spauldo

Except that the Public Health Service doesn't have torpedoes :)

I dunno, I just can't see it that way. Starfleet has been involved in way too much combat to not be a military. But then again, I don't really remember seeing a Federation equivalent of marines, which a real navy would have...

You'd think that, but for the last decade there's been a huge push to move all the SCADA software into the cloud. "Run your plant from your phone!"

And that's not even counting the various integrators that just don't implement any kind of security at all.

I fight against this sort of thing all the time. Sometimes I get my way.

I think you're taking the "FTP" part a bit too literally here. No one's suggesting we'd jump in a terminal and type in FTP commands manually or even use the FTP protocol itself - we've got better options today, and we'd have even better options if the Internet had had global node-to-node connectivity all along.

It'd likely just be built into your operating system's tooling. Your file manager would be able to access other machines it can authenticate to, or you'd automount remote directories on login, etc.

The reason people use cloud storage systems for moving files around is because they have to. A 3rd party server is required because we don't have node-to-node connectivity.

Hell, we'd likely have had cloud storage options sooner because people wanting extra remote storage would totally have been a thing.

Yep. That's something we would have had to deal with. I would love to see what solution we would have come up with.

Sadly, we'll never know.

> Never heard of an acre-inch before

I only know of it because it's a unit used by the US Army Corps of Engineers, who maintain the local reservoir. A buddy of mine's dad worked for them when I was a kid so that lake was my stomping ground.

> 2.54 cm

Oops! You're right! My bad.

Possibly. Or maybe you and I did a dramatically different amount of work on our networks. My setup is very much not what should be default for SOHO, for instance.

My point wasn't ever about home users anyway.

Maybe! Although I doubt it. Honestly, if you're really curious about it it's best to ask a local language expert if you have access to a university. I'm just an old computer geek with a higher-than-average interest in the written word.

This might make a good subject for a RobWords video, actually.

Unless someone vibecodes a new OS and convinces everyone to use it, we're stuck with what we got. Reaching feature parity with Linux and then debugging it to the point where it'd be usable is a gargantuan undertaking.

What, you've never seen a moose with a beowulf cluster?

I thought IPv5 was a protocol designed for telecoms to route voice data over packet networks, though? It wasn't supposed to be a replacement for IPv4.

There's still quite a few pockets of the industry where IPv6 just isn't available. Industrial control systems, for instance - there's lots of PLCs and SCADA software that are still IPv4-only. It's changing slowly, but industrial computing runs on thirty year time scales and there's still a lot of stuff out there that won't even run on modern operating systems. We use 32-bit Windows XP VMs or sometimes even FreeDOS for some of the software we use.

Now imagine if you didn't need that icon and Windows Explorer (or whatever file manager you use) could just connect to wherever your file is. Maybe through a "Favorite."

My OS vendor didn't set up my firewall rules, lay out my subnets, or configure my routing. I did that. Twice. Because I've got a slightly more advanced network layout than your typical home user. And that's all much less complicated that what your typical corporate network would be, which is much less complicated than what an ISP or COLO provider has to deal with. And then there's the cloud...

Yeah, sure, if your requirements can be met by a cable modem, then you're basically good to go. Until DNS breaks for some machines and not others, and it's because your ISP screwed something in their IPv6 routing but it still works on IPv4. Or Microsoft's authentication servers decide they don't like your IPv6 subnet anymore and Minecraft refuses to start unless you turn IPv6 off. Or... You get the idea.

> US customary is not "thousands" of years

You misunderstood me. It's based on measurements that people have been using for thousands of years. The Romans had feet and miles, for example - not exactly the same lengths, but for the same purposes. The Japanese shaku is almost exactly the same as a US foot. A Japanese Shō is about half a gallon. A Chinese jīn is just slightly larger than a pound. There's a reason for this.

> there was also sorts of inconsistencies

I never claimed otherwise. But do notice that the survey foot and standard foot weren't used for the same purposes, and the difference between them wasn't likely to confuse anyone except maybe people new to the field.

> Here's another one: which weighs more, a pound of feathers or a pound of gold?

Yep, Troy weights. And no one's sure where the Troy system came from. The main reason for its use is because of international trade. Also not something regular people (i.e. people that didn't work directly with precious metals) would have had contact with.

> Millimeters

Hah! Yeah right. Look at all the various non-metric systems that have existed throughout history. Did any of them use something like millimeters to measure wooden planks? Why not?

> As evidence for this Australia/NZ/EU do everything in millimetres in construction.

They do it because the metric system is mandated there and it doesn't give you reasonably sized unit for that scale of work.

Try this: go to a home center (or whatever it's called there - the place you buy building supplies) and measure some drywall. Do the measurements you made agree to the advertised ones within half a millimeter? Compare the dimensions of drywall sheets from different pallets and manufacturers. Do their dimensions agree to within half a millimeter? If not, that's a sure sign you're using units poorly adapted for purpose.

AFAIK you all use imperial pints, which are a little bigger than the ones used in countries that still use the customary system (US and I assume Liberia). I'm pretty sure your pints are the same as those used in the rest of the commonwealth, but corrections are welcome.

That goes back to the fact that the imperial system replaced the older customary system after the American revolution. The US legislated a somewhat simplified version of the Customary System the English were using at the time, which was a piecemeal system based on several different acts of parliament over hundreds of years. We (much) later made slight changes so that our measurements are based on metric.

The Imperial System was instituted in the UK in 1826 and most of the measurements stayed the same, which is why our foot and pound are the same as your foot and pound. The biggest change was that imperial simplified the various liquid measurements to make them uniform. Before then, different liquids used different measurements. The gallon used in the US was originally based on the wine gallon whose value had been last set by parliament in 1709.

I'm well familiar with DynDNS. I used to run it before I got a real domain. It can't tell the difference between my laptop and my workstation, since they're both behind the same IP. I wasn't aware of iroh, but having looked it up, it's just a hack to get around problems that NAT has caused.

And yes, Dropbox does exist because of NAT, or more generally the fact that "consumers" are second-class citizens on the Internet. If everyone had a publicly routed address and an entry in DNS - which is how the Internet was originally envisioned - we'd have solutions that don't require a third party server.

Both of your examples just show how deep the Stockholm syndrome is. IPv4's limitations have shifted the way people think about networking so much that they rarely even realize they're doing it. But this isn't the way it was supposed to be. "Intended" is completely valid when we're talking about how something has strayed from its original design and the ramifications of it.

I'm not naive enough to think that we can ever get rid of the "consumer" and "producer" ideas that have crept into everyone's head. But it's important to remember that these ideas came about only because of limitations in the protocol, not because they're some kind of natural law of how global networks function.

I'm not the person you were replying to, but I can answer this one. And yeah, I can see all the metric fanboys (a very small subset of metric users, mind you) hovering over that downvote button, but I don't get paid in Internet points so here goes:

The nice thing about imperial (as well as the customary system used in the US) is that it's based on measurements that people have found useful over thousands of years. They're human units, adapted to what people need to do with them, not the other way around.

It's difficult to explain to metric folks because it's really something you have to experience. But here's an example:

Reservoir volume in the US is measured in acre-inches. An acre is a unit of area used for measuring property, usually farmland. It's a bit less than half of a hectare. And of course an inch is 2.4cm. Acre-inches sounds totally bizarre when you first hear about it. But for the people that need to work with this value, it's an extremely useful way to measure reservoirs and gives you an intuition that you just don't get from cubic meters.

It's true that you can't just convert that to other units of volume without doing some math or looking up the conversion rate, but that rarely matters. If you're trying to figure out how fast the lake will rise or fall with a given inflow and outflow, you're going to have to have some way to account for the fact that the lake is a) an irregular shape and b) takes up more area the higher the water gets. You already need to know the area of the lake at any particular height to work out the evaporation rate anyway, so that's a number you're going to have. The units are designed to make that calculation easier, which was really important back in the days when slide rules were the state of the art.

All the customary units are like this in one way or another. They're units designed for a particular domain, and when used in their domain they work very well and calculations can be done in your head. They use fractions because that's what people have historically used (seriously - my grandfather could work fractions in his head faster than I could type them into a calculator, and he made asphalt for a living. Imagine what a carpenter could do.).

Think about it. Imagine you were never taught a measurement system. You find yourself needing to come up with a unit to make measurements for wooden planks you're going to use to build a house. Would you choose a unit as long as a meter? Or one as short as a centimeter or even a decimeter?

Bonus challenge to the fine folks clicking that downvote button: give me a real practical reason to prefer Celsius to Fahrenheit, besides the fact that Celsius is part of the metric system. No, the freezing and boiling points of water don't cut it - I work with hydrocarbon fuels, I salt my driveway and patio, I don't live at sea level, and quite honestly every American 8-year-old can spout off 32° and 212°. There's a Fahrenheit equivalent to Kelvin (Rankine) so the Kelvin to Celsius equivalence doesn't count either. My claim is that both scales are completely arbitrary, and only advantage one has over the other is that you're used to one of them. Go ahead, prove me wrong!

I can totally understand why. IP addresses are hard to get for a large chunk of the global population. There's twice as many people as there are IP addresses.

Plus dual-stack means more work, and more possibilities for misconfigurations or vulnerabilities in your network. It'd be way easier if you only had to worry about one or the other.

I live in the US and my ISP gives me one address I have to share across all the machines in my house. That's a tragedy - by all rights I should have a subnet or two. You can't directly address any of my servers from the outside on IPv4 which means I have to do hacky crap like port forwarding and can't use a lot of the older protocols that aren't NAT friendly. And I've got it good compared to most of the world!

IPv6 gives us back a large chunk of the original premise of the Internet - that all nodes are peers. IPv4 hasn't been able to do that for decades, and it's warped the way we think about networking by separating everyone into consumers and providers.

I guess I should clarify: the government mandate is that government sites are dual-stack. They have to support IPv6 in addition to IPv4.

I'm not sure where you're getting the "canonically not a military force" bit. There have been a number of wars in canonical history. Who did the fighting? Starfleet.

I think it's more accurate to say that the Federation of Planets wasn't militaristic, not that they didn't have a military or that Starfleet wasn't their naval equivalent.

And yeah, it's not conventional military fiction which usually revolves around actions during a war. But it's still military fiction in the sense that nearly all the characters are in the military and doing missions for the military. It just happens that the government running that military is at peace most of the time and uses its military for peaceful purposes when it's not actively at war.

We couldn't do it with FTP. That's kinda the point. We didn't have static IP addresses for every machine or the entries in DNS to go with them.

The whole idea of "consumer" and "server" nodes is so baked into how people think about networking they don't even realize it. But that's not how the Internet was intended to be in the first place.

Unless I've missed something, the US only mandates it for government networks. I don't think there is any mandate for private entities to implement it.

A large chunk of IT people don't understand it. So they don't demand it from their vendors. The vendors see the lack of demand so they spend fewer resources on it. When someone wants to implement IPv6, they see the limited vendor support and decide against it.

The last three companies I've worked at have all been IPv4 only. I set up IPv6 in our lab, but neither the SCADA software nor the PLCs we use support it at all, and none of my coworkers can troubleshoot it if problems pop up.

I've got a buddy that's a technical manager at an ISP and he'll straight up tell you they don't do IPv6 because he and his people don't know it.

NAT and CGNAT break the basic idea of how the Internet was designed, forcing everyone into servers and consumers. We've just become used to it, and most people have never experienced it any other way.

The Internet was supposed to be a purely peer-to-peer network, where the addresses on each side of a connection pointed to an end node. That's why protocols like FTP or SIP break when NAT is used, and why you have to play games with port forwarding if you want to run services from your house (assuming you have a public IP address at all).

It's also military fiction, which is important to remember.

Most of the characters in Star Trek are members of the military. So of course, there's a chain of command and orders have to be followed.

The Federation of Planets wasn't a dictatorship.

Your school must have been more progressive than mine, then. The argument was still ongoing in the 70s and 80s, so if you went through school during that era it could have gone either way.

Masculine pronouns were very much the default outside of a few cases (like the "what are they doing?" another posted mentioned). You can say it's due to sexism which is a reasonable argument, but that doesn't change the fact that defaulting to masculine pronouns was the recommended (and most widely used in practice) style.

Seriously, read anything more than about fifty years old. The 1918 Strunk & White¹ stated, "Use the masculine pronoun unless the antecedent is or must be feminine." They argued against inclusive pronouns in the 70s when E. B. White (yeah, the mouse guy) was in charge of the style book, and didn't start recommending inclusive language until the 2000 edition.

The Chicago Manual of Style originally didn't mention it because it was so ingrained in the English language. It only started discouraging its use in 1982, and didn't condemn it until 2010.

Edit: I guess I should state right here that I'm not advocating for default male pronouns in writing. I think "they" is the best replacement. But I was taught "he" and adapted to "he/she" over the years. "They" really only seems to have become prevalent over the last decade or so.

¹That's Strunk and White the style book, not Strunk/White slash fiction.

Except you left out an important bit of the OP's statement, where he/she is talking about Linux's success over BSD specifically.

When Linus was talking about the GPL being part of Linux's success, he was talking about Linux's success in general. And yeah, the GPL most likely is a big part of Linux's success.

However, if 386BSD had been freely available in '91, Linux would likely never have had the opportunity to build the developer base needed to take it from a student's neat project to a viable operating system.

I agree that it's easier. Eventually "they" will probably replace "him/her." Language drift takes time, though, which was my original point.

To add to what everyone else is saying, most Lisps support redefining functions in a running application. Instead of the code/compile/test loop most languages use, you can create Lisp programs iteratively from inside the program.

It's really quite neat. Emacs is an easy way to play around with it, but if you're a CS language nerd Racket might be a good fit for you. And if you want this type of environment but without all the parentheses and polish notation, check out the Smalltalk implementation Squeak.