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Windows 7 To Sell In UK For Half the US Price
An anonymous reader writes "In the UK, a full version of Windows 7 Home Premium is going to cost less than half the price Americans will have to pay, and in fact less than Americans have to pay just for the upgrade-only edition. Full details and prices were published in an article on CNet, in which it was concluded that, at least for the time being, Microsoft is honoring the prices it set for the now-discontinued European version of Win7, which did not contain Internet Explorer 8 and was only available as a full-install edition."
Do Yanks start ordering from amazon.co.uk?
"Speaking the Truth in times of universal deceit is a revolutionary act." -- George Orwell
'Cause if not, I wonder if it would be cheaper to have a friend order it in Europe then ship it over to the US of A?
'Number-memorizing Chinese people.'-Anon
I guess they're pricing it for their target market? Surely nobody would ship a copy from the UK over to North America!
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
...most will just DL it anyhow...does it really matter? ;)
It's this sort of news that makes the $29 price for Snow Leopard just look better and better.
This will lead to people indulging in arbitrage.
Unless, of course, Microsoft has somehow put in a mechanism that disables a UK-bought Windows 7 when someone attempts to install it on a computer located in the US.
This reminds me of a story once told by Nicholas Wirth:
When he was in Europe - they called him 'Nicholas Wirth', the correct pronunciation.
When he was in USA - they called him 'Nickles Worth', the incorrect pronunciation.
He inferred this was because whilst in Europe they called him by name, when in USA they called him by value.
Well Microsoft seems to have definitely reversed that with this decision.
EMail: 0110001101100010010000000110001101110010 0110000101111010011011100110000101110010 0010111001100011011011110110
Simple solution to a scummy problem.
Did anyone else notice amazon.co.uk doesn't have an upgrade version of Windows 7 available?
Guess as much as you want about future plans, the meaning behind it, the motivation for no upgrade options... but the key thing to realize is that if they're not going to sell an upgrade version in the UK, they probably want to sell the full version at a price point more affordable for upgrades.
Versions other than home premium have less substantial discounts.
We've got region coding on DVDs that does the same thing -- different prices for different markets because we all know that "one market" just isn't right. We must have several markets because different markets will bear different amounts. It would definitely be counter-productive to not take advantage of markets that will pay more or those that will only pay less.
It also makes sense that markets that are more likely to switch to Linux or Mac OS X should pay less and that markets that are less likely to switch should pay more. I have pondered the notion of how a national switch to Linux could work out for any nation and I have to say, it's really hard to imagine. But with that said, the entire globe managed to switch to the metric system, including the U.K. Oh wait, not the entire world... the U.S. is a hold-out... is the U.S. the *last* hold-out? (I dunno) So while the world might switch away from Windows, the U.S. is probably the least likely to make that change.
Is it illegal to fix prices like this? It is in the U.S. It is in other countries. But is it illegal to fix prices for specific countries so long as the whole country is included in that fixed price? I guess so since no one is charging Microsoft with any crimes... yet...
Y'all know that £20 isn't really half as much spending power as $40, right?
Better known as 318230.
Dear Microsoft,
I read recently that you have decided to cut Windows 7's price in the UK to about half of what it is here in the US. I don't feel that it does justice to us here in the States, as we're actually getting less value than your UK market.
Take, for example, all the U's that have been dropped from words. My color is not colour, but yet, I have to pay more for the lack of the U. This is unfair. Has the cost of cutting U's from words taken a sharp climb?
Perhaps the letter Z is charging too much these days, and I know how that can be. It only makes sparse appearances in words such as localize and marginalize, but despite its rare occurrence, it, much like a has-been movie star, has the gall to demand top billing. Perhaps your royalties payable to this (not)under-appreciated letter raise the costs here in the US.
Whatever the reasoning, I still find it unfair, and being such a large and powerful corporation, the fact that you can be taken advantage of like this is not only sad, but reprehensible. Use those lawyers of yours and get back at them! Hey, you can even be on the winning end of an anti-trust suit... think of the headlines now: "'Z' Loses Anti-Trust Judgement Thanks to Microsoft". Won't that be good press?
Sincerely,
A Concerned Citizen
PS - This message has been brought to you by the letter 5.
The price for my country was going to be twice that in the US, let alone the UK. I dont remember any outrage about that.
Yea, it sucks, but other people most probably have it worse off than you do. Or they use linux.
Microsoft aren't the first. For years Australians have had to pay higher prices for games purchased through Steam.
MS, like many American companies, are fleecing the country. We are regularly charged top prices for drugs, Windows software, Iron, Labor, etc. Heck, the neo-cons passed a drug policy that has the US gov paying the TOP dollar for the drugs, rather than the bottom, even though we are the largest customer. Absolutely ridiculous.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
According to amazon.co.uk, since I am running XP, I could get a vista home premium upgrade for £60, and they will throw in a full windows 7 home premium free..
http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/feature.html/ref=amb_link_84366313_1?ie=UTF8&docId=1000321063&pf_rd_m=A3P5ROKL5A1OLE&pf_rd_s=special-product-offers-3&pf_rd_r=1N0XDYG13SRJD90788PR&pf_rd_t=201&pf_rd_p=470374053&pf_rd_i=B0013O54P8
Come as you are, do what you must, be who you will.
I thought economies of scale caused prices to go down. So why does it cost so much to live in NYC? If anything, it should cost less, due to so many people all up in your business.
Oh yeah... "Fuck me nigsausage"
Thought I'd save you the trouble.
(For those who aren't aware and in case you are curious, I have a love-stalker. For most of my more recent comments, someone under AC has been replying "fuck you nigsausage" to what I write. Someone has to really care about what I say to put that much effort into it. And attempting to hide their affection with negativity is incredibly freudian to the point of latent homosexual tendencies.)
a common practice among software companies is exploited by slashdot editor.
go look and see how much the price of mathmatica fluctuate between markets and you'll realize this is nothing.
Vista sp2 should be called Vista sp2. It's out, it's free, go download it and patch your heart out.
Most of the time in the UK we end up with the raw side of the deal. The great announcement of two-nine-nine from Sony (ps3 reduction) is a case in point. USA: $299, Europe: 299 Euro (can't be bothered to find the euro key), Japan: 2.99 billion billion yen, here in England: who knows, but you can bet your bottom dollar it will be more than retail in dollars.
So, my point being, there's really nothing the consumer can do about this, except for not buy the product ala Vista. Baby.
Charging different prices in different markets isn't price fixing, it's price discrimination. Those are totally different things.
Price discrimination is what museums do when they offer student and senior discounts. Or, it's what the street vendor does when he sees you're wearing nice clothes are tells you your trinket is $10, instead the $5 he just sold one for to the people in old jeans.
Price fixing would be if all the sellers in a market got together and agreed not to sell to anyone below a certain price.
I'm not saying I like DVD region coding, or that it's good for consumers. And yeah, it would create opportunities for arbitrage (or with DVD players, it creates a market for region-free players - or you're like my Russian friend, who just has two DVD players). The interesting thing will be to see what Microsoft does to prevent arbitrage.
"Anyone who [rips a CD] is probably engaging in copyright infringement." - David O. Carson
In the UK, a full version of Windows 7 Home Premium is going to cost less than half the price Americans will have to pay...
Getting stiffed by Microsoft simply because you CAN pay more. I think that's hilarious. How are the Microsoft faithful going to spin this one?
I've got a link for the Windows fanbois.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
I get really tired of all the whining. Its real simple, if you dont like the price then dont buy it. This is nothing new, they sold Vista in China for about $69 due to high piracy rates. I preordered Home Premium for $50. Very cheap if you ask me, hell most games cost $50. So to get a windows OS for that is really great. Even the retail of $199 is very good. I mean this is something you buy what once every 6 or 7 years. Again its real simple, no one is forcing you to buy the software, if you think the price is too high then keep your money in your pocket.
Win7 is selling for half the price over 'ome? Does this mean UK residents are twice as smart as their American counterparts?
I've calculated my velocity with such exquisite precision that I have no idea where I am.
You can just switch to a left handed mouse and it'll be like the US version. But, the real news is now we know the real cost of IE, since they have to remove it from the EU version.
Americans like paying more that way they feel they get a better product, look at healthcare...
MS, like many American companies, are fleecing the country.
GB prices for tech are usually close to the same number of pounds as dollars things have eased a bit recently, here are two random examples:
* New Apple iPod Touch 8GB 2nd Generation (amazon UK), £152 = $250
* ditto (amazon US), $215 -> UK one is only 16% more
* Dell M17X laptop (UK), £1699 = $2815
* ditto (US), $1799 -> saving $1000 by purchasing in the US vs in the UK where it is 56% more expensive
Last year it was about $2 = £1; http://www.google.co.uk/finance?q=GBPUSD
You were saying ...? This would make it even more extraordinary for Win 7 to be cheaper here, but when I look ...
* Win 7 ultimate (amazon UK), £170 = $280
* ditto (amazon US), $220 -> so only $60 / 27% more and the UK price is a "discounted" one from an RRP (recommended price) of £230
Um?
Unless Intel has a surprise coming very quickly, without TCPA/Palladium, there's no chip on standard PC hardware that is region locked, however.
If there was, no problem... just import your hardware too; you're going to need new hardware to run Windows 7, which is very resource hungry.
Or use older hardware that doesn't have the new region locking.
>"Oh wait, not the entire world... the U.S. is a hold-out... is the U.S. the *last* hold-out? (I dunno)"
I believe North Korea or Libya is the only other not to have moved to the metric system.
My spidey-sense is tingling. I'm guessing that there will be an uproar, a lot, a whole lot, of press in the US about how unfair it is and then, tada, the US price actually comes in even lower than the UK price and they throw in a free churro - because USA-ians stick together and MS is just supporting business growth in the US and if only everyone will go out and buy it then democracy will come to the world and ...
Intuitively, price discrimination seems wrong, but it can actually be good. It is quite possible for the combined market price to be the same as in the more expensive market and the cheaper market is merely priced out along the demand curve. The example I seem to recall is a drug that is beneficial for both humans and pets. Such drugs are marketed under different names because a common market would price out pet use, being able to discriminate allows pets to be treated, and humans to be no worse off. A similar dynamic holds 1st vs 3rd world prices. This effect is one reason (in addition to control) that the US does not allow reimportation of drugs - it has the potential to cripple drug supplies in other countries. Even in the first world, for some drugs, it would be more profitable to not sell a drug at lower prices in Canada than deal with the competition through reimportation.
Now that the Philippines has switched, I think it is just Liberia and Burma left. And England still uses miles sometime, where appropriate.
For the record, Celsius sucks for the "how warm is it today?" question (the scale based on 0-100% is better), Meters suck for "how big is this object I hold?" question, and using a drill size 1/64th bigger than the O.D. of the bolt to make the hole just the right size is an inelegant hack in metric sizing.
None the less, the inefficiency the US carries around with it must have some huge long term detriment to the economy, and it's completely wrong on so many levels that NASA refuses to convert to metric.
~.~
I'm a peripheral visionary.
Apple surprised people by putting the price to upgrade to Snow Leopard at a very attractive $29 for a single license, and $49 for a five-user family pack. But there's a catch: you have to already have Leopard installed to pay those prices. If you're upgrading from a previous version of Mac OS X 10.4 (Tiger), you'll have to pay $169, which includes an upgrade to 10.5 (Leopard) and 10.6 (Snow Leopard). For a 5-user family pack license, it'll cost $229. And Snow Leopard is only compatible with Macs containing Intel chips. On the OS front, Leopard is the end of the line for PowerPC Mac owners.
Not by value, mate, by price.
Maybe we have something to learn from the British. Anyone know how they do health care over there?
You are welcome on my lawn.
another example: when working with a (foot long) wrench or spanner, with the Foot-pound you can simply & intuitively feel how much force to apply. With the Newton-Meter you need a special gauge to know.
~.~
I'm a peripheral visionary.
It's cheaper and you don't have to manually eradicate Internet Explorer?
Where do I sign up?!
[Metric system -] is the U.S. the *last* hold-out?
Nope, you're in good company with Myanmar (Burma) and Liberia.
(less facetiously, the UK still uses miles for distances and miles per hour for speed, and fair number of people still use feet & inches for human height)
Man who leaps off cliff jumps to conclusion.
Amazon.co.uk: 169.98 GBP/281.66$
Amazon.com: 319.99$/193.11GBP
Not sure if the huge price difference between Home Premium and Ultimate is worth it though.
Don't matter a lot. It is still several times its cost, and thousands of times its value.
It's free to download on the internets!
So's Linux, but people still pay for it.
so about the same as us oem price?
You think you can fool Microsoft so easily? Perhaps you can disguise your mouse and your IP address--but as soon as you switch your spelling dictionary to American English, they'll nail you.
Microsoft is like seawater. Everywhere, but poisonous.
Actually, what I want is REAL choice = REAL freedom.
In our current episode, Microsoft is playing games with the European regulators in hopes of appeasing them. In our last episode, Microsoft wanted to dictate Vista or DEATH! Wait, Microsoft didn't mean it. Now you can choose Windows 7 with only 35% of the awful and unneeded features of Vista! And at a special price, too. Such a deal!
Microsoft has become way to big to fail, which means too big to exist. Sooner or later they are going to fail. Whoops. Who am I kidding? Microsoft is constantly failing. What I mean is sooner or later they are going to fail so big and so hard that the economic consequences will be astronomical. This is TOO big.
Actually, I think the part that most annoys me is that Microsoft has actually become such a powerful a brake on progress. No software innovation is safe if Microsoft wants to kill it. My personal least favorite is what Microsoft did to Palm. Is it somehow supposed to be better because the entire thing was insincere? Now they've apparently decided to abandon that turkey?
From the 'positive' perspective, why would Microsoft want to innovate when they're already getting the lion's share? New versions? That's a decision for marketing! What year will be convenient for the next marketing campaign? That's the WRONG basis for improvements.
Suggestion: Cut Microsoft into 5 companies. Call them Microsoft A to E with a time limit before they need to pick new names. Give each of them a copy of the source code and 1/5 of the people and facilities and assets. Require them to compete. Windows can remain the standard OS, but they have to compete on the basis of the standard, and all changes and improvements to the standard must be discussed in public and agreed to, or the changes will be proprietary to that branch of the company.
Result? Real choice = freedom.
Side effect? As the code bases evolve over time, the single points of failure will be eliminated. Instead of 80% of the world's computers being at risk from one programming mistake, the risk will be greatly reduced.
Don't think of it as a penalty for success. It's an inducement to reproduce your company when you are successful enough. A new form of corporate evolution that increases our freedom while also creating more pressure for creative innovations and progress. (If you succeed again up to about 40% of the market, then your company should reproduce again, just to note the obvious.)
Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.
You may be old enough to remember Nancy Sinatra's song:
This Eula's meant for breaking,
and that's just what I'll do,
and one of these days this Eula's
gonna get broke all over you!
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
I believe whoosh is the sound that is supposed to be posted here.
@ethana2
http://lifehacker.com/348653/install-os-x-on-your-hackintosh-pc-no-hacking-required
http://www.hackintosh.com/
http://gizmodo.com/5156903/how-to-hackintosh-a-dell-mini-9-into-the-ultimate-os-x-netbook
The bad news is I am guessing that the value of the USD is going to drop to half the current value. Tim S.
It would definitely be counter-productive to not take advantage of markets that will pay more
I know! They could go out of business!
In the U.S. we must pay to have propriety NSA spyware installed in our copies of wind0ze, dragonware is expensive! Why I had a back door added to my house and it cost $450... I guess it's cheap for a back door.
I always buy the store brand.
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
The funniest thing about that post is that you didn't even manage to spell his name properly!
It's all simple and intuitive when it's the system you've been taught and used since childhood. Trust me, for someone who's been using metric for all his life, meters and kilograms and degrees Celsius are perfectly easy to use and intuitive, while your pounds, feet, and Fahrenheit are totally weird and incomprehensible. Especially conversions between them.
12 inches in a foot, but 3 feet in a yard - why? And 1760 yards in a mile - gosh, how convenient that must be. Even better when you get to area and volume units - I mean, 1728 cubic inch in a cubic foot sure roll from the tongue, and is easy to remember as well. And 1 acre being 43560 square inch is so obvious! If that wasn't enough, you have separate units of volume, which follow their own, mixed 2/4-based progression (unlike mixed 3/4-based for length) - gallon/quart/pint. I also love how there's 16 ounces in a pound, but then 2000 pounds in a short ton - hey, it's almost metric - yay for consistency!
All the claims about Imperial being more "natural" or easier to use are pure bullshit. The only difference between the systems is that one is decimal-friendly and consistent, and another is not.
Americans pay double; to recover the cost of IE development
What's wrong with meters for "how big is this object?" You realise that there are "centi" and "milli" suffixes for metric, right?
They keep suing Microsoft over stuff they don't like in Windows, and when Microsoft removes it and puts that version out, no one wants to buy it.
I'd say, stop selling it in the UK. If people want it so bad, they can order it online then.
Pharma has us paying double for drugs compared to outside our borders while they try to kill health care reform.
So why shouldn't MS charge double for Windows while they try to kill Linux?
It seems only fair.
I didn't desert Windows; Windows deserted me: BSOD
And 1 acre being 43560 square inch is so obvious!
No, it's 43560 square feet in an acre, not square inches though I guess you sort of proved your point as you confused the units while describing how much harder it is to remember conversions in english units versus metric units.
12 inches in a foot, but 3 feet in a yard - why?
We prefer to ask "Why not?" ;)
The only difference between the systems is that one is decimal-friendly and consistent, and another is not.
That's not true. One was designed by the French and the other was not. That's all most Americans need to hear. I've often thought we should invent our own base ten measurement system and impose it on the rest of the world out of sheer spite ;) If they do make us switch to metric then the least we can do is come up with new names for the measurements. Millifreedom, centifreedom, freedom and kilofreedom sounds like a good replacement for millimeters, centimeters, meters and kilometers. Celsius could be replaced with "Jefferson's" and kilograms with "Franklin's". Still trying to come up with a good wholesome name for liters -- any suggestions?
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
Isn't selling a product in a foreign country for less than you sell it at home called "dumping"
Mark S Twitter/AIM/Skype:ekivemark B: http://ekive.blogspot.com
I wish we'd just switch and get it over with. Right now it's annoying to need SAE and Metric sizes to do almost anything. The frustration of going through the "Oh that nut isn't a 5/16th, maybe it's a 5/8th, oh no it's 16mm" is something that could be avoided easily. I worked in a hardware store for a few years, everytime someone needed a hand in the fastener aisle they all agreed it'd be easier if things were metric numbered. What's bigger than a 5? A 6 - imagine that!
12 inches in a foot, but 3 feet in a yard - why?
We prefer to ask "Why not?" ;)
That's Perl design school.
Hm... actually, that would explain a lot... ~
I was able to install a Chinese version of Warcraft III, which I purchased from a non-blzzard online vendor for half the price, on my computer by just changing some language settings in my registry. This time ill just change my registry language settings from American to British when I upgrade.
I'd rather search for the answers than just ask the questions.
For the record, Celsius sucks for the "how warm is it today?" question (the scale based on 0-100% is better),
So tell me what scale that is when it was 108F today here in Phoenix? It routinely gets up to 115 and even over 120. Also it rarely gets below 30F. Should we have a different scale for every climate?
Meters suck for "how big is this object I hold?"
Which is why we have centimetres,
and using a drill size 1/64th bigger than the O.D. of the bolt to make the hole just the right size is an inelegant hack in metric sizing.
Because using a drill size .5 mm bigger is inelegant how?
Don't forget: how many stone do you weigh? What's that in kg?
Boozles?
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
Actually here in north Celsius is better - crossing the zero degree does have some consequences which you are better to be aware. Not a big difference but still.
Artificially enforcing price discrimination should be illegal. Countries have used tariffs for many years to try to balance the value of a cheaper import good with that which is produced locally to make their own products more competitive.
One example of the end result is a huge glut of corn syrup usage in american foods, whereas if there were no tariffs on cane sugar importation, sugar would once again be the primary sweetener used in food industry instead of corn syrup. This is market inefficiency at its finest.
Perfect discrimination is the antithesis of a free market, where the populace collectively determines the value of a product based on what the populace is willing to pay. Imagine instead if Microsoft really had to compete for it's operating system market share-a huge chunk of their marketing budget, which is formidable, would be reallocated to development. The end result would be a better OS.
A sure indicator of the absence of free market ideals in Microsoft is their absurd profit and the proportions of money they spend on lobbying, marketing and PR versus what they spend on development. In a free market, companies compete on value, price, quality, etc. MS' only real competition is legislators and government actions.
You can't legislate goodness. Let each to his own destiny, by will of his freely made choices.
Still trying to come up with a good wholesome name for liters -- any suggestions?
Pints, for the lulz.
It is worse that that.
Some units, like "mile" vary depending where you use it - nautical, aerial, british, official and for measuring gold. Or something like that, I really don't know all of them.
Having been to England a bunch of times its really strange. Petrol is sold by the liter, but the cars it goes into the odometer, speedometer is mph.
Grocery stores sometimes list the metric weight or SI, or both - I guess it depends where the product came from. Maps, GPS and distance seems to be measured dependent on what mode of transport you are using.
I always heard that the imperial system was 'intuitive' because it allowed lots of ways of packing things. If you have 12 items, then you can make a 4 x 3 box of them and it is almost square. You could also do 2x6 (they pack eggs that way).
You could split the between imperial and metric and switch to a consistent base 12. You'd get all the nice features of a consistent system, and you'd still have nice packing for the supermarket. "Honey, I broke an egg. Now there are only B left."
I would recommend base 16, but noone ever uses that.
who cares, it will be hacked and available for download within an hour of going on sale....
Things like this are the very reason it will be pirated way more than it is bought.
There's one more difference. One system of measure has a group of people so convinced it's the best thing ever that they think the law should prohibit people from using any other.
If the metric system is so great, why is it necessary to try to force people to use it? Let people use whatever measuring system they find most useful and if the metric system is better, it'll become dominant.
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
fuck you nigsausage
1 acre is actually 43560 square feet, or 6,272,640 square inches, and there are 640 acres in a square mile.
Also, you have to remember that for volume the quantity "ounce" comes in two varieties, the fluid ounce and the solid ounce. The solid ounce is defined as exactly 1/16th of a pound of any substance, but since the fluid ounce is a measure of volume (about 29 ml), not weight, the weight of a fluid ounce in pounds will vary with the density of the substance, but it's exactly 1/128th of a gallon. I've seen tall cans of beer advertised using both weight and volume measurements at the same time: a can of beer advertised as being 24 ounces and above the store display reads "$1.79 per pound!" If you didn't know there were two definitions you might get confused. At least we don't have to spend a lot of time calculating how many gills are in a hogshead anymore.
> No, it's 43560 square feet in an acre,
here's another kicker - in some US states (but not others) the US Survey foot is used, and by extension the US Survey Acre may surface from time to time.
~.~
I'm a peripheral visionary.
Why does Celsius suck for the scale on "how warm is it"?
One degree Celsius is about the smallest unit that anyone cares about for most purposes.
-10 is fucking cold
0 is freezing
10 is cool
20 is room temperature
30 is warm
40 is hot to everyone else
At 45 we Arizonans go ahead and acknowledge that it's hot
50 is about as hot as it'll get.
How is this hard?
...with a free copy just for me, I would point to the Debian logo on my t-shirt and raise one eyebrow, Spock-like.
one foot is just about one foot, an inch the width of your thumb at the wide part, a yard is finger tip to fingertip with your arms stretched. how is that not natural?
You completely miss my point, and the connotation of the words "intuitive" and "natural". They do not mean "familiar after experience".
Having grown up in a metricized country you really have an intuitive grasp of what a Newton-meter is? You can feel it? Either you must be a professional mechanic or you need a torque wrench.
Let me rephrase it. Can you "feel" what 20 kg weighs like? Most people can. Would you feel comfortable to apply approximately 20 kg of force at the end of a socket wrench? Most people would, it's intuitive and you have experience in how much force* that is. That's how easy a foot-pound is. It's a pound of force at the end of a foot long tool. Now, could you - off the street with no training - trust yourself to apply 60 Newton-meters of force on a socket wrench? No idea how much that is? Exactly my point.
* and regarding force, don't even start with the mass vs weight arguments- we are all on Earth here; you know what my meaning is.
As for "how hot is it today?", surely a scale based roughly on 0-100% of full scale is more natural to the answer than one based on the boiling point of a common liquid. For a question of the melting temperature of steel, of course deg C or K would be just as good to use. But I'm speaking about practicality for everyday use in everyday life.
One great thing the metric system has given us is a single standard. But now that the US is the only big player left, the US system of measures are a single standard as well, so that argument is bust. But yes, conversions between different units is a pain. Fortunately most are easily factorable in your head (12 splits easily by 2,3,4,6) and so short skips are no as bad as you expect. Big skips like converting inches to miles is not an everyday task so not relevant to my point.
For the record I have spent many years living and working (as an engineer up to my eyeballs in such matters) in both the US and now in a metric country. I am fully "bilingual" and give my opinions based on a good working knowledge of both.
~.~
I'm a peripheral visionary.
...that's my advice.
I bought a technet subscription and i get Office, Visio, and Windows 7 (not to mention Vista and XP) along with it.
Why bother spending $220/- for the Ultimate edition when the same money could get you a all-you-can eat buffet?
"Doing what i can, with what i have." ~ Burt Gummer
So like the TFA says, for once the British aren't going to be screwed over by having to pay Yank prices in Sterling. At a time before the recession hit and the exchange rate was sitting nicely at US$2 for 1GBP this was sadly never translated into the Interenets SUper-Combobulating-Exchange-Calculator that all multi-nationals selling software or hardware in the UK and US seemed to use that seemed to be closer to a US$1 to GBP1 mapping. iTunes store and most Apple products being notable offenders. I for one am sick of being shafted for my lunch money by greedy companies.
Yes. I am British.
Looks like someone doesn't enjoy fractions!
Man blir trött av att gå och göra ingenting.
And why would that happen? Survival of the fittest for measuring systems? It doesn't work, no measuring system is THAT good to give you an advantage when everybody and everything else uses another one. If every law, textbook, label, measuring instrument, ordering system (and computer programs in general) are using the "bad" measuring system you would have no advantage and a lot of hassle if you start using the "good" measuring system. Metric system is better if mostly everybody is using it not if you and three neighbors are using it while everybody else uses something different.
The reason why it doesn't work that way is inertia. If you grow up with Imperial, changing to another system is going to be inconvenient to you personally, even if it's advantageous in the long run. It's not like metric is an order of magnitude better, either - it is somewhat more convenient, but hardly enough to justify the switch for a person already familiar with a different system.
Practice of other countries switching has shown that the generation which initiates the switch doesn't see anything good from it. It's the next one, which studies the new system in school, that reaps the benefits.
Slower than XP. Uglier than Linux and Mac. What is the point again?
Don't drink the kool aid. Just because it's better than Vista doesn't mean it's good. Vista sucks!
Why is the length of someone's (definitely not mine) foot or thumb supposed to be good at measuring something?
By the way, one of your definitions is quite wrong anyway. For an average adult male, the distance from fingertip to fingertip with arms stretched is about 1.5 metres, which is quite a bit more than a yard. So much for "natural".
Windows has cost double in the UK since Windows 95...now it's cheaper there and you're up in arms?
Hypocrisy of the first order.
No sig today...
Let me rephrase it. Can you "feel" what 20 kg weighs like? Most people can. Would you feel comfortable to apply approximately 20 kg of force at the end of a socket wrench? Most people would, it's intuitive and you have experience in how much force* that is. That's how easy a foot-pound is. It's a pound of force at the end of a foot long tool. Now, could you - off the street with no training - trust yourself to apply 60 Newton-meters of force on a socket wrench? No idea how much that is? Exactly my point.
First of all, newton-meters do not measure force. Newtons measure force. Newton-meters measure torque.
Also, given that newton is ~1/10 (not exactly, but good enough for the situation you describe) of "kg of force", and given that you admit that it's not a problem to "feel" and intuitively apply force in kg, why would I have a problem in applying them? I just divide by 10.
As for "how hot is it today?", surely a scale based roughly on 0-100% of full scale is more natural to the answer than one based on the boiling point of a common liquid.
On whose full scale? Los Angeles? Toronto? Vilnius? Norilsk?
By the way, defining 0 as a freezing point is actually pretty damn convenient when speaking of weather specifically, since you know immediately whether to expect snow (and ice on roads) or rain.
Actually, we do enjoy fractions in countries with metric quite a lot - considering that when you ask for a pound of something, we ask for half a kilo.
I expect you'll be sending back the Statue Of Liberty any day now...right?
No sig today...
I'll assume that's a UK thing I wasn't aware of during my time there - Australians use kg as the weight reference. The "fair number of people" was more global - e.g., India still uses feet & inches for heights, but most everything else is metric.
Man who leaps off cliff jumps to conclusion.
http://xkcd.com/526/
Most human behaviour can be explained in terms of identity.
Don't forget pints
(less facetiously, the UK still uses miles for distances and miles per hour for speed, and fair number of people still use feet & inches for human height)
And stones for body-weight. And pints for milk and beer. And....
mmmm beer....
We live, as we dream -- alone....
I much prefer thinking of it as 4840 square yards, as this at least is slightly relavent to the size, which was defined as a chain (22 yards) by a furlong (220 yards). Although I can happily switch between the two, except farenheit which makes no sense.
Surely if it's important, you would use a torque wrench, rather than just hanging off the end of a lever arm and hoping for the best?
Yeah.. corporations don't (and shouldn't) give a fuck about your silly "free market". A corporation's goal is to maximize profits, not create some abstract "free market". So saying Microsoft has some "absense of free market ideals" is silly.
A free market means Microsoft can sell their product for whatever the hell price they want, and you are free to buy it or not to buy it. Your definition of "free market" is just a convenient excuse to be all crazy and wacky and pretend that your wanting to interfere in the consentual purchase of a product by a buyer is the real free market. Up is down! Left is right! I'm caaa-raaazy!.
It would definitely be counter-productive to not take advantage of markets that will pay more or those that will only pay less.
Maybe I'm too hung up on the word "productive" here, but: how's that so?
In the standard microeconomy 101 model, you have buyers willing to pay up to b_i for each unit and sellers willing to sell for down to s_j for each unit.
If buyer i pays p_i, then he "profits" (not in terms of money but in terms of gaining something worth more than the money he spent) the difference, i.e. b_i - p_i. [economists use the term surplus instead of profit]. Similarly for sellers.
Pair the most generous seller with the most generous buyer as long as the buyer is willing to pay more than the seller requests. The market price is somewhere between the b_i and the s_j of the last created pair. If everybody trades at this price, as much "profitable" ("surplusable"?) trade as possible takes place, which maximizes the total surplus (also called social welfare).
Letting sellers sell at market price to some customers, but also sell at higher prices to some customers, that means the sellers get a larger part of the total surplus, but no more surplus is generated.
[for this to make sense, you need it to be difficult or costly to resell the goods, otherwise people would undercut the high sellers by reselling at market price.]
So: price discrimination is just a way for sellers to grab a large piece of the pie.
There's one situation, though, where it's also to the benefit of the buyers. If a seller wants to cover $20 in fixed and variable costs and there's a market of four buyers, willing to pay $3, $4, $7 and $8, what price do you charge?
It's readily seen that if you don't sell at one of those four prices, you can earn more by "rounding" up to the nearest of those prices.
So at $3 you sell four copies, $4 three, $7 two and $8 one, grossing you either $12, $12, $14 or $8. But if you can charge each customer the price they're willing to pay, you gross 3+4+7+8=22, which is enough to cover your costs and net $2. [fuzz the numbers a bit if you want to give the buyers some surplus from the seller].
There, price discrimination enables a socially beneficial exchange that the market doesn't enable.
I started out by asking how you're counter-productive if you don't price discriminate. I've given my answer which only applies in some situations. It sounds like you suggest one should price-discriminate all the time. Care to elaborate?
That's because it'd be too awkward to re-teach all of the old people and change all of the signs ;)
As for height in feet and inches, I grew up through the period of teaching the "Metric System" at school and I still find it easier to judge 5' 10" than 1.8m or 10st 5lbs instead of ###kg (or even ###lbs for the American way). Oddly, I find cooking and any DIY easier in metric, though :D
Single standard my arse.
Don't forget: how many stone do you weigh? What's that in kg?
And an American would be asking "Whats that in lb?" . They have never heard of stones weight either. But at least you both use pints and gallons. That must reduce confusion :-)
A centimetre is the difference in length between my right foot and my left foot. Which one is a foot?
It depends on whether you are a man or woman. A recent survey proved that men have bigger foot and longer legs than women - in fact the biggest difference between men and woman is between legs.
For the record, Celsius sucks for the "how warm is it today?" question (the scale based on 0-100% is better),
Not really, actually. Fahrenheit has two issues for this question, the first being that the freezing point (which is something we can easily identify, or at least approximate) is stuck at an arbitrary value, the second being that the large numbers it produces gives a sense of false accuracy. Celsius works because the difference between, say, 24 and 25 celsius is approximately on the same level as the smallest difference in temperatures an average person will be able to detect. Very few people, I warrant, could tell the difference between 78 and 79 fahrenheit. Neither is a killer problem for fahrenheit, but then neither is the fact that celsius doesn't go to 100 in ordinary weather. The freezing = 0 thing is extremely convenient though.
Meters suck for "how big is this object I hold?" question
This is closer to true, but it still isn't a big issue. Inches and feet are convenient as small and large units, but it really isn't much harder to work in units of (say) 1cm - 25cm. And once you get beyond issues of human scale items, the simpler arithmetic you get from performing calculations in the metric system is a huge benefit.
the entire globe managed to switch to the metric system, including the U.K.
Well... the UK is trying. Except for road signs, milk, beer and temperatures on hot days*
*Yes, newspapers will say "What a scorcher" telling us that the temperature is a whopping 95F, then six months later tell us parts of the country have dropped to -5C.
And pints for milk and beer
Last I checked, standard milk bottles and beer serving sizes are 568ml, not a pint (which is actually slightly more than 568ml).
Yes, we're using metric approximations to imperial units. Yay! :)
I wonder how does the definition of one Joule/Newton/Volt/Ampere/specific heat capacity/... look like in imperial units. Or do you use there other units similarly to psi vs. Pascal?
Except, according to the Oxford dictionary, realize is more correct (because of its Greek origins). The use of -ise instead of -ize is a recent British innovation (recent in the sense of the last century or so) ... mainly so people don't misspell analyse the way we do (which is not of Greek origin). -ize is one of the rare cases where the North American spelling is actually closer to traditional, "correct" English than the UK -ise ... in stark contrast to almost every other difference between the two ("tire" vs. "tyre", "color" vs. "colour", "jewelry" vs. "jewellery") where the UK spelling is more correct and often more nuanced.
Not that it matters ... I can't spell on either side of the pond.
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
The UK maintains a few imperial measurements - miles for distances/speed on the roads, pints for beer in pubs and milk in pint bottles, and most people measure everyday length in feet and inches and calculate their weight in stones. There are also lots of random holdovers as well, like nut and bolt sizes, and many foods are packaged in what would be imperial units (like 454g).
[FUCK BETA]
For those who don't get the joke, US and International Pints/Gallons are different. It makes all the discussions on here about fuel economy really hard to follow as a brit.
Get free bitcoins: http://freebitco.in
When I'm doing DIY I tend to measure with whatever unit happens to be on the more convenient side of the tape measure. I often end up measuring an area of 31 (inches) by 72 (cm), or somesuch.
Get free bitcoins: http://freebitco.in
Fingertip to fingertip for me is exactly 2m, and fingertip to middle of chest is exactly 1m. How more convenient can it get? (Yeah, I'm kind of tall)
Nautical miles are actually used worldwide at sea and in aviation. They are a convenient unit for navigation, because a nautical mile equals one minute of latitude. As a navigator, I measure distance in nautical miles and speed in knots (nautical miles per hour).
You are correct, however, that miles being used to measure distance on land aren't the same everywhere. And they aren't actually even the same in the same place; various countries have used different definitions of a mile over time.
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
1 pint is technically 568.26ml I think that last 1/4 ml approximation is as close as to not really matter.
For the record, Celsius sucks for the "how warm is it today?" question (the scale based on 0-100% is better)
Celsius has always made most sense to me with its below 0 = freezing, 100 = boiling. Water freezing at 32? Why such an arbitrary point on the scale for such a major change in the environment? Perhaps if water didn't play such a major role in our lives and the environment... 1 degree C steps are generally enough for most uses such as climate and cooking. Adding a single decimal point gives you more accuracy if you need it. My car climate control works in 0.5 steps, which is enough resolution for me.
I agree that the foot is a handy size for measurement, but aside from that (and perhaps those bolts), the imperial system doesn't have a lot going for it unless you're already familiar with it.
the entire globe managed to switch to the metric system, including the U.K.
Oh really? Let me know how that 400-metre drive from London to Edinburgh works out for you...
In all seriousness, the UK now has a rather mixed system. We still use Imperial measures for road signs, beer (but not spirits or wine), milk, and (association) football and cricket pitches (but not athletics or swimming distances) among other things. In other areas, we sell things in metric quantities which are suspiciously close to the old imperial measures - e.g. you'll commonly buy a 454g jar of marmalade in the supermarket. And if you ask a butcher for a piece of steak "5 centimetres thick" he'll look at you funnily...
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Please tear down that big statue of a lady in New York if you really hate the French so much.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
One example of the end result is a huge glut of corn syrup usage in american foods, whereas if there were no tariffs on cane sugar importation, sugar would once again be the primary sweetener used in food industry instead of corn syrup. This is market inefficiency at its finest.
That's more political, isn't it? Presumably sugar cane grows in the USA (it does, the USA is the 9th-biggest producer). The country is subsidising corn more than it subsidises sugar.
(Sometimes I meet older Americans who say the Coke here "tastes like it used to". Recently I met a much younger American who didn't like proper Coke ;-) as it tasted funny. Heretic!)
For just about every other piece of software on the planet, the UK pays much more and often twice as much as the US does. Adobe are one of the worst in this respect but previous MS operating systems have been *far* cheaper in the US than here.
I want a list of atrocities done in your name - Recoil
The old multiples make a lot more sense when you consider that the units come from agricultural civilization and many of the units are physically meaningful in themselves. In this sense, I'd definitely say they're more "natural" than the metric system. You can see this type of thinking starting to be duplicated in some parts of physics even - e.g. using electron volts rather than joules.
For inches/feet/yards, they approximate the sizes of parts of the human body you might use for measuring things - eg an inch is roughly the length between the tip of the thumb and the first joint (or historically the width of the thumb); a foot is pretty self-explanatory (though you measure including footwear); and a yard is roughly the distance from the tip of the thumb to the tip of the nose when the arm is outstretched (think how you might use this to measure cloth). And of course the mile derives from the Roman empire, where it was a thousand paces.
For the other common distances, a rod (5.5 yards) is the standard length of the goad used for plouging fields, i.e. the width you can plough at once. A furlong (40 rods) is the distance you would plough before giving the animals a rest. And an acre is roughly the amount of land you could plough in a day (40 rods by 4 rods, so you'd rest your animals 3 times in a day).
Where I would agree with you is with the chain - it derives from the tools used for the first efforts at surveying England in the 17th century and I would agree that as such it's not really a particularly useful or "natural" measure.
That's decimal v duodecimal (base 10 v base 12), not imperial v metric. Egg packing doesn't have much to do with either measurement system. They still sell eggs in boxes of 6 or 12 in the UK. Sometimes they sell 10, or 4, or 9.
You could use metric in base 12 (e.g. 2a88 m) if it's useful enough to you.
(PS, it's "honey, I have eleven left". We have a base-12 language up to 12, eleven and twelve have their own words, thirteen doesn't, it means three-ten. It's more obvious in something like German: zehn (10), elf, zwolf, dreizehn, vierzehn.)
If the metric system is so great, why is it necessary to try to force people to use it?
You do realise you're already forced to use whatever measurement system is used by your country? Try selling sand in "elephants" and wait for a visit from the police.
We have standard systems because it makes things fair. The yard is the distance from some English king's nose to outstretched fingertip. Before that was made English law, cloth merchants would use different length yards -- that's not fair for customers.
(There are occasionally street traders in trouble with the law here as they try and sell fruit in "buckets" or "bowls", which aren't defined amounts. Sure, you can see what you're getting -- but you can't compare it with the price in a shop, or with any other trader.)
there's no chip on standard PC hardware that is region locked, however.
DVD drives are 'standard PC hardware' and are region locked (in the usual 5 changes and no more type way). I assume you can get round this by reflashing the firmware, but that applies to just about any 'locked' device.
The country is officially metric, and except where it doesn't really matter, it is. Some old people (50+) feel about as strongly over it as you guys do over your healthcare (relatively, i.e. as strongly as they ever feel about anything), and so far it's clearly not worth the risk for any politician to finish the job and change the road signs.
Every year there are bridge strikes from foreign lorry drivers not understanding the height/width limit. I've noticed that most railway bridges now have both units on the sign.
Vehicles sold in the UK have both units on the speedo, but vehicles sold elsewhere just have km/h.
A grocery store selling in pounds/ounces is breaking the law -- they're allowed to have a conversion to Imperial in smaller letters, but that's all. I don't think any supermarkets bother any more. Milk, traditionally sold in pints, is pretty much the last thing sold in "568ml" multiples, but in the last couple of years I've noticed more 0.5L multiples -- I assume dairies are updating their equipment.
0 is where saltwater freezes, which is much more important for shipping. Where does saltwater freeze on the Celsius scale?
Peter predicted that you would "deliberately forget" creation 2000 years ago...
Except for the U.S, neither Liberia nor Myanmar is using the metric system: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metric_system
Installed the Bubblemon yet?
Whats with you Colonials hatred of the French, As a Brit I understand hating the french.
The US owes it's existance to the French, the only important Naval battle they ever won was the one that meant Cornwallis couldnt get any reinforcements at Georgetown.
And if that price is still too high for you, then just get it off The Pirate Bay for free... ;)
60NM is about 6kg of force on a 1 metre breaker bar, or 12kg on a half metre bar. It's not hard.
As for temperature, what exactly is 'unnatural' about a scale where below zero means ice? That's far more natural to me than ice forming at 37-odd degrees.
I do admit to using and thinking in miles for driving, but that's only really due to familiarity. I know that London is 120 miles from here. I know I can take a certain curve at 50mph. I know that on a motorway below 60mph feels unreasonably slow and above 100mph is unusually fast. The km/h figures (100km/h and 160km/h) don't feel natural to me right now, but no doubt mainland europeans feel different, as would I had I been using kilometres all these years.
In engineering I tend to use Metric for precise measurements and Imperial for imprecise. In electronics you end up with a right mixture of measurements. Connectors, for instance, with pins 1mm thick, 0.2" long and spaced at a 0.1" pitch are common. The average PCB might be 1.6mm thick, have 1.2mm holes, spaced at 0.2", connected to 100 thou (of an inch) tracks with a 0.8mm clearance around them, mounted on a 2mm thick aluminium panel measuring 10" by 8"... So long as everybody involved is conversant in the basics of both systems, and all drawings etc are clearly marked, everything works (indeed on several graduate-level interviews, the first question they asked was "how many millimetres are there in an inch?").
As for a system being "natural", I would say that it's entirely down to your personal experience. I have very little immediate concept of how heavy a pound is (I have to think of roughly half a kilo). I know that 27c is quite warm. I have little idea how warm 78F is. I know that any less than 30mpg is disappointing fuel economy (here, at least). I have no idea how many l/100km that is. I know that a pint of beer is a refreshing drink, but have to think of Coke in litres. For somebody else every one of these answers may be different. A German might not know a pint of beer if you poured it over his head!
This is a substitute for a clever sig that fits within the maximum number of characters.
There is no UK version of Windows. (Source). We get the US version, with US spelling.
Who other than a professional mechanic gives a crap what a Nm feels like anyway? Just tighten it till it's tight.
I think that last 1/4 ml approximation is as close as to not really matter.
I can only assume you're not a CAMRA member ;-)
See this is the lovely part of globalization, if your a company you get to go cheaper countries to ger your primary resources, labor hours, etc ...
If your a consumer .... you do not get to profit from globalization ( screw us) you just get your fixed priced from your country and the company and country considers you a felon if you go to a cheaper source to get the same product.
I'm up for globalization if we get both sides of it.
But with that said, the entire globe managed to switch to the metric system, including the U.K. Oh wait, not the entire world... the U.S. is a hold-out... is the U.S. the *last* hold-out?
We use a metric system in the US, in fact we use two of them. We're bi-mensurate!
I am not a crackpot.
Why not?
The foot is quite a useful size for things as big as a human.
Inches are good for things big enough to hold in your hand.
Yards are good for plots of land you can farm.
Miles good for distances to the nearest town.
You DO NOT need to know the distance to the nearest town in miles, yards, feet and inches! Therefore "how many feet in a mile" is a question used to show MATHEMATICS. You wouldn't give the size of New York in square centimetres, would you.
The rod was the width of the pole that an ox could pull and till land.
The furlong the length an ox could go before needing a rest pulling a tiller. At that point, why not just turn the ox around?
The acre is the number of times you can get an ox to go in one day one furlong tilling the land multiplied by the width of a rod multiplied by the length of a furlong.
The acre is very long and thin.
The hectare is 100m by 100m. Why 100m? Because it's a base10 number and gets close to the acre. But it is square.
Long and thin is THE RIGHT WAY to break up a field. Posh nobs who thought they knew better than the peasants how to settle land partitioned up the ground into large blocks of square land all together to one peasant at a time.
This SEEMED to the nob to be a good thing. They got the same amount of land, but being square made it easier to find out how much you gave to each peasant and being all together for one peasant meant that you knew what peasant had what land.
The peasants knew this was a bad move. You waste two bands at the long end of a field to the length of an ox plus the length of the traces. It can't be turned over by Ox. Long and thin wastes less land than square. Being all in one place meant that one peasant had marchland and grazed sheep and no veg. Another peasant had land for root veg but no pasture or grassland. Another peasant had grassland but nothing else. So each peasant had to deal with other peasants just to get their own needs met.
YOU are like those posh nobs who think they know better because they think they have a simpler solution.
YOU ARE WRONG.
And you're wrong because you are making a strawman.
NOBODY needs to know how many square feed in an acre or how many acres in a square league. Those questions are brought up because they are interesting MATHEMATICAL problems.
Not life problems.
And so there IS no problem with the imperial system.
It is appropriate for its realm.
But the Metric length is the metre. Too big for something you hold in your hand (0.045m) and too small for the nearest town (12653m). Compare to imperial: 2in, 8 miles. Nice easy numbers that don't require partial fingers to count or more arms than you find in even the best hindu god...
PPS: NOTE: The centimetre is NOT a unit. If you want to include decimal power multiplication in use of units, why not a kiloyard? Centiyard? Micro-tonne? There's absolutely NO PROBLEM with the yard then, is there. You'd have the centiyard and kiloyard. How many yards in a kiloyard?
We need software reform. A Public option is a must...a government created OS of All.
> it's completely wrong on so many levels
> that NASA refuses to convert to metric.
NASA should be using SI, not metric. Actually, SI is what we mostly use in science class (in the US), and it works pretty well for that.
They tried to teach us full-blown metric in elementary school, but it didn't take. All those hectolitres and deciwhatsits, it's even more useless than memorizing pointless conversion facts like how many feet there are in a mile. (Yeah, that's a useful conversion to be able to do. Google Maps says it's forty-seven miles to Bob's house, but I happen to know his driveway is fifty-two feet long. I guess I'll have to convert one of those numbers into the other units to add them up and see what the total comes out to...)
I suspect most countries that actually use "metric" don't really use all those stupid prefixes much. But nonetheless, all those stupid prefixes are what Americans think of when somebody says "metric". We see ourselves back in fourth grade doing a math worksheet that's asking us stuff like "Rico's swimming pool had 42 hectolitres of water in it, but then Juan dipped out 175 decilitres, how many decalitres are left?"
Do we know how much a litre is? Sure, no problem: it's half the volume of a two-liter pop bottle. Do we want to "convert to metric"? No, and go soak your head. All those stupid prefixes make our heads swim.
> For the record, Celsius sucks for the "how warm is it today?" question
Celsius sucks in general. If you want a temperature scale that makes some kind of scientific sense, you use Kelvin.
If you just want to talk about the weather, you use Fahrenheit with ISO standard hyperbole (e.g., "It's eight hundred degrees outside today!")
Cut that out, or I will ship you to Norilsk in a box.
How do they figure that 65GBP = $72USD? Unless there has been dramatic inflation since the time the story was written and now, 1 GBP= 1.64USD. Therefore, 65GBP = $108.6. As they are stating that the US version will cost $129, this is no where near half the price. Pretty much, the UK is getting around a 10-15GBP, or about 10%, not 50%.
try 'litres'. . .
> And 1760 yards in a mile - gosh, how convenient that must be.
Yards are only used in football.
The rest of the time we use feet and inches for mundane distances, or miles when we're talking about driving somewhere in the car.
There's never any reason to convert between them.
Yes, in gradeschool they teach us that there are 5280 feet in a mile. They also teach us about Johnny Appleseed and casting out nines, because the gradeschool curriculum is set up by morons. But it doesn't *matter* how many feet there are in a mile, because it's not a conversion you would ever actually do. It's like memorizing how many molecules there are in the platinum-iridium doohickey that officially defines the kilogram.
Cut that out, or I will ship you to Norilsk in a box.
internationally, "English" is "British English".
You know, the empire and all that.
When would you ever want to convert acres into square inches?
"Yeah, there's this lot for sale outside of town, that I'm thinking about buying. The ad says it's four and a quarter acres, but I'm going to convert that into square inches so I can understand how big it is..."
I can see possibly wanting to convert between square miles and acres, though even that is a bit of a stretch. Acres and square inches? Get real. Nothing that is measured in acres would ever be expressed in square inches. Ever.
It's like memorizing how many atoms of platinum and iridium are in the artifact that officially defines the kilogram. Knowing the number would NOT give you a better understanding of how much a kilogram is.
Cut that out, or I will ship you to Norilsk in a box.
12 inches in a foot, but 3 feet in a yard - why?
more integer divisors, for real world splitting problems. I can divide a yard into three feet very easily, yet one third of a meter is a repeating fraction...
Farenheit is better at the extremes. Over here, you KNOW that zero is too cold to go out, while in Europe, it's barely cold enough to snow.
And those Europeans are griping about heat when it gets over 40, but we can take over 100 before we complain like that.
Slow down, cowboy! It has been 4 hours since you last posted. You must wait another few hours.
Base 12 works better than base 10 for doing simple fractions. since 12 is divisible by 1,2,3,4,6 and 10 is divisible by 1,2,5. Every time you measure something in metric that isn't exactly half you end up with decimal point strangeness. Measuring a yard of fabric into 6 pieces is 6, 6 inch pieces. In the metric world you have 6, 16.6666...cm pieces.
Also 1 foot is a very usable length, there is too much of a gap between meter and centimeter, do metric countries even use the decimeter? Would you describe me (6'4") as 19.4 decimeters tall?
Calvin:Do you believe in the devil? Hobbes:I'm not sure man needs the help.
shit man, lesson on how to start a thread explosion on slashdot: mention that the $HOME_TEAM system of measure might not be the be-all and end-all.
> As for a system being "natural", I would say that it's entirely down to
> your personal experience.
> I know that a pint of beer is a refreshing drink, but have to think of
> Coke in litres. For somebody else every one of these answers may be
> different. A German might not know a pint of beer if you poured it
> over his head!
1 beer: a good example of a "natural" unit - one serving of beer. Too small, it's not enough to please and you need another too soon. Too big, it's overly warmed by the time you get to the bottom and it's too heavy to lift. After centuries of applied research & averaging the english speaking world decided to call that 1 unit of beer a "pint". In other languages it's called something else but the volume is about the same. In some countries they are a bit more thirsty than others and so the definition of a pint differs slightly from say the US to the UK. A lot more useful to call it 1 drink/1 pint/1 whatever the germans call it than to ask the bartender to draw about 568mL from the tap.
As for temperature, in F 0 is the coldest that you'll ever find in a mid latitude country. 100 is about the hottest. There's nothing to learn there besides experiencing the 4 seasons a few times - it's a natural scale for the bulk of humans to use. [I believe it was based on his travels through France with a reversing mercury thermometer that he'd just made. etched a tick in the glass tube on the bitterest cold in the north, and another in the most sweltering heat he could find in the south in summer.]
As for PCB drill hole sizes, what can I say. #68 doesn't mean much without experience. But I'm talking about everyday living experiences of the general population, not specialist fields.
~.~
I'm a peripheral visionary.
Its pretty disingenuous to pick unit conversions that aren't natural. That is, square inches per acre. Also taking things entirely out of context: an acre *was* intuitive when it was defined. Is it relevant any more? Not so much, but it has a basis in meaning, rather than an arbitrary basis like the meter/kilometer bit (nice go there at trying to approximate a yard, messing that up, and then messing up its rather silly relation to, well, anything). So metric distance is not natural or relevant.
Metric units of time... oh, my, this one *isn't* good for decimals. Why are there 60 sec per minute, 60 min per hour, but only 24 hour per day? OMG, your metric uber decimal system just fell crashing around your self righteous ears.
In the end, metric defines a 'meter' as a slightly-different-almost-the-same-as-but-not-quite yard. Why? Because a yard is a useful distance for measure but the french revolutionaries needed something "different", they needed something buzzword compliant and fitting with the "new movement of rationality".
A foot is also a useful and natural unit of measure if you could fit any knowledge about work environment spacing into your metric filled head, but oh well. The remaining decimal metric units all fall out from the 'almost a yard' measure of distance and have little meaning or relevance to the world. A kilometer is "kind-of-sort-of" a mile -- which as an approximation has been used by various peoples through time. To my estimation that makes it a more natural unit of measure. Luckily for those afflicted with metric some units happen to be "close enough" fits to useful measures to be meaningful. The liter is "almost a quart" and has some currency from that. A hectare is "almost an acre" and so moderately useful for measuring plots of land. The whole "scale up" and "scale down" of metric that is so touted is pretty meaningless. That is just a feature of a decimal system. The standardizing prefixes for increments of 1,000 has some merit and thus has gained currency outside of the metric system (OMG, its 1024 for RAM instead of the pure 1000, gotta fix that! -- too bad that 1024, 2^10, is a *natural* measure for RAM).
The french revolutionary calendar *attempted* to decimalize time as well, but that was a total fail because, unfortunately for them, measures of time are even less adaptable to decimalization than distance, area or volume. But you can read about their epic fail. In the meantime, enjoy using your standard units for measuring time.
thoromyr
I noticed a considerable difference in my house between 71*F and 72*F—I start to sweat easily at 72*, but am fine at 71*.
(using * for degree since Slashdot sucks at rendering unicode, refuses to parse the # code correctly, and ignores the & codes altogether)
Before commenting on the Bible, please read it first
What type of water are you talking about? How much salt content? How much mineral content? This is why the Celsius scale is also just as arbitrary as the Fahrenheit scale. At least the zero point in Fahrenheit is the point at which practically any type of water will be found to be frozen. This is useful knowledge if you are in a cold climate.
If the temperature is above zero degrees Fahrenheit, using salt to melt ice makes sense. If the temperature is below zero degrees Fahrenheit, ice becomes pointless, and it is time to switch to sand for traction.
For hot climates, if it is above 100 degrees Fahrenheit, it's getting dangerous to be outside for too long. If it is less than 100 degrees Fahrenheit, it is generally safe to be outside.
Fahrenheit is just more practical for every day use. (Note: everyday use, not scientific use).
Before commenting on the Bible, please read it first
Considering the millions and millions of computers running Windows, ten bucks sounds more than fair to me.
Free Martian Whores!
(less facetiously, the UK still uses miles for distances and miles per hour for speed, and fair number of people still use feet & inches for human height)
I think the height thing is a matter of the units selected. How tall would you rather be, 5 or 1.5?
I suppose we scientists are all macho, then -- I've been out in 300-degree weather!
Actually the US doesn't grow much cane sugar compared to any of our other crops, much of our soil and climate isn't right for it. We can however grow corn in great volumes. I live in Minnesota, where every plot is covered in corn so what I advocate really is bad for my own state. I dont care though.
Tariffs are in place on imported cane sugar to make corn and corn products cheaper relatively to cane sugar, and to make our own cane sugar more competitive with that grown in places where it is very cheap. And yes, the government directly subsidizes corn production as well, even further imbalancing the market and having great negative impact on our health as well. Research isn't conclusive yet, but anecdotal evidence seems to point to fructose/glucose(HFCS and LFCS) mixes as a contributor to obesity and a trigger for diabetes.
You can't legislate goodness. Let each to his own destiny, by will of his freely made choices.
I'm not saying the UK version is too expensive, or that they should raise the price.
I'm saying it should be illegal for Microsoft to make any EULA limitation or try to exclude sale of EU versions to US customers.
All these years I have hated IE and now there might be a chance I can pay less for Windows AND not have IE installed by default(woohoo). I haven't read the EULA yet, but I would bet a fair amount of money that the EULA for the EU version will exclude licensing outside of Europe.
You can't legislate goodness. Let each to his own destiny, by will of his freely made choices.
In the USA you need to purchase patent licenses for the permission to run the software!
Thepiratebay will be giving away windows 7 for free US Customers will be thrilled.
So are Cory Doctorow's books, but that doesn't stop him from getting on the NYT best seller list. In fact, it is likely one reason why he is. If you want to read a Doctorow book, he has them posted on his web page, because he's smart enough to USE free rather than trying vainly to compete with it.
Free Martian Whores!
Don't be intentionally dense and dramatic. Every corporation desires perfect discrimination, where each customer is given the opportunity to pay the largest sum they think it is worth. I don't blame companies for seeking discrimination because that's what they do-make money. Microsoft hasn't suffered any downward pressure in pricing from the free market on it's OS products in 15 years due to their illegal monopoly.
No, I don't want to "interfere" with the consensual purchase of any MS product. What I would like to see is that any person, anywhere can buy any MS product they want without licensing restrictions forbidding it. So if a Mandarin speaking customer in the US wants to buy the Chinese version from a Chinese vendor for a fraction of what everyone else pays, the EULA can't deny you a license to use based on your location.
It's a global marketplace, but Microsoft, and more so the MPAA, view each country as a little isolated retail island. MS uses EULA terms to enforce this, and the MPAA has DMCA-backed region coding.
You can't legislate goodness. Let each to his own destiny, by will of his freely made choices.
You have good points but what about gravity? Why did you guys have to make it 9.80665 m/s2?
For the record, Celsius sucks for the "how warm is it today?" question (the scale based on 0-100% is better)
And just what the heck do you think Celsius is? Chopped liver?
0C = freezing, 100C = boiling.
10C is a bit chilly (50F), 20C is comfortable (68F), 30C is hot (86F), 40C is blazing (104F), and 50C is murderous (122F).
I grew up in the US (and had never been outside it until I was nearly 40), but after living overseas the last few years, I've become totally comfortable with Celsius, and get a bit annoyed when I have to convert for friends and rellies back in the States because the Fahrenheit numbers no longer feel right.
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
Stones are also quite commonly used in Australia (used often enough that, when I lived there, I had to learn how many lb/kg one equals because I'd no idea what people meant by it otherwise), although kg are official. One also hears occasional use of feet/inches, although metres are official.
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
Not to mention stone for personal weight...
Which is why everything should be base 3! Then we'd have no problem dividing things into thirds. Dividing things in half, OTOH...
Interesting.
I think the reason there are only 24 hour (sic) per day has something to do with the rotation of the Earth.
We *DO* use standard units for measuring time. They're called seconds. I think Americans (and avoiding another flame war, I mean people from the USA) use them too.
Your whole rant about Imperial units being more natural seems strange to me, could it be that it's a product of our respective upbringings? To me (and many others), metric units are more natural.
Interesting.
Close enough to 10. Maybe if the Earth accumulates enough mass, we can get it there exactly. Maybe it's just me, but 32 is a harder number to work with.
Interesting.
Ah shiz, whoa, almost had a panic attack. Had some auditory memory relapse of something like, uh, Millennium, or something.
What's that supposed to mean? *smirk*
But, mcgrew, what about the poor shareholders?
They might have to reduce their paid lawn and garden service from four times per month to two.
How will we ever, ever get by?
Base 12 works better than base 10 for doing simple fractions. since 12 is divisible by 1,2,3,4,6 and 10 is divisible by 1,2,5. Every time you measure something in metric that isn't exactly half you end up with decimal point strangeness. Measuring a yard of fabric into 6 pieces is 6, 6 inch pieces. In the metric world you have 6, 16.6666...cm pieces.
But you don't consistently use base-12. Units of volume are a prominent example that I gave in my earlier post - there isn't a 3 anywhere to be seen there, only 2 and 4.
Also 1 foot is a very usable length, there is too much of a gap between meter and centimeter, do metric countries even use the decimeter? Would you describe me (6'4") as 19.4 decimeters tall?
People's height is usually measured in centimeters, so it would be 194cm. And, of course, nothing precludes one from just saying things like "half of a meter" - in fact, we do it all the time (and my native language, at least, has a shorthand prefix for "half", so it is actually shorter than saying "one meter").
The nominal value of g was established about a century after the first metric system was drafted.
Also, since it is actually different depending on one's position on the surface of Earth (due to it being geoid and not spheric, and due to irregularities in structure) and altitude, it's not a kind of measurement that is a good basis for a unit. Any particular value of g you might pick is still arbitrary. Of course, it's not a strong argument, since kilogram is similarly arbitrarily defined (as it's the mass of one litre of water only under very specific - and somewhat random - conditions), and from practical point of view a closer approximation of g would probably be more convenient.
Still, some nice round figure for speed of light in m/s would probably be more cool. I'd support a reform for that ;)
They need to pass a law that when a company is too fucking lazy to localise English then it should be considered incorrect and even defective and therefore must be priced as such.
> > As for "how hot is it today?", surely a scale based roughly
> > on 0-100% of full scale is more natural to the answer than
> > one based on the boiling point of a common liquid.
>
> On whose full scale? Los Angeles? Toronto? Vilnius? Norilsk?
The Fahrenheit scale was developed based on relatively temperate English weather, so yeah, a lot of places have sub-zero temperatures in winter (we do in Ohio), and the tropics regularly see temperatures above 100.
Nonetheless, the scale is still very well suited for talking about weather. Even if you're from Florida and seldom see temperatures much below forty, a hundred is still pretty warm (especially if it's also humid), and even if you live in the continuous permafrost zone, zero Fahrenheit is still a wee bit nippy. I suppose on Breen they probably go sunbathing if it gets up to zero Fahrenheit, but here on Earth that's a winter temperature, and the humans put on coats and such.
> By the way, defining 0 as a freezing point is actually
> pretty damn convenient when speaking of weather specifically,
> since you know immediately whether to expect snow (and ice on
> roads) or rain.
I don't know where you're from (Physics Textbook Land, perhaps, where people and vehicles are point masses and/or frictionless?), but around here there's about a ten- or fifteen-degree range wherein you can just as easily get rain, freezing rain, snow*, slush, sleet, or some combination, depending on conditions. On the Fahrenheit scale this runs from the lower twenties into the high thirties. If you want a round figure I'll round it off to thirty, but that's very much an approximation. In gradeschool they teach the official figure as 32, but I'm pretty sure that's based on textbook standard pressure at mean sea level, not to mention the obviously preposterous assumption that the ambient temperature is completely uniform all the way from the stratosphere right down to the bedrock. In the real world you can easily have snow* at 36 one day and pouring rain at 28 the next.
* By "snow" in these temperature ranges I actually mean the warm soggy stuff that passes for snow in December. Obviously, if you want *proper* snow (the kind that squeaks when you walk on it and can still blow around afterward) you need subzero temperatures. I think ten below is just about the warmest temperature at which I've experienced real snow.
Cut that out, or I will ship you to Norilsk in a box.
Granted, you can have snow (and even hail) while temperature is above the melting point, but it won't stay frozen on the roads.
You have a point that 0 C (which is 32 F) isn't precisely the freezing point because of other conditions (atmospheric pressure varies, water isn't pure etc), but it is close enough.
In any case, as I've said, convenience of talking about everyday things is totally subjective for virtually all units. I can understand your explanations about why you find Fahrenheit convenient; on my side, personally, I find Celcius convenient because temperature difference of 1 C is just large enough to make a meaningful detectable difference, while 1 F is too small for that.
And since there's no issue of conversion between various units here - both C and F are essentially self-sufficient - C doesn't have the same kind of advantage over F in terms of ease of arithmetic with it as metric does over Imperial. [0..100] there is consistent with metric in some random way, but this consistency isn't really of much use. So it really does boil down to habit here, with no clear advantage to either side.
You cannot comment on the Cnet story about micro$$ thumbing its nose at European Union justice, as the 'captcha' will not accept correct answers from non Brit posters. Nice touch from another micro$$ sock puppet monopolist 'CBS Britain'. Well this is America and John Bull 'CBS Britain' can go 'ontercourse themselves' if y'all rednekks no wut ah mean....and let their f#$%#$ spell checker swallow that one. Anyway looks like micro$$ is willfully deciding to not comply with an EU court order to get IE8 the hell out of Win7. They axed the win7E edition and are shipping full IE8 editions to the EU probably 'slightly disabled but fully installed' along with 'other browsers' that will have to be installed from scratch. However, as most sales will be to wholesale businesses, these are the only ones to which real choice will be given. So when these worthies 'by choice' (you KNOW that one was 'voluntary' don't you?) order the 'full IE8' editions 'preinstalled' on pc's, these then will be the only ones on the floor to be sold to customers...eg: all the poor happless suckers that wander through that store's doors. I know European stores and know that they give poor choice to the customers...THEY KNOW what's 'best for the customer'. Europeans will get the shaft from micro$ and their paid sock puppet European Union Supreme Soviet Commissars yet again! Oh well, another digital rebellion is brewing in Ingushetia with a new version of the Pirate Bay this time run by Islamic Jiwhaddists.....
And by the way you will probably not be able to order from England as they 'know' what an American URL is, etc. and will simply charge the USA screw us agin price!
Now it becomes clear why they raised the price of the XBox 360 in the UK!
I am not devoid of humor.
Fahrenheit is zero-referenced from the freezing point of sea water. Not exactly a stable reference point, but thats what it's based on. Don't recall the gradient reference is based on.
The original Celsius scale was inverted: 100 was freezing and 0 was boiling. Along the way someone pointed out how stupid that was: "Hey! Dumb ass, you have the scale upside-down!" It was quietly turned right-side up.
If you want a nice romp through the history of temperature measurement, may I suggest Nova's 'The conquest of Cold' aka 'Absolute Zero' http://video.pbs.org/video/1050757560/program/979359664/topic/979382098
We always have alternatives, but not always the incentive to seek them out. I've been using w98se for as long as it's been out and things have been working out fine for me. It works for me. I have it installed on a dozen or more pcs. I still get the same work done now as I did years ago, actually more, with faster pcs. True, the rest of the world is forging ahead, expensively, I might add, but think about it... if no one bought vista, they'd be still getting the work done with their original os, and maybe, just maybe, MS might have noticed the crap still on the shelves and then worked to put together a better package at a more reasonable price. Unfortunately, we are not yet at the tipping point of techy revolt. If we were so inclined, we'd fund a group of nerds to do the job right, in the first place, and deliver the message to the big boys that we are so-over the herd mentality ( I thought Linux was supposed to do that? Or apple... I'd buy an Apple, if I could afford one....). But not yet. We'll probably wait until folks like MS and USG have all our money, and we'll have no more for them to extract. And we'll have nothing left to buy the next un-working version of whatever. So they will probably sell it to someone who has all the money, and it will continue. Things endure either because of their quality or because of our stupiditity. Thanks for lis'nin' seekertom
Yeah, but what about in the good old days when you used different units for different dimensions? Fathoms were for depth and height measurements, leagues were for horizontal measurements, and ells and hands were what you used when you couldn't be sure which direction it might be (such as rope).
(Yet more practical knowledge drawn from LOTR.)
$META_SIG_JOKE
I think the parent was thinking of the fingertip to nose definition of a yard.
When you go into a pub, what do you order, a "pint of beer" or "568ml of beer"? Myself, I order in pints, but maybe I'm abnormal. Oh and I also have just bought a 4 pint bottle of milk, yes it also has the volume in litres, but it says "4 pints" on the label. 568 ml is close enough to a pint, to be equal to it for most uses, I don't think anyone is worried about the 0.26125 ml difference either way.
Hey, maybe you really are right, but I think you just being needlessly pedantic.
Probably - at least WP gives that as an origin. Didn't ever make sense to me either - measuring things by poking your nose at them doesn't sound like it's a particularly convenient operation to perform.
Still trying to come up with a good wholesome name for liters -- any suggestions?
Sam Adams? :)
Don't ping my cheese with your bandwidth!