Besides lack of familiarity there's also a vicious anti-government undercurrent.
Ok, I was missing this point - I understand it. But this only holds for end users - not for industrial applications. I understand that there are costs involved in changing a system, but given that many engineering products are made by parts produced on both sides of the Atlantic I see costs already today due to the co-existence of two systems since somebody has to do some conversion. For instance, I presume that aerospace manufacturers today have got this problem.
Time is such a critical unit of measurement that it has eluded decimalization.
Note that the point in this discussion is not about the merits of *metrics*, rather the merits of a common, shared system. So, it's not a problem for me the fact that we'd use a decimal system for most measures, base 60 for time and angles, and powers of two for disk and memory capacity, and even inches for monitors, as far as we all use the same.
Amusingly, in Alabama, they used to have kilometer markers on the road in addition to the mile markers. They found that this caused confusion, because people did not report which unit marker they were at, just the marker. So... back to mile markers for the foreseeable future.
Was writing "24M" and "20K" so that people could report the trailing letter really too hard? :-) Jokes apart, I do agree that exposing a double system to end users creates more problems than it solves.
-- Fabrizio Giudici - Java Architect @ Tidalwave s.a.s. "We make Java work. Everywhere." http://tidalwave.it/fabrizio/blog - [email protected] -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Java Posse" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/javaposse?hl=en.
