Intel Atom: pros/cons/hazzards?

It's even becoming more popular with tv programmes like this:

--
Stef    (remove caps, dashes and .invalid from e-mail address to reply by mail) 

"If there isn't a population problem, why is the government putting cancer in  
the cigarettes?" 
-- the elder Steptoe, c. 1970

People don't think in those terms, and they certainly don't think in the /same/ terms for petrol and milk. You think of milk in terms of glasses (whose size depends on the glasses you have in the cupboard), breakfast cereal (depending on the size of your bowls), and recipes (in cups, dl, ml, fl.oz., whatever - or more likely just "some"). You think of petrol in terms of how far you can drive on a tank, and how much it costs to refill.

It doesn't matter in the slightest whether the "standard unit" used is the same - no one /ever/ compares a quantity of milk to a quantity of petrol.

And milk doesn't have to be accurate - you could change from quarts to litres, and pints to half-pints, and no one will care because it is close enough. Petrol, on the other hand, makes people obsessive - if you convert to litres then any cents lost in rounding errors had better benefit the car owners or there would be riots!

Any fuel dispenser in the US is already capable of being metric or English by changing configuration. How rounding errors are handled is very much governed by existing weights and measures regimes.

--
Les Cargill

"A pint's a pound the world around."

--
Les Cargill

Yes, there's something wrong with cash! Handling cash is a *massive* PITA. Cash is detested by most businesses and organizations, although many have practical reasons* for handling it.

Cash introduces huge security and management problems, and is actually a direct threat to the health and lives of your employees (just ask your insurance company**).

Most businesses would happily refuse to deal with cash if they could, and it has nothing to do with being able to collect extra data from electronic transactions (although that's a bonus).

All that being said, the level of law enforcement's harassment of people using/carrying non-trivial amounts of cash, especially when crossing borders, is absurd, as are the seizure rules that go with that.

*They may be legally required to do so (my local electric company has a couple of offices where you can pay your utility bill in cash, because they're required to by the regulators), it may be a business where cash is commonly used and expected by the customers (the local hamburger place, for example), or they may want to avoid a paper trail for (il)legal purposes (being able to cheat on sales tax collections, or sales of things illegal, for example). **You'll get hit on both your liability and workers comp policies if you handle non-trivial amounts of cash.

No, the Commonwealth standardised volume units such that a gallon weighed 10lb, making the pint 25% larger than its US equivalent. Britian (can't speak about the rest of the Commonwealth) then in time redefined the measures in terms of their metric equivalents

- much as how a yard is 0.9144 metres by definition. In the process the precise value changed slightly, but the difference is small enough to be an irrelevance for most purposes.

--
Andrew Smallshaw 
andrews@sdf.lonestar.org

I actually have a pinch measuring spoon (1/16th tsp or .312ml, IIRC). I rarely use it, it came in a set of "odd size" spoons. The set also includes a 1/8th tsp spoon, but it's not labeled as a "dash" (unlike the pinch spoon). The 1/8 tsp spoon does get used occasionally, especially when scaling a recipe down.

In Europe (or at least Germany and Austria), where ingredients are commonly specified in grams, a graduated inverted cone is commonly used, and it has columns of marks calibrated for different (common) substances. For example, there's one set of marks for grams of sugar, and another for grams of flour. Obviously there are packing/density issues with that, but no more than measuring flour in cups...

Here you can see the flour and sugar side of a semi-typical specimen:

And there are various other forms:

On Mon, 22 Sep 2014 23:27:22 -0400, rickman Gave us:

All three car makers, and even AMC and Jeep, when they existed.

Since the early seventies.

The military, NASA, many other gov orgs, all metricized.

The thing is that the inch conventions are NOT ruled out, so what one sees is a mixed application of both, and even within the same product.

That is how a space probe mission can fail. Because too many "college educated" folks failed to actually pay close attention to the world some HR idiot hired them into and let them even get undeserved paychecks in.

I cannot believe how so many fully degreed folks can be so downright common sense, real world stupid when they hit the labs.

And for you to have been on this planet for so long, and to be fully unaware of where America is in all this, is a huge tell that you are just one of the assholes I refer to.

On Tue, 23 Sep 2014 10:08:11 -0500, Robert Wessel Gave us:

Just don't ask 'Justin Wilson' to calibrate any kitchen measures for you. (He was one of the original TV cooking show hosts)

Nonsense. 18mm is quite large (and I didn't look at all drill bits) but HD *does* sell metric drill bits.

11mm:

Who cares, as long as the same units are used?

>

I have smidgen, pinch and dash spoons. As I rarely scale recipes *down*, they tend to only see use in cases where I am mixing some particular aromatic/strong spice into a dish or preparing rubs, etc.. E.g., I use the dash spoon when mixing "vindaloo masala" into my chicken rub (it is far too "hot" for my tastes so even 1/4t would be "too much").

I use the smidgen spoon to meter pure stevia into my tea (a little goes a VERY long way! A pinch would be too much!). In fact, I

*store* that spoon *in* the stevia container.

OTOH, most folks encountering "a pinch of salt" in a Rx would assume "some small, indefinite amount" (as if "to taste") without realizing that a *specific* amount is, indeed, being called for.

[And, a "smidgen" seems like a made-up-word intended to signify "even less" -- along the same lines]

Gee, sort of like a MEASURING CUP?? What a silly concept! :>

So, where "our" recipes would make that conversion implicit in the specification of *which* "cup/spoon size" to use, Europeans have to perform that "conversion" each time they meter out sugar or flour or...

And this is MORE efficient? One cup to handle every potential case (with run-time conversions) vs. a set of nested cups/spoons?

Essentially the same as the sorts of cups we use for "liquid measure". Though those are only calibrated in volumetric units (english and metric)

Actually that is nonsense. Sugar measurement especially is more accurate when weighed. Volumes depend on how finely something is ground or packed. Weight doesn't vary as much. That is why Robert said the graduated measure has "issues" which are the same as with measuring cups. The device is calibrated in grams for those substances so there is no conversion.

Silly boy.

Uh, yeah. That is the point...

--

Rick

Actually his point is bang-on. The above is available on Home Depot's web site, but is not a stock item in their stores (they will ship it for free to one of their stores for pickup, however, but that doesn't help me if I need it before next Thursday).

And while the do stock some small metric sets (or is that Menards?), an 18mm bit is pretty big, and even if they had a set of more common sizes, finding an 18mm in stock is going to be much harder. Even finding something as simple as a 4mm x .7 x 60mm bolt is probably not going to happen* at your local home center (although you might well find 30 and 40mm lengths).

*Yeah, I needed two a few months ago. Fortunately my favorite Internet supply house is willing to ship a package of a dozen (or so). Still, I had to wait for that. I was ready to drill it out and re-tap it for a #10, but there wasn't all that much extra material there, and I decided I could wait...

NASA, only sort-of. ISS is chock full of 5/16, 7/16 and 3/8 inch bolts.

18 mm is not large. It would be a flat bit for wood.

--

Rick

(snip on speedometer units)

I think electronic (digital display) speedometers have a switch that can change the units.

More traditional ones have tiny blue numbers for kph and big white ones for MPH. I have driven in Canada, and sometimes it is hard to see the little numbers.

I believe, though, that on a lot of cars now the electronics is digital with an analog display. The computer that does all the engine ignition calculations also knows the speed, and just sends it out through a DAC.

I believe that in Puerto Rico, that road distances are in km, where speed limits are in MPH. Gasoline is sold in liters, I am not sure about milk.

-- glen

On Tue, 23 Sep 2014 18:18:15 -0500, Robert Wessel Gave us:

Harbor Freight stocks a lot of metrics.

So, BTW, does Sears stores.