Possibly, the point of view from the various governments having to setup international trade agreements was much different than the view from a large part of there population, maybe a little too focused on there national concern. If the Imperial units was a really superb system with many advantage it would have been out of question to forget it. But, the fact is that a very large consensus (especially within scientists) agree that the SI unit is better.
Seeing this process as a allegation of a government to others is abusive. At that time this was more governments that wanted to help there country to exchange goods with others countries with less problem, by using a common unit system. There simply pickup the best system available. The fact that the USA failed to implement it internally will not magically make the Imperial unit system better than the SI unit system. There could have political difficulties to take the decision a bit longer, but this would not have changer the end result at the international level. Again, the internal concern of the USA is an other story. If there really played a double game from the start, then there would have very well known that this will end up at the exact situation there faced today: being the last country using the Imperial units. There don't played a double game, there simply failed to change soon enough.
Oh, and fwiw, since some of your remarks seems to suggest that you believe otherwise, I'm not American. I'm Canadian...
Sorry, I make this mistake in my last sentence.
but it's still probably something that very easily wouldn't have happened at all if the fact that the USA wasn't really going to make any effort to fully adopt the metric system for general use had been known about at the time.
Well, USA just delay the effort to the maximum, losing a lot of energy doing so. Did you really think that this would have been an advantage to lost the same energy in Canada ? I am certain that you don't have to regret the change. Globalization will irreversibly make the non-SI units more and more useless. At a certain point in time, the USA will realize that using two units systems is more confusing and more costly than using a single one. There inevitably have to fade out the non-SI unit soon or later.
About the speculation that the USA could have not agreed in a international unit system a half century ago, I think that this would have been also only a matter of time.
If you ride a Swiss train on a Friday evening then you will see more young men in close conjunction to guns than you have ever seen in your whole life.
Until about 10 years ago, the armed soldiers taking trains to go back to the army the Saturday evening usually passed the travelling time sharing stories while drinking beers and wines. For me this was usual as I have see that since I was a child. But I remember having see tourists freshly arriving from the Geneva airport felling very uncomfortable (and even a bit socked for some of them) when about 200 armed soldiers mounts on the train at the next station and start to drinking alcohol and laughing loudly.
Interestingly, I can't remember that this kind of situation have been out of control and terminate in a drama. In fact, I thought that was the safest trains you can take as there was really no a single pickpocket, drug dealer, begging, or other parasites, close to this kind of trains... Today soldiers don't have to carry there weapon all the times just to pass the week-end in there house, and there are (theoretically) prohibited drinking alcohol if not in civil.
For there intended audience, the I2C bus is still a very good choice, since there only have to deal with a very limited quantity of low speed sensors and actuators.
But I agree with you, there is probably a business opportunity to setup a standard based on USB for less toys oriented robotic. Something that make straightforward to add a new feature in a robot: - Can be compatible across many manufactures (including your own hacking). - Driver code contributed into a common open source project. - Auto detection of devices instances, with driver loading and necessary user space application. - Easy to use programming API for every sensors and actuators.
Something a bit like the Arduino community but instead of the shields, using the USB to communicate with parts. I there anything like that already ?
uClibc is hosted on the same page as BusyBox. It's smaller and has less bloat.
Less bloat, ok but at the expense of less compatibility with existing code and more strange behavior or bugs that make existing code taking unexpected action. I use uClibc since 10 years now and I have not a single project where I don't have to fix a bug, add a support, or patch the application code to get the expected result.
Today memory is very cheap and the economy in size of the uClbc is not enough anymore to justify the lost in development time to use it, unless you maybe playing with very large quantity. Many system I see have applications binaries, libraries binaries, and user data, at least 10x bigger than the size of the uClibc. In addition, build system like Buildroot provides now the choice to use crosstool-ng and thus other libc than the uClibc.
The only good reason to use uClibc is for noMMU processor (Cortex-M3, Blackfin, etc...) to run few user space process. Using many process without a MMU will eat a lot of SDRAM and will quickly cost more than upgrading to a cheap MMU core like the venerable ARM-926EJ-S used in a lot of processors.
Don't blame Canada and Australia for that situation. USA have officially endorsed the SI units, period. From the international point of view the case is closed since a half century already. USA only have a national problem with his internal general public, while many of his citizens use SI units at work already and children learn SI units at school.
It's really not USA against the world, it's more like less and less USA citizens against more and more others. Many many things have changed in the day live in the last half century. Using SI unit is just a other small change. Why so much resistance ? Millions of others peoples in others countries have already switched to SI units without problem. Just do it, it's really not that hard if you wish to help your next generation.
USA officially use SI units, USA scientists use SI units, USA military use SI units (according to other post in this forum), USA space use SI unit, USA automotive use SI unit, and the rest of the world use SI unit. Others counties have already show that switching to SI unit is not a such big problem. No county have any discussion about leaving SI unit, ans USA is full of discussion about accelerating SI unit switch. Did't you not get the trend ?
Aside of that, there is actually also a big question about weapon control in Switzerland as well. A few days ago, a depressive ex-military has killed 3 innocent peoples in a small village not so distant from where I live. I can't find up to date English link to it. Use Google Translation: http://www.lematin.ch/faits-divers/Le-portrait-du-tireur-de-Daillon-se-precise/story/24393786 (In fact English results about this affair is full of mistake or outdated information that was showed wrong later). He used an almost historic military gun that was not covered by the actual gun control law. Fortunately, the authority have confiscated some years ago the others modern guns he used to have. Without that, he probably would have killed twice more innocents.
"35mm caliber Swiss-german revolver cannon, it fires a sophisticated tungsten fragmentation promity fuze high explosive amunition. The rate of fire is 1050 rpm and the muzzle velocity 1170 mps."
You can be certain that there known what there are talking about.
Reference please. And formally, USA already uses SI units. Check USA government legislation if you don't believes that. It even say that the SI units should be preferred over the Imperial units and make SI units mandatory for some uses. Before fighting others countries that have already switched to SI units in day life uses, ether USA must comply with his own legislation or change it. The later option will be a nightmare for the USA because it will be see as a illegal economic protection action under a number of entities like the World Trade Organization. Resulting penalty will make the USA even less competitive and only even more painful to make the switch to SI units later.
In continental Europe uses of non SI unit is rare, especially for every day uses. The last common example are horse power (for car) and calorie (for food), but there are now just indications in parentheses after the proper SI unit watt and joule. There will probably disappear in a generation or two. The uses of no SI units are now found only into the specific professional uses, for historic reason. International scientists globally agree on SI units.
A for a non metric system, I can't find a single example in every day uses in continental Europe. Fraction are used sometimes, but it's to define a metric quantity (for example 1/4L = 0.25L = 2.5dL = 25cL = 250mL).
More and more electronics components case and connectors are specified in millimeter. Even US new automotive cables and connectors are now specified using a SI based norm.
0 F - point where brine freezes, 100 F - the temperature of the human body
Even the Fahrenheit is scientifically *defined* from the freeze point and boiling point of water, exactly the same as the Celsius. The only difference is that the freeze point is defined as 32 F and the boiling is defined as 212 F, witch is a big mess compared to 0 C and 100 C. Liquid water is the most important element state for the life as we known. Even if it's arbitrary, it's full of good sense to use it for the temperature definition. Just realize how much money spend the USA to find prof of liquid water on Mars...
A few years back, a chief mate on a ship I worked on said "99 millimeters... that's almost a centimeter."
- 'milli' is 1/1000, from the French word 'mille' ('thousand' in English). - 'centi' is 1/100, from the French word 'cent' ('hundred' in English).
How many 1/1000 are in 1/100 ? Obviously 10 (and not 100 as your chief mate said). Or perhaps he was talking about a surface. An area of 99 square millimeter is correctly almost equal to an area of 1 square centimeter. 100 * (1/1000)^2 = 1 * (1/100)^2.
Slashdot Mirror
Possibly, the point of view from the various governments having to setup international trade agreements was much different than the view from a large part of there population, maybe a little too focused on there national concern. If the Imperial units was a really superb system with many advantage it would have been out of question to forget it. But, the fact is that a very large consensus (especially within scientists) agree that the SI unit is better.
Seeing this process as a allegation of a government to others is abusive. At that time this was more governments that wanted to help there country to exchange goods with others countries with less problem, by using a common unit system. There simply pickup the best system available. The fact that the USA failed to implement it internally will not magically make the Imperial unit system better than the SI unit system. There could have political difficulties to take the decision a bit longer, but this would not have changer the end result at the international level. Again, the internal concern of the USA is an other story. If there really played a double game from the start, then there would have very well known that this will end up at the exact situation there faced today: being the last country using the Imperial units. There don't played a double game, there simply failed to change soon enough.
Oh, and fwiw, since some of your remarks seems to suggest that you believe otherwise, I'm not American. I'm Canadian...
Sorry, I make this mistake in my last sentence.
but it's still probably something that very easily wouldn't have happened at all if the fact that the USA wasn't really going to make any effort to fully adopt the metric system for general use had been known about at the time.
Well, USA just delay the effort to the maximum, losing a lot of energy doing so. Did you really think that this would have been an advantage to lost the same energy in Canada ? I am certain that you don't have to regret the change. Globalization will irreversibly make the non-SI units more and more useless. At a certain point in time, the USA will realize that using two units systems is more confusing and more costly than using a single one. There inevitably have to fade out the non-SI unit soon or later.
About the speculation that the USA could have not agreed in a international unit system a half century ago, I think that this would have been also only a matter of time.
If you ride a Swiss train on a Friday evening then you will see more young men in close conjunction to guns than you have ever seen in your whole life.
Until about 10 years ago, the armed soldiers taking trains to go back to the army the Saturday evening usually passed the travelling time sharing stories while drinking beers and wines. For me this was usual as I have see that since I was a child. But I remember having see tourists freshly arriving from the Geneva airport felling very uncomfortable (and even a bit socked for some of them) when about 200 armed soldiers mounts on the train at the next station and start to drinking alcohol and laughing loudly.
Interestingly, I can't remember that this kind of situation have been out of control and terminate in a drama. In fact, I thought that was the safest trains you can take as there was really no a single pickpocket, drug dealer, begging, or other parasites, close to this kind of trains... Today soldiers don't have to carry there weapon all the times just to pass the week-end in there house, and there are (theoretically) prohibited drinking alcohol if not in civil.
For there intended audience, the I2C bus is still a very good choice, since there only have to deal with a very limited quantity of low speed sensors and actuators.
But I agree with you, there is probably a business opportunity to setup a standard based on USB for less toys oriented robotic. Something that make straightforward to add a new feature in a robot:
- Can be compatible across many manufactures (including your own hacking).
- Driver code contributed into a common open source project.
- Auto detection of devices instances, with driver loading and necessary user space application.
- Easy to use programming API for every sensors and actuators.
Something a bit like the Arduino community but instead of the shields, using the USB to communicate with parts. I there anything like that already ?
uClibc is hosted on the same page as BusyBox. It's smaller and has less bloat.
Less bloat, ok but at the expense of less compatibility with existing code and more strange behavior or bugs that make existing code taking unexpected action. I use uClibc since 10 years now and I have not a single project where I don't have to fix a bug, add a support, or patch the application code to get the expected result.
Today memory is very cheap and the economy in size of the uClbc is not enough anymore to justify the lost in development time to use it, unless you maybe playing with very large quantity. Many system I see have applications binaries, libraries binaries, and user data, at least 10x bigger than the size of the uClibc. In addition, build system like Buildroot provides now the choice to use crosstool-ng and thus other libc than the uClibc.
The only good reason to use uClibc is for noMMU processor (Cortex-M3, Blackfin, etc...) to run few user space process. Using many process without a MMU will eat a lot of SDRAM and will quickly cost more than upgrading to a cheap MMU core like the venerable ARM-926EJ-S used in a lot of processors.
Don't blame Canada and Australia for that situation. USA have officially endorsed the SI units, period. From the international point of view the case is closed since a half century already. USA only have a national problem with his internal general public, while many of his citizens use SI units at work already and children learn SI units at school.
It's really not USA against the world, it's more like less and less USA citizens against more and more others. Many many things have changed in the day live in the last half century. Using SI unit is just a other small change. Why so much resistance ? Millions of others peoples in others countries have already switched to SI units without problem. Just do it, it's really not that hard if you wish to help your next generation.
USA officially use SI units, USA scientists use SI units, USA military use SI units (according to other post in this forum), USA space use SI unit, USA automotive use SI unit, and the rest of the world use SI unit. Others counties have already show that switching to SI unit is not a such big problem. No county have any discussion about leaving SI unit, ans USA is full of discussion about accelerating SI unit switch. Did't you not get the trend ?
This would be a massacre. A comparable machine once faulty fired only 1/8 second and killed 9 soldiers and injured 14 others. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oerlikon_35_mm_twin_cannon#History
Aside of that, there is actually also a big question about weapon control in Switzerland as well. A few days ago, a depressive ex-military has killed 3 innocent peoples in a small village not so distant from where I live. I can't find up to date English link to it. Use Google Translation: http://www.lematin.ch/faits-divers/Le-portrait-du-tireur-de-Daillon-se-precise/story/24393786 (In fact English results about this affair is full of mistake or outdated information that was showed wrong later). He used an almost historic military gun that was not covered by the actual gun control law. Fortunately, the authority have confiscated some years ago the others modern guns he used to have. Without that, he probably would have killed twice more innocents.
The same group of companies already make awesome weapons: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=neONcIVGUJA
"35mm caliber Swiss-german revolver cannon, it fires a sophisticated tungsten fragmentation promity fuze high explosive amunition. The rate of fire is 1050 rpm and the muzzle velocity 1170 mps."
You can be certain that there known what there are talking about.
You know, less than 5% of the world population are in USA.
km/h, C, CHF/L :-)
Reference please. And formally, USA already uses SI units. Check USA government legislation if you don't believes that. It even say that the SI units should be preferred over the Imperial units and make SI units mandatory for some uses. Before fighting others countries that have already switched to SI units in day life uses, ether USA must comply with his own legislation or change it. The later option will be a nightmare for the USA because it will be see as a illegal economic protection action under a number of entities like the World Trade Organization. Resulting penalty will make the USA even less competitive and only even more painful to make the switch to SI units later.
Mod parent up.
None. And in fact US is already using SI unit to define there own historical units.
USA have already spend enough syllables on this issues to compensate the switch.
No country in the world uses only one system.
In continental Europe uses of non SI unit is rare, especially for every day uses. The last common example are horse power (for car) and calorie (for food), but there are now just indications in parentheses after the proper SI unit watt and joule. There will probably disappear in a generation or two. The uses of no SI units are now found only into the specific professional uses, for historic reason. International scientists globally agree on SI units.
A for a non metric system, I can't find a single example in every day uses in continental Europe. Fraction are used sometimes, but it's to define a metric quantity (for example 1/4L = 0.25L = 2.5dL = 25cL = 250mL).
More and more electronics components case and connectors are specified in millimeter. Even US new automotive cables and connectors are now specified using a SI based norm.
'Système International', don't forget the 'è' (accent grave) :-)
Hilarious. Given how strong is the marketing in the USA, this might be the trick.
Mod parent up.
To be arrogant, you have first to forget that you needed help from others before.
Sorry, you have lost this war already.
The vast majority of the world population uses Celsius. All scientists uses Celsius. Even today Farenheit is defined by Celsius scale.
Turns out there's a good reason for why 0 and 32 were placed where they were on the Farenheit scale
No reason better than using the freeze point and boiling point of water witch is also used for the today Farenheit definition.
0 F - point where brine freezes, 100 F - the temperature of the human body
Even the Fahrenheit is scientifically *defined* from the freeze point and boiling point of water, exactly the same as the Celsius. The only difference is that the freeze point is defined as 32 F and the boiling is defined as 212 F, witch is a big mess compared to 0 C and 100 C. Liquid water is the most important element state for the life as we known. Even if it's arbitrary, it's full of good sense to use it for the temperature definition. Just realize how much money spend the USA to find prof of liquid water on Mars...
A few years back, a chief mate on a ship I worked on said "99 millimeters... that's almost a centimeter."
- 'milli' is 1/1000, from the French word 'mille' ('thousand' in English).
- 'centi' is 1/100, from the French word 'cent' ('hundred' in English).
How many 1/1000 are in 1/100 ? Obviously 10 (and not 100 as your chief mate said). Or perhaps he was talking about a surface. An area of 99 square millimeter is correctly almost equal to an area of 1 square centimeter. 100 * (1/1000)^2 = 1 * (1/100)^2.
letter being 8,5x11 inches in north america but 15cm x 30 cm in Europe.
Completely wrong. Here is the reality: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_216