"Mike Kaliski" wrote in
:


"Lostgallifreyan" wrote in message
. ..
Richard Clark wrote in
:

As the original poster (I presume it was Art) is in the habit of
quoting a German surveyor of the early 19th century; it should have
been settled by the Reichoffice of land boundaries.

These threads seem to be started in the vein of a breathless discovery
of an announcement tucked away in a locked file cabinet in the
janitor's closet in the third basement revealing plans for the "new"
hyper-Hohenzollern horse carriage expressway bypass - as much as the
original comment, responses and counter-responses are so distinctive
by fulfilling that metaphor.


That reminds me of another great bit of writing, on military standards,
I found it online somewhere, it explained how the Roman roads were
decided based on uquestrian travel, went on to show how the same
standard measures persisted through centuries of rail travel and ended
up explaining why it is
that the scale of the solid rocket booster of the most advanced form of
orbital transport known was exactly correlated with the width of a
horse's ass.

Basically true. The ruts on Roman or older roads caused by wagons and
carts meant that any cart not conforming to a standard wheel width would
tip over or lose a wheel. Rail wagons were adapted from road carts and
so the standard was maintained through the Victorian era. Modern
machinery is still essentially set up to those standards to maintain
compatibility with earlier equipment and so that older machinery can
still be maintained. Bit like the DOS prompt still being available in
Windows?

Mike G0ULI



That prompt SHOULD be there. The real problems with M$ come when they try
to break with history, not when they honour it. Given that their initial
survival depended on direct inheritance that should be evident. OS's that
have real security like OpenBSD don't reject their roots, they GROW on them
properly.

Which reveals an interesting point... The size of standards can easily be
arbitrary. So it makes good sense to go with something that has historical
context. That way we can efficiently revert to whatever earlier form we need
at will. The only way to improve this proces is to think ahead better at the
outset. Not easy, given that ancient Rome was in no posotion to imagine a
space flight program's requirements. Actually, of those it COULD have
imagines, it provided the groundwork for extremely well despite not having
any way to imagine them. Likewise, people underestimate older and simopler
computer systems at their peril.