And when a Redox monthly progress report is here, Haiku’s monthly report is never far behind (or vice versa, depending on the month). Haiku’s February was definitely a busy month, but there’s no major tentpole changes or new features, highlighting just how close Haiku is to a new regular beta release. The OpenBSD drivers have been synchronised wit upstream to draw in some bugfixes, there’s a ton of smaller fixes to various applications like StyledEdit, Mail, and many more, as well a surprisingly long list of various file system fixes, improving the drivers for file systems like NTFS, Btrfs, XFS, and others.
There’s more, of course, so just like with Redox, head on over to pore over the list of smaller changes, fixes, and improvements. Just like last month, I’d like to mention once again that you really don’t need to wait for the beta release to try out Haiku. The operating system has been in a fairly stable and solid condition for a long time now, and whatever’s the latest nightly will generally work just fine, and can be updated without reinstallation.
> to pour over the list of smaller changes
*pore over
Also, why the imperial units? I was a fan of osnews going metric 🙂
https://www.osnews.com/story/141470/aros-centimeters-closer-to-64bit/
Alfman,
As an ounce of retrospection will show, the “Freedom Units” are many miles ahead of the alternatives, and they pound at the puny metric ones…
Interesting isn’t it! It’s not that Imperial (or “freedom”) units are actually useful as they just aren’t but their idiomatic use will keep them alive for a very long time. A lot like the floppy disk icon for “save”.
ppp,
We can argue these units, at least some of them, have actual utility, which no longer exists on floppy discs.
The “freedom” temperature scale has 0 – 100 as the human livable range. 0 is coldest people would survive, and 100 is when you start having heat strokes.
Similarly inch and foot are measurable by our own thumbs and … foot.
Teaspoon, tablespoon, cup… no need to say
I have no idea what a mile or pound would relate to, though.
sukru,
The US are still fiercely proud of the monarchy units for some reason. :-/
I personally wish they would die off once and for all in favor of metric units with standardized prefixes, which are better in just about every way…especially when you start doing physics with boat loads of units.
BTW does anyone know the metric equivalent to “boat loads”? It sounds like a suspect imperialist unit to me.
@sukru:
That’s completely arbitrary though, and another reason we should move to metric. My actual foot happens to measure within millimeters of the official imperial foot, but I’m also 193cm tall (6’4″), taller than the average American adult by several inches. Feet and hands are typically proportional to one’s height, so I can’t imagine most people in the US have feet as long as the unit of measure with the same name.
“0 is coldest people would survive”
From someone who lives in the Arctic,
lol
Morgan,
The are close enough though. Average foot size in the US is about 10-10.5. Mine is 11.5.
This helps measure things like “Will this couch fit in my living room?”, or “how many flower plants do I need for this part of the yard”. Add in 10-15% slack, and you have.a usable rough measurement.
Thom,
We assume nobody lives outside of the US. And when temp drops below 0 in Alaska, people usually stay in.
“Insert meme world map with US only”
Jokes aside, you have to be superhuman to survive there.
sukru,
Even if you lived in a country that used metric, you are always free to use parts of your body to estimate lengths when you don’t have a measuring tape handy (pun intended), But it doesn’t mean that parts of the body should actually become official units of measure. Given all it’s disadvantages, I’m surprised that anyone here would seriously advocate for imperial units over metric.
Say I’ve got one board with length 3′ 5 7/16″ and another at 4′ 9 1/2″, what’s their sum? Say the height of one story is 10′ and there are 13 steps, What’s the height of each step closest to the nearest 1/32th of an inch? These are the types of units we’re forced to deal with in US engineering/architecture/etc. Even though we make do with it, it’s so hacky and it needlessly introduces complexity in the math just to represent basic lengths. The overhead adds up. It’s like an eternal tax for those forced to use the US system.
Alfman,
Of course you don’t use inches for calculation or science. You use metric for that. (US is a dual system)
That being said…
Everything is literally built around this.
The tiles on the floor? 1 foot, 2 feet, 1/2. You can easily “measure” exactly by counting them.
The wood that I use? 2″ x 4″, 6″ x 4″, etc. The boards? 4′ x 8′.
The bins for my IKEA storage? 1′ x 1′ x 1′ (or 12″ x 12″ x 12″)
Much easier to work in real life
And again, for science, you go back to meters, kilogram and kelvins
sukru,
At least scientists had the good sense to get on board with metric, but doctors, DMV, architects, some engineers and contractors still commonly use imperial units adding to complexity and increased risk of mistakes.
https://handyhubzz.wixsite.com/handy-hubz/post/5-real-life-cases-where-a-unit-conversion-error-caused-serious-problems
In my own line of work I come across databases that store lengths as text fields to deal with the way people use imperial units. I’ve given up on trying to fix this, it’s what people in the US want, but it’s got bad practice written all over it. This mess exists in spreadsheets too. You want to do math to calculate sums/areas/volumes/etc over cells containing imperial length measurements? Well good luck with that. Searching & sorting doesn’t work either. In the US we shun simple standardized units just because that’s who we are.
I do see some tiles having those dimensions, but others that need fractions of inches too. IMHO architects (and even amateurs honestly) should not be relying on measurements exactly matching imperial units.
Please don’t take offense, but your saying this tells me strait away that you do not have much experience with wood working 🙂 Many people learn the hard way that the common name for lumber does not actually reflect it’s true measurements, And it’s not even close.
https://www.inchcalculator.com/actual-size-of-dimensional-lumber/
This is absolutely infuriating. Worse yet, the “fake units” are not proportional with respect to each other…
So if you are buying decking material (be it wood or some artificial composite), you have to check with the manufacture whether they’re using real product measurements or “nominal” lumber equivalents such that you will come up short. Hopefully knowing this saves you from frustration in the future.
Part of me hopes that you will change your mind and agree that at least some criticism is warranted.
@Alfman
> The US are still fiercely proud of the monarchy units
The US system is not really “imperial” though. There are a ton of differences (including how much a ton weighs). US gallons, quarts, and pints are quite a bit smaller than imperial even though US fluid ounces are bigger. And nobody in the US can tell you their weight in stone.
LeFantome,
I agree, many imperial units varied from country to country, not just ounces, but even length units like feet and inches too.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foot_(unit)
This is all the more reason to replace them. Imagine the urgency of coming up with a more universal standard when trade partners are using rulers with different markings on them. From a historical perspective I suppose the geographic isolation of the US dulled the urgency of switching compared to Europe.
Doing some reading and found that NASA adopted the 25.4mm inch in 1952, and it was internationally adopted in 1959, officially making the inch smaller by 2 parts per 1 million.
https://sparkfiles.net/foot-whats-special-12-inches/
https://usma.org/laws-and-bills/refinement-of-values-for-the-yard-and-the-pound
Not a big difference for non-precise applications, but still seems strange to me that the world had nuclear weapons long before agreeing on the length of a yard and weight of a pound. It makes me wonder if Los Alamo Labs used the metric system in nuclear weapons research? I couldn’t find an answer to this.
Others have pointed out some reasons that imperial units have greater utility, Mine is that SI/Metric made the boneheaded decision to use powers of 10 and decimals across the board.
Take your basic unit of length, the foot. Divide it by 2, 3, 4, or 6, or go for 2/3 or 3/4 or 5/6 of it, and you get an even number of inches instead of a repeating decimal that makes the exact length of a thing pretty hard to express in metric or SI units. Ditto pounds to ounces, etc.
That is my big beef with SI. Who the hell decided to build a system designed for ease of calculation around a number that is inherently unsuited to simple calculations? Use 6, or 12, or 16.
@Brainworm
The ancient Babylonians choose 60. It’s a pretty useful base.
PS : Is there a maximum thread depth here? I can’t reply to the replies.
Brainworm,
That would be a fair point except that imperial units exhibit the exact same problem when the examples aren’t cherry picked to create perfect values. In the real world we can’t assume every measurement is perfect. It got ignored before, but I already provided an example for this in an earlier comment: 10 foot story divided by 13 steps. I actually did count the steps.
So to convert this to a standard imperial measurement you do 10 feet/13 = ~0.7692 feet per step, which is 10*12/13 = 9.2307 inches per step. We might stop there with decimal inches, but standard imperial measuring instruments don’t have decimal fractions, so to get a precise measurement you (or a contractor) will have to convert it to standard base 2 fractions.
Here are some candidates in order of increasing accuracy.
Granted metric doesn’t solve the repeating decimal issue, but we still ended up with that being a problem with imperial units anyway so they both share this con. Also the math for metric is much more simple and straitforward: divide and read the value off the screen, done. Converting between m/cm/mm is trivial too.
This isn’t just theory, I’ve done a lot of wood-working projects, working with imperial units absolutely sucks in real life. I lament that I cannot get a hold of any metric tools domestically though I’ve seriously looked. Table saws/drill bits/measuring tapes/square edges/etc…they all force us into dealing with these oddball ratios, which creates more work and increases the risk for mistakes. I bet the average person growing up with imperial units will make more mistakes than the average person growing up with metric because metric math is objectively so much more straightforward.
I honestly think it’s a cultural phenomenon. People don’t like changing the practices imprinted into their cultural identity.
I’ll drink my pour over while I pore over the changes.
Poor you!
Morgan,
Save a drink pour moi!
As a non English native myself I also thought it was pour over.
What beta? Beta 5 or 6? Just name it 1.0 and move on from that. Stop this ridiculous naming. The OS is already stable enough.
They won’y do that.
I think it’s because they don’t know what to do after 1.0. Who has a vision of where it should go?
“surprisingly lost list f various file system fixes” – it feels some typos
Bogdanow,
…it feels some grammar.
pmac – all this pedantry is your fault, it feels. 🙂