Anybody interested in this issue should look at http://www.metric.org.uk/
It gives a lot of information about how stupid the imperial system is in general, and in particular in its implementation in Britain.

It's very hard to feel a fraction of a degree celcius. It's rare enough that you care, that the occasion you do, using a fraction isn't a big deal.

"Why not 10 or 1000? "

10 or 1000 would work. But humans are used to doing a lot with the 100 scale.

"Why water?"

Because water is important. Its the the cause of a lot of weather: rain, snow etc. It's the basis of the kilogram (a decilitre of water).

Just because you switch to metric doesn't mean you have to re-round all your products. If it's a 3.4 litre container, or dual-labelled, its not a problem. In metric countries, lots of things are in odd units. 375ml cans of coke for example. It doesn't matter.

I don't think many eyes cared to look at the grotesque internals of bash. I've glanced at it before, and it aint pretty.

You're right, but on the other hand, putting executable code in environment variables always was asking for trouble, web or no web.

Just go to a prompt and type the following command: /bin/rm -rf /

The whole idea that any and every environment variable can contain runnable code which would automatically be loaded was pure insanity on somebody's part.

Well, the basic idea of bash, sh, or a unix shell is rather crufty. /bin/sh was already crufty what with its weird quoting rules and so forth before bash added all its extensions.

Nobody's really invented something yet as just damned convenient as /bin/sh, but I wish they would.

All that needs to line up is that there be cgi based bash scripts, which admittedly not everyone has, but plenty of people (for some strange reason) do have. You are underplaying this.

Even if they fix the basic bug, which is that functions are exported as environment variables, but the function can be trailed with extra commands, the whole idea seems extremely dangerous to me. What if you define a function called ls or cp or some other common command? It's pretty likely something will call it, and the whole problem is back in play.

The bigger problem to me seems to be that cgi scripts export user parameters to environment variables before calling bash. I mean, bash itself as a cgi web handler seems incredibly dangerous already. Too powerful for this application. But to then have unvetted user defined environment variables? This is insane. There's plenty of blame to go around here.

The smartphone market has rapidly gone from 128MB RAM devices to (at least) 1GB devices. It's no wonder that earlier devices suffered a bit under later OSes. But I think this phenomenon has passed. Now new OSes don't really slow down. I don't see anything bad with my iPhone 5 and IOS8.

Yeah, it got a few years of updates. Apple made the mistake of only giving it 256M of RAM so it couldn't get any more updates. That was a mistake, but having made the mistake I can't blame Apple for not doing the impossible. They've been generous with the iPad 2 though.

I served papers on someone by email when I couldn't do it in person. This isn't particularly surprising.

Well... in most circumstances the GPU will only help graphics related performance. That's only impressive when you wanted better graphics performance, and not general performance. You can't offload anything onto the GPU. Only certain specific types of things, and certain math.

Anyway, this whole article is premature. The benchmarks may not even be iPhone 6, they may be spoofed. They are only one benchmark. Let's wait see what real analysis reveals. Whatever the answer I doubt it will hurt sales.