Nope, my current GPS coordinates look like this:
42.47084, -83.23933
What you see above were the V+H coordinates of my serving telephone company central office at the location I was at at the time. (I actually cheated, those are the ones of the central office serving my house. The place I was at was 2 miles north on a different central office, but hey. 🙂 )
V+H coordinates have only a loose correlation with lattitude and longitude. Their main function is to determine the distance between offices for use in billing. Back when the Bell System and AT&T Long Lines were running the show, you used to pay rates for long distance based on two factors – time and distance. Time is obvious. They would charge higher rates during the day because that is when most people are on the phone and the system is most heavily utilized. Long Distance was cheaper at night. The other factor was how far away you were calling. This was calculated using the V+H coordinates of your telephone office, and the other party's telephone office, and there's this weird trigonometry equasion you can use to calculate distance.
Sounds crazy because it is. But it was designed because the computers calculating this at the time ran on punch cards, and it was easy to calculate in comparison to doing things like calculating the curvature of the earth, and a billion other things the V+H math avoids.
hah, I probably could have just answered no instead of giving a several paragraph explaination, but hey. I'm crazy like that.
D'oh!
Happy New Year and Birthday, Paul!
Thanks!
Happy, happy bithday! If I were in town, I'd bake you a cake!
Thanks!
Re: hopes
Nope, my current GPS coordinates look like this:
42.47084, -83.23933
What you see above were the V+H coordinates of my serving telephone company central office at the location I was at at the time. (I actually cheated, those are the ones of the central office serving my house. The place I was at was 2 miles north on a different central office, but hey. 🙂 )
V+H coordinates have only a loose correlation with lattitude and longitude. Their main function is to determine the distance between offices for use in billing. Back when the Bell System and AT&T Long Lines were running the show, you used to pay rates for long distance based on two factors – time and distance. Time is obvious. They would charge higher rates during the day because that is when most people are on the phone and the system is most heavily utilized. Long Distance was cheaper at night. The other factor was how far away you were calling. This was calculated using the V+H coordinates of your telephone office, and the other party's telephone office, and there's this weird trigonometry equasion you can use to calculate distance.
Sounds crazy because it is. But it was designed because the computers calculating this at the time ran on punch cards, and it was easy to calculate in comparison to doing things like calculating the curvature of the earth, and a billion other things the V+H math avoids.
hah, I probably could have just answered no instead of giving a several paragraph explaination, but hey. I'm crazy like that.