring a serial number on home made guns independent of how they were made.

Actually, the legislature passed that. But, in a fit of sanity, governor Jerry Brown vetoed it.

Anyone familiar with California politics will realize how extrordinary that is. B-)

Take a look at a Black and Tan.

Which is on the top: the Irish or the British. :)

hawk

perhaps the rest of the Common Market would have gone back to the old Roman measure?

A pound (livre/whatever) of silver being divided into 20 units, each of which was divided into 12 pennies was hardly a British development.

hawk

True, and clearly a win.

ROFLMAO. IME, the only thing more painful than maintaining a Windows system over the long term is maintaining a *nix system over the long term.

Let's consider Linux. First, you probably get to choose between a stable or a not stable version of your distro. Choose stable and you're OK as long as you don't need to run any software released in the last 3 years and you're OK with being forced to upgrade the whole OS after maybe 2 years anyway (which will quite possibly trash your entire machine to the point of not being able to boot, or at least breaking minor features like RAID arrays, assuming you actually managed to configure one of those properly in the first place after your distro's "user friendly" installer messed it up completely). Alternatively, choose unstable if you want to run more recent software but don't mind stuff breaking all the time instead of every couple of years on a schedule.

Either way, if you want anything that hasn't got into your distribution's package management system yet, you're almost invariably forced into compiling your own software and manually installing it with makefiles. Those might, if you're really lucky, also offer a make uninstall option that actually does cleanly uninstall. That might, if you're even luckier, still work six months later, as long as no-one inadvertently installed a new version of the manually compiled code over the top to "upgrade" it, or just ran make distclean without thinking leaving you with no idea what make uninstall should have done. In any case, Linux is going to enforce absolutely no system hygiene at any point in this process.

OS X is of course doing much better with a similar foundation, as anyone who has spoken the words "Apple" and "shellshock" in the same sentence over the past few days can testify. Or at least, they'll be able to testify, just as soon as they've finished wiping and reinstalling their botnetted systems, because the patch everyone else had within hours only arrived for Apple gear several days later and long after exploits were widely found in the wild.

You're absolutely right that we should be able to install many programs and uninstall them with no lingering effects. But the idea that the registry is the only thing preventing that on Windows or that *nix systems do better is crazy. The only reason *nix systems don't break more often is that the only people running them are geeks and professionals, and those kinds of people are less likely to install random junk and more willing to dive in and fix internals when stuff goes wrong.

>We have a certain failed Mars probe to prove the case.

You mean the one that slammed into the ground because some idiot used metric units instead of real ones and miscalculated the thrust? :_)

hawk

Except there wasn't. Well, there was. A bit. Sometimes. Naturally, this half-baked approach actually made the problems worse.

Even today and with native Windows applications, many aren't very well behaved in following the "standards" here, because Microsoft did such a terrible job of promoting good practices.

Anything that isn't a native Windows application -- including almost every darling of the open source world, for a start -- probably ignores not only the application data directory but also the program files directories and insists on spewing its crap all over your filesystem and environment. Oh, and $DEITY help you if you need to do anything with Cygwin, and $CHORUS_OF_DEITIES help you if you have more than one ported application that requires Cygwin.

It is telling that you can't even schedule a backup of the "official" place to store documents without considerable effort, because Windows itself sets up so many links that most backup tools can't handle them.

And that's before you get idiots like the Chrome team at Google who think it's clever to install executable software in your data directory in order to deliberately circumvent Windows' normal security model, just so their auto-updater can do things it shouldn't without anything silly like troubling the user for permission. I'm always a little surprised that Microsoft hasn't, with considerable and legitimate justification, flagged Chrome's installer/updater software as malware and automatically removed it at some point.

On the bright side, if Microsoft can actually manage to produce an operating system with a sensible filesystem structure and application installation/update/uninstallation tools that actually enforce that structure, they might yet salvage the Windows brand and convince significant parts of their potential market to upgrade again.

Nah, it's just inflation.

Kind of like how a buck used to get you a great burger, but now only the dregs of the menu.

Two enormous rocky-ice things in orbit around one another used to be enough to get you a planet, but no longer . . .

hawk, pretty sure that it's not about a disney trademark . . .

You can make Windows systems run crap-free and full speed again as well, by cleaning out all the obscure registry entries and system services and automatic updaters and cached thingies and temporary wotsits. You just have to know what you're doing.

Also, as with the part of the Linux strategy you forgot to mention, you have to be willing to spend forever doing it, because the tools provided as standard are just about hopeless.

He was also an obese asthmatic and died from the strain of trying to run away from a volcano.

Oh, sexconker, you and your stories - "the study is wrong", "beer kills brain cells".... Now let's go back to that ... building ... thingie ... where our beds and TV ... is.

Some years ago after being laid off from one programming job, my old CS prof from college suggested I stop by to interview with the Epic recruiter who was visiting the campus. I was told to block out about four hours time, and that it would be a very in-depth technical interview. It turned out to be nothing of the sort: it was maybe ten minutes of talk with a human being, and hours and hours of filling out a badly-written "technical exam". Allegedly it involved seeing how well the taker could think about programming languages and programming language concepts by giving us a toy language to write a parser and compiler for, but ... holy toledo, was it a stinker.

First, the language was defined in plain English. There was no BNF. When ambiguities of English occurred (as they always do), the Epic rep was unable to give any resolution as to what the language was supposed to do. My protest of, "Well, if you don't know what it's supposed to do, how can you expect me to write a parser or compiler for it?" fell on deaf ears.

Second, certain mathematical operations were supposed to be supported ... but the language was vague: they were supposed to have their "conventional" meanings. But some mathematical operators are defined sort of vaguely: for instance, it's not really well-defined mathematically what the modulo of two negative numbers are. As a result, different programming languages tend to implement it differently. (For instance, C++03 says it's implementation-dependent, while C++11 has a strict policy on it.) How did they want the modulus operator implemented? They had no idea.

Ultimately, when it came to writing a parser and compiler for their toy language I decided to do it the right way as opposed to their way. Instead of having an ad-hoc thing, I turned the exam over and started writing a formal BNF and lex/yacc rules on the back of the pages. I took the full four hours to do the technical exam, turned it in, told them that my work was on the *back* of the exam and not the front, and walked out.

Six weeks later, not having heard a thing from Epic, I sent them a politely-worded email saying, "If I'm going to spend four hours on a Saturday on an interview for Epic, I would appreciate the courtesy of being told whether I would be receiving a job offer or not."

A week after that I received a one-line email: "We regret to say that we're going with other candidates."

Anyway. That's my experience with Epic. Take it for whatever it's worth. I didn't think much of their interview process, and they sure didn't think much of me.

I think maybe you read more into my post than was really there. For example, I never suggested we supply all drinks in pints, only milk and beer, because those are what most people are familiar with. Obviously we could sell, say, a half-litre of milk instead of a pint, but what benefit would that actually bring? Every child in the UK grows up knowing how much a pint of milk is, and every shop sells milk in pints, so changing units (and, realistically, slightly changing the familiar volumes as well) seems like a solution in search of a problem to me.

Except that in this country, almost literally everyone uses that system, and what the metricists are arguing for is the "standard" that almost literally no-one uses.

Losing the Mars mission was very unfortunate, but not nearly as unfortunate as seeing, say, an extra hundred people dying on the roads the year after speed limits changed.

I wonder, do you think we self-absorbed holdouts should drive on the right as well?

I was kind of hoping for some sort of creature deciding to try to crawl out onto dry land, finding no actual land, saying "screw it", and crawling back under the ice.

No, 1:16:9. Our entire solar system moved to high-def monoliths shortly after 2001.