Anyone have any ideas on this one.....

[Coos Haak]

Op Wed, 12 Sep 2007 20:22:44 +0000 schreef Richard Heathfield:

Al Balmer said:



And I wish we would go back to Imperial weights and measures. Life in
Britain is much more confusing than it needs to be. The last time I
went to the grocer, I had to ask for 0.68038856 kilograms of carrots,
2.2679619 kilograms of spuds, and 1.8927059 pints of milk.

That's the trouble with these Europeans. Give them 25.4 millimetres and
they'll take 1.1429982 metres.

<OT>
You mean three feet and nine inches? That's exactly 1143 mm. The value of
an inch has been expressed in SI units for a long time now ;-) Like the
Dutch proverb: You don't have a foot to stand on.
</OT>

 

[Ian Collins]

Al Balmer said:



And I wish we would go back to Imperial weights and measures. Life in
Britain is much more confusing than it needs to be. The last time I
went to the grocer, I had to ask for 0.68038856 kilograms of carrots,
2.2679619 kilograms of spuds, and 1.8927059 pints of milk.

That's the trouble with these Europeans. Give them 25.4 millimetres and
they'll take 1.1429982 metres.

Shouldn't that be 1,609.344 metres?

 

[Mark McIntyre]

On Tue, 11 Sep 2007 20:58:08 +0000 (UTC), in comp.lang.c ,

Usually, A = 80%, B = 75%, C = 65%, D = 55%,

This is all highly implementation specific. Here in the UK they don't
miss out E (I know, I needed two of them at A level to get into
Oxford...) and the percent scores are variable.

Plus - what does it hav to do with C?

--
Mark McIntyre

"Debugging is twice as hard as writing the code in the first place.
Therefore, if you write the code as cleverly as possible, you are,
by definition, not smart enough to debug it."
--Brian Kernighan

 

[Al Balmer]

Al Balmer said:



And I wish we would go back to Imperial weights and measures. Life in
Britain is much more confusing than it needs to be. The last time I
went to the grocer, I had to ask for 0.68038856 kilograms of carrots,
2.2679619 kilograms of spuds, and 1.8927059 pints of milk.

We do it with old-fashioned American measure on the package, with
metric in fine print. The grocers wouldn't like the change, because it
would reduce the number of ways they can measure things in order to
circumvent the unit pricing regulations. I don't know if you have
that. In most places, items are supposed to be marked with both total
price and price per unit, with the idea that consumers can more easily
compare prices between brands and sizes.

This has resulted in things like three bags of chips, one marked price
per pound, another price per ounce, and the third price per each.

 

[Richard Heathfield]

Ian Collins said:

Shouldn't that be 1,609.344 metres?

You refer to a modern corruption of the original adage.

I did, however, say "pints" where I intended to say "litres".

 

[Charlie Gordon]

Richard Heathfield wrote:
[...]
You'd give an A+ for that? I'd give a C, tops.

I am not that familiar with the letter-grade system.
On a scale of 1 to 10 (10 being the highest score), I would give the
program, if it was turned in as posted, at most a 5.
For starters, the program does not meet the stated requirements.

Any decent scale for grading C programming assignment should be 0
based, don't you think ?

Well, you could think of the scale as running from 0 to 10. The first
point is awarded for turning in a paper with your name on top.

Yes, but some students don't even turn in anything, and others loose that
point by copying the rest of the assignment from another student or the
Internet. Zero sounds good for complete failure, even by coca cola
standards.

 

[Ben Bacarisse]

"Keith Thompson" <[email protected]> a écrit dans le message de (e-mail address removed)...
Richard Heathfield wrote:
[...]
You'd give an A+ for that? I'd give a C, tops.

I am not that familiar with the letter-grade system.
On a scale of 1 to 10 (10 being the highest score), I would give the
program, if it was turned in as posted, at most a 5.
For starters, the program does not meet the stated requirements.

Any decent scale for grading C programming assignment should be 0
based, don't you think ?

Well, you could think of the scale as running from 0 to 10. The first
point is awarded for turning in a paper with your name on top.

Yes, but some students don't even turn in anything, and others loose that
point by copying the rest of the assignment from another student or the
Internet. Zero sounds good for complete failure, even by coca cola
standards.

Most marking schemes I've see include the equivalent of NaN for
missing or copied assignments. It usually obeys similar arithmetic
laws and is consequently much feared.

 

[CBFalconer]

Ian Collins said:

You refer to a modern corruption of the original adage.

I did, however, say "pints" where I intended to say "litres".

Why are you buying milk in US quarts. I would have thought
Imperial quarts would be more natural for you.

 

[Richard Bos]

Does this body look dead to you? No? Then no.

I do wish that the US would follow the UK (and most of the rest of the
world) and go metric.[/QUOTE]

You're a couple of days late. The UK is officiously going back to
playing the empire: <http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/6988521.stm>.

Richard

 

[Richard Heathfield]

Richard Bos said:

The UK is officiously going back to
playing the empire: <http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/6988521.stm>.

It's called "freedom of expression". If I want to measure in yards
instead of metres, I will do so. If you want to measure in metres
instead of yards, feel free! So long as neither of us is hurting others
by our choice of yardstick (or, if you prefer, 0.9144metrestick), who
cares? And if someone /is/ hurt by my choosing to go for a six mile
walk rather than a 9656.064 metre walk, then I really do think they
need to get themselves into town to pay a quick visit to the life shop.

 

[jaysome]

Richard Bos said:



It's called "freedom of expression". If I want to measure in yards
instead of metres, I will do so. If you want to measure in metres
instead of yards, feel free! So long as neither of us is hurting others
by our choice of yardstick (or, if you prefer, 0.9144metrestick), who
cares? And if someone /is/ hurt by my choosing to go for a six mile
walk rather than a 9656.064 metre walk, then I really do think they
need to get themselves into town to pay a quick visit to the life shop.

Some people, arguably mainly those who classify themselves as
navigators (who like to think in terms of nautical miles), may
disagree with this assertion. In their world, six miles is exactly
11112 meters.

 

[Charlie Gordon]

Richard Bos said:



It's called "freedom of expression". If I want to measure in yards
instead of metres, I will do so. If you want to measure in metres
instead of yards, feel free! So long as neither of us is hurting others
by our choice of yardstick (or, if you prefer, 0.9144metrestick), who
cares? And if someone /is/ hurt by my choosing to go for a six mile
walk rather than a 9656.064 metre walk, then I really do think they
need to get themselves into town to pay a quick visit to the life shop.

I think it is just bad marketing. They should have used the beer argument:
with metric pints (0.5 litre) you get 10% more beer !

 

[Richard Bos]

I think it is just bad marketing. They should have used the beer argument:
with metric pints (0.5 litre) you get 10% more beer !

The UK government may be innumerate, but it's not _that_ innumerate. A
pint is 13.5% larger than half a litre.

Richard








(No, what you were thinking of is not a pint, regardless of what the
even worse innumerates on the other side of the pond call it.)

 

[Charlie Gordon]

The UK government may be innumerate, but it's not _that_ innumerate. A
pint is 13.5% larger than half a litre.

Of course, my mistake, US pints are the smaller ones.

(No, what you were thinking of is not a pint, regardless of what the
even worse innumerates on the other side of the pond call it.)

Well the innumeracy is indeed abysmal:
http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/pint

pint comes from old French pinte, still used in today's French bars for 0.5
litre servings of beer.

 

[Joachim Schmitz]

pint comes from old French pinte, still used in today's French bars for
0.5 litre servings of beer.

And in Germany Pinte is a colloquial word for the bar itself...

 

[Mark McIntyre]

I think it is just bad marketing. They should have used the beer argument:
with metric pints (0.5 litre) you get 10% more beer !

Experience suggests that you'll get 10% more quantity for 15% more
money.....
--
Mark McIntyre

"Debugging is twice as hard as writing the code in the first place.
Therefore, if you write the code as cleverly as possible, you are,
by definition, not smart enough to debug it."
--Brian Kernighan

 

[Charlie Gordon]

Experience suggests that you'll get 10% more quantity for 15% more
money.....

Fair competition on a free market produces the opposite.

The beer and pub market is much more efficient than say the market for PC's
operating systems ;-)

 

[Richard Bos]

Fair competition on a free market

....is a contradiction in terms. Otherwise, why is Microsoft Windows so
succesful? When it entered the market, that market was more free than it
has been since.

Richard

 

[Charlie Gordon]

...is a contradiction in terms. Otherwise, why is Microsoft Windows so
succesful? When it entered the market, that market was more free than it
has been since.

Where do you see a contradiction ?
The Microsoft story only proves that free markets do not imply fair
competition.
Regulators are supposed to stop unfair competition, but they failed in this
case.
Pubs compete fairly for the most part, and beer manufacturers too.

 

[Richard Bos]

Where do you see a contradiction ?
The Microsoft story only proves that free markets do not imply fair
competition.
Regulators are supposed to stop unfair competition, but they failed in this
case.

If regulators stop unfair competition, the market is /ipso facto/ not
free. If regulators don't stop unfair competition, the competition isn't
fair. Usually, you have both an imperfectly free market _and_
imperfectly fair competition.

Pubs compete fairly for the most part, and beer manufacturers too.

*Snigger* Go tell that to everybody whose favourite pub was turned into
a Wetherstone's.

Richard