Please create an account to participate in the Slashdot moderation system

 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror
×

Comment Re:still on imperial and no plan to switch to metr (Score 1) 100

comon - all of the U.K. is still on imperial and no plan to switch to metric

I don't know why you state this so confidently when you are almost completely wrong.

Nearly all units in the UK are officially metric, with the official change having taken place many years ago (pre 1980) apart from a few very specific exceptions like road signs (miles/mph) beer (pints) milk (mostly pints, sometimes litres).

Informally, most people use a mishmash of imperial and metric, often switching between the two for convenience.

Some imperial measures have effectively died out completely (e.g. imperial spirit measures like the gill); others will die soon as older folks die (Fahrenheit use); a few are still used as the prime units and show no signs of dying.

This wikipedia article seems to give a very accurate version of the actual current state of UK units:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metrication_in_the_United_Kingdom

Comment Re:Online storage?! (Score 1) 330

1% of my pressed, carefully stored CD collection has succumbed to 'bit rot' over 20 years; CDs that played perfectly when new at some point developed pin-point holes in the reflective layer (visible when held up to the light) in critical areas such that the discs are no longer even recognized as CDs either by standalone or PC based CD players/drives.
I'd rather rely on a rotating set of 3 external hard drives as backup (retired and replaced periodically) than bet on the 'good' 99% of my CDs still being readable in another 10 or 20 years.

Comment Re:Support? (Score 1) 96

Since there's a whole lot of love here for Gnome 2.x, what's the distro that'll be last standing for that GUI?

Probably RHEL or clones CentOS etc.

E.g. RHEL 6 and CentOS V6, with Gnome 2, are supported until November 2020

If you want something a bit more up-to-date with out of the box multimedia support etc. then the LTS version of Mint with Gnome 2 'clone' MATE is supported until April 2017 (and it's probable/possible MATE will work with the following LTS version, due Apr 2014 and supported until 2019).

Comment Re:Never connect the critical systems to the inter (Score 1) 153

and you won't be allowed to change the owner of the car,

That's pretty far fetched; unless all the car manufacturers did this at the same time, the sales for those cars with this 'feature' would drop through the floor since they would have no resale value. If all the car manufacturers *did* do it at the same time it would probably be some sort of cartel issue and illegal.

Much more likely is that you would have to officially update the registration with the manufacturer in order to carry on receiving necessary updates after a change of owner, and to do this you would have to pay a 'reasonable admin fee to cover costs' (as they would put it), which could be quite lucrative for the car manufacturers, but not seriously affect resale values if set at the 'right' level. This way they get a cut of all resales for doing virtually nothing.

Comment Re:I'm postponing buying toothpaste (Score 1) 291

my dentist trying to directly freeze my brain stem or something with a needle the size of a drinking straw and then STILL feeling it kinda gets on the nerves.

I always request no anaesthetic for fillings; after 40 years of dental work on my teeth, I've concluded it's much less traumatic than the injections (which have made me bawl like a baby, and on one occasion given me a 2 week long nasal drip), and you don't bite big chunks out of your inside cheeks while waiting for it to wear off.

However, my teeth have been drilled *a lot* and that seems to destroy or desensitise the nerves, so it may be that I can stand no-anaesthetic drilling more than is typical.

Comment Re:Is this really a "death"? (Score 1) 134

Probably they are moving towards a database structure like you have on minis and mainframes.

Some minis, yes. But *the* mainframe OS - MVS, OS/390, now z/OS does not have a database type file system.
It has two types of filesystems - a UNIX style hfs (current flavour is ZFS) and the traditional
node.qual1.qual2...
files.
The closest thing it's got to a database structure (in a default setup) is VSAM KSDS clusters, consisting of a data and index file component (plus optional alternate indexes) but these are not generally classified as databases since they do not have an associated database manager, transactions etc. (although they can and do serve as the foundation for various databases).

Comment Re:I don't get it (Score 1) 535

Mental illness. Pure and simple.
Doesn't have to be mental illness as such. Could be a personality disorder, which is just basically saying the he's not ill in any treatable way, rather just 'born bad'.

Same way as you don't classify people born deaf as 'physically ill', someone with a psychopathic type personality (no empathy etc.) isn't usually considered 'mentally ill'.

This is not to say that he should be let off because it's 'not his fault'. It's perfectly possible for many people to control their personality disorder intellectually (e.g. I want to do X, I know it won't make me feel guilty, but I don't because intellectually I know X is a bad thing for society or whatever).

Comment Re:Others (Score 1) 713

Also, the UK road sign for an ungated railway level crossing is a picture of a steam locomotive.

Of course, you are quite likely to encounter steam locos in many areas, particularly on summer weekends, due to the large number of heritage railways (and mainline steam excursions)...
Although the ungated crossings are getting much rarer.

Comment Re:The best part... (Score 1) 441

It certainly isn't Canonical, which never contributes anything back to any upstream Linux projects.

*Never* is just plain wrong. The standard criticism is that canonical does not contribute *enough*.
E.g. see this:
http://www.kroah.com/log/linux/lpc_2008_keynote.html
which shows that canonical is a small but not completely insignificant kernel contributor.
It also makes at least some upstream contributions to a selection of other projects.

Slashdot Top Deals

Top Ten Things Overheard At The ANSI C Draft Committee Meetings: (5) All right, who's the wiseguy who stuck this trigraph stuff in here?

Working...