Re: Interesting programming description for bank selection

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From: Marko Mäkelä msmakela@gmail.com
Reply: cbm-hackers@musoftware.de cbm-hackers@musoftware.de
Date: 2014-04-22 at 08:22:40
To: cbm-hackers@musoftware.de cbm-hackers@musoftware.de
Subject:  Re: Interesting programming description for bank selection

> to keep the lawyers away. I guess that the reluctance to implement
> certain international standards, such as the Metric system, is coming
> from that too (American people are too used to the imperial system). It
> does not necessarily mean "we are the US, the world revolves around us”.

Doesn’t it? ;-) Reluctance to change habits does a lot of harm in many fields. I don’t say one or the other system is better (I grew up in SI but I see some good sides in imperial too) but I say that reluctance to adopt common way in a situation when there is no other advantage than keeping and feeding old habits is what brings harm and in some cases even lethal dangers.

> By the way: it has worked also the other way around. I have heard that
> the Soviet Union used Metric 2.5mm spacing on IC cases instead of 0.1"
> or 2.54mm, and that they used metric scale on aircraft altimeters while
> the globally established convention is feet. I would guess that this was
> deliberate, to oppose the "imperialistic" system. :)

:-) I wouldn’t go that far with the conclusions. And actually for me the harm being done by having multiple systems is nowhere more clearly visible than in the aviation. You can have a one line fully official message with units from three measurement systems there.. And this is actually caused by the fact that some countries having very strong foothold in the aviation refused to adopt SI/metric and stubbornly continue to use the “good, old units”, unlike e. g. Soviet Union (and its current descendants) who decided to drop their “good” traditional stuff in favour of SI.

Good that in the aviation people at least eventually stopped using the utterly stupid invention called timezones and adopted one common standard of time measurement..

-- 
SD!

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