• (cs) in reply to pointer
    pointer:
    Tah taa!:
    And another interresting thing is, the swedish pint is also larger than the imperial, the swedish horsepower is larger than the american, and our foot is larger than your stoo, but

    But our, ahem stuff ahem, is larger than yours. :P

    Is that what he meant by horsepower?

  • dkdf (unregistered)

    This reminds me of a perhaps apochryphol story from the 70s. Bank in minnesota - CEO teed off about new govt reg requiring extensive printed doc with unreadable verbiage be sent to ever customer.

    CEO has printed on page 23 the following: we doubt that anyone is actually reading this. IF you are, call this number, and we will send you 20$ (a lot of money in the 70s)

  • Dave (unregistered)

    Interestingly I am just finalising a government contract, with only the user Acceptance Test & User Documentation remaining.

    I am having massive difficulty convincing them that all they need is the help files, easily accessible by pressing F1. These help files contain everything necessary from installation to configuraton to fault-finding to usage, etc.

    The problem is that the help fiels are all done in HTML format (using RoboHelp) & use hyperlinks extensively. This works perfectly online, but the printed version is just useless as you can't hyperlink where needed. However, they STILL want that printed version.

    suspect it will never be looked at, and I guess we will just print it anyway, even if not understandable. I think it will only be about 1 metre though.

  • (cs) in reply to Baggy McBagster
    Baggy McBagster:
    The REAL real real WTF is that people are on here trying to argue with pro-metric cranks. You _can't_ argue with them. It goes like this:

    Regular shmoe: Well, what would be the benefits of changing to a new system?

    Metric Man: Why, you grit-sucking xenophobic has-been redneck!!! Can't you see that Metric is MORE PERFECT?

    Regular shmoe: Well, maybe, I guess it might be -- what's the benefit of changing?

    Metric Man: YOU ARE ENSLAVED BY THE LENGTH OF THE FOREARM OF KING HUBERT THE 79TH!!

    Regular shmoe: Er --

    Metric Man: GWAAARRGHHGGHGHGHG!!!

    (Metric Man falls to the ground writhing and twitching and mumbling something about how metres are defined by the speed of light whereas feet are somehow not. Regular shmoe offers to get him a 12oz coffee at the store that's a few yards down the street but somehow it doesn't seem to make Metric Man feel better.)

    (Caffeine infusion effects set in and "Metric Man" recovers ... )

    Metric Man: Count your fingers, dude !

  • (cs) in reply to Cthulhu
    Cthulhu:
    Id like to point out that one thing this 8 meters of documentation rule seemed to achieve was forcing them to print *everything* including the source code, etc.

    What it forced to happen may have been what the rule was supposed to achieve - everything is archived

    And if you look at the periods modern digital archival media last/ are accessible then paper storage of everything is not such a bad idea at all.

  • (cs) in reply to pointer
    pointer:
    Tah taa!:
    And another interresting thing is, the swedish pint is also larger than the imperial, the swedish horsepower is larger than the american, and our foot is larger than your stoo, but

    But our, ahem stuff ahem, is larger than yours. :P

    Yeah, but the swedish ahem stuff is dysfunctional and retired - maybe V-----a would help.

  • (cs) in reply to Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward:
    Can you guys read? It is clearly stated that the story took place in a "Post-Communist European country". Russia/CIS is not considered one of those because, first, it is not European, and second, it is not that post-Communist either. Also, Russians would not be converting to domestic jets because they have never used foreign-mades.

    < SNIP >

    Where is is Russia not European ? Europe extends to (and including the) Ural mountains in Russia. You really need to polish up your geography. This is NOT correct, evn though you think so:

    [image]

    This is a current map of Europe:

    [image]

    Damn, IMHO a lot of you americans are just too ignorant and provincial to keep me from blowing my stack every now and then.

    To the amercians which are not ignorant and provincial: I am sorry if I offended you but I am not sorry about my above statement since it reflects my honest-to-God opinion.

  • (cs) in reply to FredSaw
    FredSaw:
    cklam:
    Who the wet flying fart cares ... and it's moron, not maroon.
    He's quoting Bugs Bunny, you maroon.

    If somebody's already pointed this out, I apologize. I'm reading through the posts and there are a lot to go... I didn't want to finish reading first and then come back to try to find this one to quote it.

    I stand corrected.

    Anyway, I prefer Tom and Jerry.

  • villa (unregistered) in reply to freelancer
    freelancer:
    ZergMortron:
    THE REAL WTF here is.. they used meters. We all know ONLY COMMUNISTS USE THE METRIC SYSTEM BY CHOICE!! And communists == enemy to america.
    HEY! I use meters (I live in Sweden), and I am NOT a commie!

    just ignore him, he's just an american stuck in hid own little world. Everyone except you uses meters and 24 hour time. LIVE WITH IT.

  • Now here's the real WTF... (unregistered) in reply to Dave
    Dave:
    I am having massive difficulty convincing them that all they need is the help files, easily accessible by pressing F1. These help files contain everything necessary from installation to configuraton to fault-finding to usage, etc.

    The problem is that the help fiels are all done in HTML format (using RoboHelp) & use hyperlinks extensively. This works perfectly online, but the printed version is just useless as you can't hyperlink where needed. However, they STILL want that printed version.

    Now this is indeed WTF-worthy. Hopefully they will not believe what you're trying to convince them to believe. Sadly it seems to be a common misconception that extensive linking makes reading documentation easier for the user. Not only it means that the reader needs to divide his attention between multiple sources, it also makes concentrating on the essentials more difficult.

    A good documentation needs to present single, continuous thoughts for the user, not require the user to jump around to be able to follow a thought pattern to its conclusion. Unlike some of us like to believe, paper is still a superior form of conveying written information to masses instead of computer screens. You can witness this yourself by checking the piles of printouts lying on desks in almost every office.

    CAPTCHA: burned - yes, indeed

  • Chris (unregistered) in reply to FredSaw
    FredSaw:
    Not a lawyer:
    If you're American you are stuck with using miles for most large distances.
    In Texas, we don't measure distance in miles. It goes like this:

    Joe Schmoe: How far is your drive to work? Joe Bloe: About 35 minutes.

    In the UK we measure time by pints. "How long have you been in the pub?" .. "about 2 pints".

  • (cs) in reply to cklam
    Metric Man: Count your fingers, dude !
    Yup. Done that. The answer is 8.
  • Paul (unregistered)

    Putting all those crates of bumpf straight into a vast warehouse just reminds me of the very last scene in Raiders of the Lost Ark :)

    No-one reads documentation anyway...

  • symbol shift (unregistered) in reply to deeksy

    The miles are not the same everywhere. In Sweden, a mile is 10 kilometers. It's used quite often for expressing car mileage and large distances between cities.

    Anyway, if the story is true, it may be about Hungary and their aquisition of Gripens.

  • drno (unregistered)

    Heh, few years back my uncle worked on flight simulator for russian MIG fighter jet in another ex-communist Europe country... Before they delivered the simulator to the Air Force, he called me to his company offices to show me the simulator. He also showed me printed documentation for the simulator, it was approx. 1,5 meters, and that was HUGE. Can't imagine 8 meters :)

  • the F (unregistered) in reply to EvanED

    Concerning turning in an essay with the Star Spangled Banner written in the middle without affecting the grade. I've got to share my experience with a teacher that always gave the same grades to "good students" no matter what they turn in. I'm from Finland our school grading system ranges from 4 (failed) to 10 (exellent). In our Finnish language class from from the 7th to the 9th year we had a teacher who always seemed to give the same grades for every assignment. Once I missed handing in an assignment and still got my usual grade 8 for it. After that me and my friend, a grade 9 student, stopped handing in our assignments and still kept getting the same grade. Needles to say we stopped attending the class altogether and I ended up getting 8 for each assignment while my friend got 9 for all of them! I suppose it was easier for the teacher just to keep giving everyone the same grade without checkin what they handed in or if they were even there! On top of all that the teacher in question was supposed to my classes “homeroom teacher” responsible for looking after us, meeting with our parents and whatnot. On my final year at school it turned out that she had no idea I belonged to her class. After three years of meeting with my parents and telling them their son was doing fine and didn’t seem to have any problems… She retired soon afterwards.

  • See (unregistered) in reply to captcha: ewww ???
    captcha: ewww ???:
    akatherder:
    The metric system won't catch on in the US because it's either too specific or too "big" for how we use measurements verbally.

    Hey, where do you want this? a. Oh, set it 1/3m to 2/3m away from the wall. b. About 33-66 cm from the wall. c. Just put it a foot or two from the wall.

    Do people really use decimeter that frequently?

    They taught us the metric system in elementary school, but the only conversion we ever cared about was how to get to feet or inches.

    In europe we'd say... "Oh, put it about half a meter from the wall"

    of course in germany it would be put exactly 500mm from the wall, In Italy it could be anywhere from right next to the wall too the other side of the room, and in france, well their not going to let some foreigner tell them where to put it so it wont be there at all.... :)

    of course

    Haha, I love this one :)

    Reading this I just thought of a nice thing with the metric system, by the way : It's easy to specify the precision you need. See, if I say "half a meter", it will be quite vague, maybe +/- 10cm. But if I say "50 cm", it means I want a precision of around 1cm. And if I say "500 mm", then I want it to be exactly 500 mm. And (well, at least in French) all these measures have the same number of syllables and are equally easy to pronounce, so don't start with "but 500 mm is so awkward compared to 1 7/11 ft !".

    I wonder if it's easy to do so using 34th of an inch or 27th of a foot ?

    As another thought, it seems French speakers don't care as much about the length of their words or phrases... I think it's because French is more fluent (is that the right word ?) than English, how would you pronounce, say, the number "2 384 725" in English ?

  • hognoxious (unregistered) in reply to Will
    Will:
    Doesn't the UK measure highway distances in miles? And beer in pints?
    In the South, yes. Oop North, we drink it by the gallon.

    Where were we, arbitrary requirements. I once wrote a test plan for a program inserting records in a database. The test cases were in groups of insert/amend/delete actions in all the different orders. So, I A D was case one, I D A was case two etc etc.

    Team leader said it wasn't comprehensive enough. So I renumbered it with each individual I A or D as a case. Perfect!

  • Cdn (unregistered) in reply to lusis
    lusis:
    You'd be surprised but I think the US is the only country where we equate liberalism with socialism.

    Nah, that is the way it works in Canada too...

    captcha: smile (about liberals? me thinks not)

  • Anonymous coward (unregistered) in reply to Cdn
    Cdn :
    lusis:
    You'd be surprised but I think the US is the only country where we equate liberalism with socialism.

    Nah, that is the way it works in Canada too...

    captcha: smile (about liberals? me thinks not)

    Except in Québec. Well, The liberals are socialist because all the parties are socialist anyway, but less so than the others as far as I know (I'm not that into Québec politics though, so I may well be wrong).

  • steveOC (unregistered) in reply to WhatTheFaq

    and the next page reads :

    "and so was this one"

    .. followed by "me too"

  • Iain (unregistered)

    This doesn't just happen in post-Communist European countries. It happens in western defence projects all the time. Yes, you're required to produce documentation on everything down to painful levels, and yes, you can guarantee that nobody will ever look at the vast majority of it again.

    Some people's interpretations of MIL-STD-498 make it so; people do indeed still use that (ancient) tome!

  • TonyP (unregistered)

    OMG, this is a VERY VERY GOOD EXAMPLE of how private industry is soooo much better than the public (government) industry is.

  • - (unregistered) in reply to Dave
    Dave:
    Interestingly I am just finalising a government contract, with only the user Acceptance Test & User Documentation remaining.

    I am having massive difficulty convincing them that all they need is the help files, easily accessible by pressing F1. These help files contain everything necessary from installation to configuraton to fault-finding to usage, etc.

    The problem is that the help fiels are all done in HTML format (using RoboHelp) & use hyperlinks extensively. This works perfectly online, but the printed version is just useless as you can't hyperlink where needed. However, they STILL want that printed version.

    suspect it will never be looked at, and I guess we will just print it anyway, even if not understandable. I think it will only be about 1 metre though.

    Just start each "page" with a reference number, and add the reference[1] :-)

  • Emyr (unregistered) in reply to bstorer
    8 meters = 314.96063 inches, or 26.2467192 feet, or 8.74890639 yards, or 0.0397677563 furlongs, or 0.00497096954 miles, or 1.59071025 rods, or 4.37445319 fathoms, or 0.00143988481 leagues, or 78.7401575 hands

    Cubits?

    I drive miles, measure metres and when I say how big something is, I say "About this [insert pair of suitably distanced hands here] big"

    Hence the "half-metre" vs "2 - 3 feet" argument is pointless: you will always say "about this far".

    And it's Metre, not Meter. Meter is an expression of musical notation.

  • Tiago (unregistered) in reply to Emyr

    Metric System Seven Basic Units

    length = metre (m) mass = kilogram (kg) time = second (s) electric current = ampere (A) thermo-dynamic temperature = kelvin (K) amount of substance = mole (mol) luminous intensity = candela (cd)

    From the 7 basic units of the SI other units are derived for a variety of purposes, like hertz, joule, newton, ohm, volt, watt and Celsius.

  • jotrys (unregistered)

    Great Post. Had me laughing out loud!

  • fuzzy peaches (unregistered)

    the military mind is an easy thing to warp.

  • (cs) in reply to ActionMan
    ActionMan:
    Yeah, in Australia the Liberal party is in power

    Ah har! not any more! (Elections on the Saturday just gone stopped the 11.5 year reign of the conservative liberals)

  • Gary Roberts (unregistered)

    Is that where the expression "the whole eight meters" comes from? LOL...

    Great story!

  • lost (unregistered) in reply to Kev

    I was driving in england with a GPS navigator. It kept telling me to 'turn in 300 yards'. It was completely useless until I found the metric setting. Turn in 400 metres - ah, NOW I get where you mean.

    NOTE: Before you tell me my conversion is wrong, the nav system apparently knows the distance and only calls out whole numbers. It doesn't say turn in 1.6 kilometres, or anything like that.

    Totally unrelated but if you are in GErmany, on the autobahn, a good game to play with your nav system is 'how far away will it warn me of my exit'. You see the systems warn of an exit at a set time before the exit, then convert that to distance based on your current speed. At 100 kmh, it's about 400 m, 150 kmh, 600. At over 200 kmh, you can get it up to 800 m, but I never managed to get the warning 'exit in 1 km'. Should have gone faster :)

  • Brett (unregistered) in reply to ZergMortron

    You're kidding, right? We're one of the few countries in the WORLD that do not use the metric system.

    I gotta' believe you're being sarcastic.

  • Ilya Ehrenburg (unregistered)

    Most certainly he was. But it's always fun to spark off one of these vitriolic 'stupid americans' vs. 'stupid everybody else' debates :) I only wish I could believe more wouldn't take it seriously. But whichever system one uses, if it doesn't contain a british pint, it's useless.

  • ELIZA (unregistered) in reply to Henry
    Henry:
    freelancer:
    ZergMortron:
    THE REAL WTF here is.. they used meters. We all know ONLY COMMUNISTS USE THE METRIC SYSTEM BY CHOICE!! And communists == enemy to america.
    HEY! I use meters (I live in Sweden), and I am NOT a commie!

    Sweden is very nice. I like Swedes. My granddad was born in Sweden. However we are pretty sure it has at least a pinko socialist government and media if not right out blatant commie.

    http://stefanolsson.nu/2006/12/02/swedish-television-honours-castro/

    I believe you are thinking of Cuba: Sweden is the one with what I believe are referred to as "Statist Libertarian" principles, like those of Adam Smith and John Keynes, in which the government is expected to clean up the mess that is left behind by capitalism, such as with workplace safety standards and nationalised healthcare (and US healthcare, with some exceptions such as the Veterans Administration, has sufficient fodder to have a special site for it like health.thedailywtf.com, especially once you look at health insurance, such as where they will cover a $30 000 amputation but not a series of $150 podiatry visits that would have made it unnecessary; I can see the title now, "First, Do More Harm"). In some areas, of course, such as their policy on recreational pharmaceuticals, Sweden is even more extremist than, and as it happens in the same direction as, the United States.

  • Stewie (unregistered) in reply to AGould

    Yes... we can't really make up our mind here... chicken is listed as on sale by the pound, but when you see the price on the package it is listed per kilogram.

  • (cs) in reply to TravisO
    TravisO:
    While not as excessive, I worked at a shop and each app's documentation binder had the entire source code and SQL tables printed up.

    Why, I have no idea, I mean if the app god lost, why would you retype the entire app, that's what backups are for.

    Hmm, the app God lost? Well, I think that if the almighty God lost it, it really should have been lost forever. If you meant that God lost in by accident, then I don't see how that could be with his almightiness and all.

  • Someone (unregistered) in reply to ewhac

    Was the thinking of the developers documented along each step of the way - You idiot! Stupid asshole. Stay away from software, please. You don't know anything about it. Idiots like you make the life of software developers miserable. Do you really think it is even possible or it makes sense to "document the thinking"? Kill yourself, please. Stupid.

  • joetheprogrammer (unregistered) in reply to akatherder
    USA is socialist
    it is now...
  • eric bloedow (unregistered)

    this reminds me of a quote on a book: the amount of paperwork required to get an Air Force plane ready to take off equals the weight of the airplane!

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