2002-10-06 Markus,
Whose fault is this for not happening? There are 6 milliard people in the world, and only about 300 million in North America. As long as the "world" sits back and only complains but takes no action, the status quo remains. You people outside the US must place the burden of cost and confusion back on the US market. You must work with whatever resources are available on your side to force American companies who sell products in the world to strictly follow ISO regulations. If they were to provide their products in a manner that is friendly to the standards of the world, they would soon find what a cost burden it is to be different for the North American market and soon comply. But, as long as they can continue to impose their confusion on the world and are not stopped, the confusion will continue. What power or influence do you have to get the ball rolling? How effective can you be in seeing to it that ISO standards are adhered to when American Business sells products in the world? As an example, what can be done to make sure that computer software is ISO and SI friendly in all world markets instead of the present practice of FFU being the default and metric being a choice. How many users of software out there know how to change the default to SI or bother doing so and keep it in FFU. A very subtle way by the US to get people everywhere use to the US method. I have received e-mails at work from many different parts of the world and in ALL cases, the header that their computers produce is in the US format. My computer is set to the ISO format, so it displays on their computers that way, but theirs always appears in the US format. This is because Microsoft defaults its operating system to US formats when English is the selected language, and all of the correspondences so far have their settings to English. did you ever notice that the choice of measurement systems in Windows regional systems is restricted to metric or US. you don't get a choice of say, UK Imperial, or old French, old German, Chinese, Japanese, Arabic, etc. It goes to show you that the battle over which system will become the defacto world standard is between metric and the US. And even though we feel metric truly wins out, the US is doing its damnedest to make sure that FFU passes up SI and eventually eliminates it. Don't be fooled into believing the US will ever change. They will fight first and only if severely defeated, will they ever give in. Let's not wait until 2010 to fight. We have to do it now while the US economy is weak, and it will be weak for a long time to come. John Globalisation starts with getting the details right. Inconsistent use of SI units and international standard paper sizes is today the primary cause for U.S. businesses failing to meet the expectations of the global economy. > There can be no doubt that moving to A4 paper has to be an integral > part of any serious US government metrication program. Internet users > all over the world are eagerly waiting for the current paper format mess > to end! > > By the way, I just added more documentation on the history of > ISO 216 to > > http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/iso-paper.html > > Markus > > -- > Markus G. Kuhn, Computer Laboratory, University of Cambridge, UK > Email: mkuhn at acm.org, WWW: <http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/> >
