Re: The price of cheese
 

There's no hope for the UK though, with the long arm of the EU now being fully extended thanks to a gutless government....

Re: The price of cheese
 

'Mutter, BOM, Mutter, Units of Measure, Mutter, Friggin ERP is screwed up, Mutter, Friggin Engineers who can't configure BoM's, etc etc.'

How did we get from the price of cheese to the joys of MRP and ERP?:rofl:

Re: The price of cheese
 

<explodes Canadian cheese>

milk

bacterial culture

preserving chemicals

expanding agent so it blasts out of aerosol can properly

Re: The price of cheese
 

In truth I expect both systems to be used here forever. Most of the computer systems I work on belong to US companies (I would say "in the US" but who knows with computers) and they use a mixture of measures. My beef is only with people who try to bring metric measures into everyday conversation.

Re: The price of cheese
 

Now getting back to cheese and chemicals....

http://www.oldfash.com/oldfash/produ...sol+cheese.asp

Re: The price of cheese
 

The construction industry's likely to stay imperial for the forseeable - the requirement to be backwards-compatible with existing buildings is too important to overlook for the sake of going metric. In the UK the shops get over this by selling sheet materials and lumber in "nominal" sizes, so that a sheet of plywood or drywall at nominal 2400 x 1200mm is actually 8' x 4', and 100 x 50 lumber is your standard 2x4 (which isn't 2" x 4" anyway, of course, unless you're buying unplaned rough-sawn lumber).

I was brought up knowing both - I can vaguely remember maths lessons involving rods and chains, pounds and ounces, shillings and pence (this was mid-1970s, post-currency-decimalisation, so must have been an out-of-touch maths teacher with an out-of-date textbook...). I've never had a problem converting most things in my head, but I use different systems in my head for different things:

• height & weight are in imperial (actually, weight is usually in St/lb, so I have to multiply by 14 to get pounds before converting to kg)
• construction stuff is in imperial (because it already is)
• but curiously, though nails & screws are imperial, nuts & bolts are metric. I still convert back to M8, M10, M12 etc when confronted with 3/8" bolts
• paper stock is gsm. I can't get my head around pound-weight per ream of uncut stock.
• fuel is in litres, but consumption in (imperial rather than US) mpg
• highway distances are now in km - I no longer think in terms of miles except when calculating fuel consumption
• most food is in kg, but fruit is probably more often than not in lb (except, of course, that jam etc is sold in odd numbers of grammes, that are really whole numbers of pounds)
• milk is in litres but beer is in pints (except when it comes in bottles, in which case a bottle is the unit of measure and I don't know or care how much a bottle holds beyond 'not nearly a pint')

...and so it goes on, more exceptions than rules, really!

Re: The price of cheese
 

I vaguely remember that stuff being mentioned in class but I never expected to use rods and chains. Now we're looking at buying or leasing some more and and it'll need fencing. Fence is unexpectedly offered in rods.

Re: The price of cheese
 

isn't a rod the same as a pole or perch? I can only really relate to a cricket pitch - one chain (22 yards) = 4 rods.... I think.

That makes a furlong (220 yards) 10 chains - about the only multiple of 10 in the imperial system, as far as I can see.

Which reminds me of a silly question, somewhat pertinent since the Olympics start tomorrow: what standard athletics event is closest in distance to one mile?



















A: it's the 4x400m relay, and not the 1500m as most would assume.

Re: The price of cheese
 

Ah see but the BoM calls for 1% milk but we're actually using 2% so bloody purchasing went and bought the wrong thing, then the unit of measure for bacteria was grams but someone entered it as kilogrammes so we have 135 years of inventory on hand. Plus of course sales promised the cheese to the customer in 5 days time and it takes 30 days to get the expanding agent in so of course we're going to fail.

Manufacturing. It's such fun!

Re: The price of cheese
 

Goin and ask them for x number of rods and some of the flat long straight bits to connect it all together with.

You'll look:

a) urbanite
b) immigrant (queue xenophobic rant from the inbred help)
c) a total dick but it would be funny as heck.

R.

Re: The price of cheese
 

It is.

The most useful bit of programming I done was for a tin can factory. We were able to automate the order processing based on sensors on the production line and have the rolls of material arrive JIT without any human intervention (granted a can is only a half dozen components from two suppliers but this was 20 years ago). It was exciting to see computers do something vaguely useful. The can company was then bought out by a US conglomerate who flew in a team to convert the factory to their card index methodology and I went back to fiddling with systems that don't do very much really.

Re: The price of cheese
 

Yes, I must admit I thought you did stuff with banking as opposed to something useful like manufacturing. If you'd confessed to being the 'brains' behind an ERP system I rather think I'd go off you. ;)