I lived through the conversion as a kid, really it wasn't hard, school work (all those conversions, all that manual long division,) went away and got easier. We had dual speed limits up for 4-5 years.

in practice when you switch to metric you switch to natural units - a pound is about half a kilo a pint about half a litre (american pints are smaller) - you don't buy a quart of milk you just buy a litre, you go to the butcher and you ask her to cut you half a kilo of meat, no one asks for 0.23kg, that's silly

In the transition you use some useful equivalences: 2 inches are ~ 5cm - 3 yards ~ 1m, 30miles=50km 50miles=80km 60miles=100km (speed limits are easy unless for some weird reason you've chosen to use numbers that end in 5 rather than 0) 2pints ~= 1l (in the US) 1pint=600mL(in the UK, but half a litre will do for lots of day to day stuff), 2lb ~ 1kg

"cups" are am interesting issue: cups in the UK and US are different by about 20% (because the pints are different) so recipes sometime don't work well between them today, the metric cup used by everyone else is an intermediate size, as a result european recipes tend to work slightly better in the UK and US

as far as fluid ozs are concerned they're just such a mess they're best avoided

that's silly - he said that cm are not used - the basic epiphany you have to have is "a saw cut is about 1mm wide" after they you realise that most carpentry is easily done just in mm

firstly everywhere else on the planet calls it a "4x2" 'merkins are weird. As others have pointed out it's not really 4x2 anyway, but we buy 100x50s quite happily, 100mm is 4 inches to about 1% - it's exactly the same wood made on the same machine

it's certainly different but not revolutionary, I worked on a core that did this 15 years ago (not transmeta) it's a hard problem we didn't make it to market, transmeta floundered - what I think they're doing here is the instruction rescheduling in software, something that's usually done by lengthening the pipe in an OoO machine - it means they can do tighter/faster branches and they can pack instructions in memory aligned appropriately to feed the various functional units more easily - My guess from reading this article is is that it probably has an LIW mode where they turn off the interlocks when running scheduled code.

Of course all this could be done by a good compiler scheduler (actually could be done better with a compiler that knows how many of each functional unit type are present during the code generation phase) the resulting code would likely suck on other CPUs but would still be portable.

Then again if they're aiming at the Android market maybe what;s going on is that they've hacked their own JVM and it's doing JIT on the metal

I've always thought that what happened in NZ sort of just proves human nature (not pakeha or Maori, just humans) - the Maori showed up with well developed cultural systems for managing fisheries, having island hopped through the Pacific for maybe 1000 years before they came to NZ - what they didn't have was rules, or experience managing moa, or forestry and as a result burned a lot of it down to get at those tasty moa - basically the same thing the Europeans would do when showing up somewhere new - exploit it like crazy - I'm sure if the moa had lasted longer, maybe if NZ was a bit bigger, people would have figured out how to manage moa - numbers would get low, a tapu would be proclaimed, after a while it would be lifted and the moa population would have stablised ..... by the time people figured it out it was probably too late

here's a link to a Sparkfun blog article on the "pit/valley of despair" that small hardware companies face: https://www.sparkfun.com/categories/20

Basically you make a few things by hand for yourself, and your friends, or you go to China and Manufacture (with a capital "M") there's nothing in between the two that's economical, though I do think that's changing with the arrival of cheap pick and place machines (another fallout from the 3D printer revolution)

On my office work bench:

Binocular microscope
soldering station
solder
flxes
large magnifying glass with light ring
project boxes full of SMD parts
tweezers
side cutters (dikes in the US)
scrap wire

storage scope/logic analyzer
power supply

In the other room:

cheap chinese reflow oven
cheap chinese stencil jig
(and if I can finally persuade my wife) cheap chinese pick and place ,machine

At this point I have to point out that almost all my best tools these days are cheap and from China, mostly bought off of aliexpress at prices maybe 10% of what I used to spend buying from the US - stuff I'd never ever have considered buying for myself 2-3 years ago. In this case being cheap and from China doesn't mean low quality or non-functional, quite the opposite.

What's interesting is that our Prime Minister effectively admitted in parliament (by refusing to answer in a situation where "no" would have been a far better answer for him and one he would have given had it been true)just 2 days ago that the GCSB (or NSA wanna bes) have been funded by the US to the tune of millions of dollars.

So what did they buy? probably a Prism to put in our fibre access to the rest of the world. And I guess enough of a back channel to send it all to the US. I can see now why the second pacific fibre was nobbled because they wouldn't accept the use of Chinese infrastructure - wouldn't do to have some other country's backdoors in the routers rather than the US's.

yes truly - for example I can't get the Daily Show here (in NZ) on cable or satellite ... but it's region blocked so I can't play it on their web site either - apparently the US thinks some things are just too funny, or maybe too close to the bone, for us to see

I did something similar (in New Zealand in the early 70s) except we used perforated cards for a Fortran subset. Cards were taken to a local bank and run on the machine that processed/reconciled cheques after the night shift was done

since when did "hacked" mean "took a copy off" - come on if they had hacked the building plans they'd have added secret tunnels or something, at the very least installed the doors with the hinges on the outside

I used jmce for simulation - 8051s are all different enough that chances are you'll have to hack on you simulator (and configure sdcc) to match the memory layout and dptr/p2 weirdness of your particular variant