prior art?
I believe that there are decimal-denominated versions of the definition of engineer that go back before Neville Shute.
Bob Mansfield, Apple's senior vice president of hardware engineering, has announced his retirement from the company after 13 years in situ, and it seems he's also walking away from tens of millions in unclaimed share options. "Bob has been an instrumental part of our executive team, leading the hardware engineering …
...and shouldn't it be spelled 'nickle' ? And while I'm at it, what's a 'bit' ? I always wondered...
</troll>
But seriously, we English may have had some odd slang for money in primeval times (and still do for large sums, eg monkey = £500), but >mandatory< coin nicknames? Makes me shudder. A currency with no actual denominations embossed on the coins - just nicknames. Wow.
> And while I'm at it, what's a 'bit' ?
It's 1/8th of a Spanish Milled Dollar. Take a big chisel and a hammer and cut up a dollar into 8 bits to make small change. At least that's what you did 300 years ago.
And we call our 25¢ piece a Quarter. Kinda like you lot used to call your 12d coin a Shilling.
> A currency with no actual denominations embossed on the coins - just nicknames.
Our coins have denominations, spelled out in words: one cent, five cents, one dime, quarter dollar, half dollar, one dollar. (These are not nicknames.)
The only one that's arcane is dime. The rest merely require that you be able to read, and do a bit of math. Certainly that's not asking much, but apparently it is for some of you. Maybe you should have paid attention in school.
Well said. Except in England they don't teach us about colonial administrative processes... Ouch!
But yes, you are right. Because US coins have no numerical denominations on them, and all US citizens refer to 'bits', 'dimes', 'nickels' and so on, and because the US dime actually says, rather stupidly, 'dime', I'd assumed all the other coins followed suit.
Sadly, the malaise spreads: the current designs for British small denomination coins no longer say 1, 2, 5, 10, 20, 50 on them either … just One, Two, Five, Ten, Twenty, Fifty. Retrograde. And before people say what's the problem, I say 一, 二, 五, 十, 二十, 五十. It's fairly simple to work it out, but why not simply stick with the conventional symbols that have worked so well for so long?
And when do we get un, dau, pump, deg, ugain, hanner cant?
Is there nobody left on this forum who can still count?
25c is not a nickel. And it is not two dimes. It is a quarter.
And Jim, not to be too pedantic but while a "nickle" might be worn around the neck in the form of a pendant , a nickel is the term used for a north American 5c coin.
I was thinking the exact same thing but chalked it up to the ale, this being Friday and all, and folks either not getting that the quote is "5 bobs" or missing that one bob is 1/20 of a quid which would result in the same error when making an analog of dollars to quid. I didn't see any mention of dimes but two bits has been a quarter in these parts since early colonial days.
> I didn't know they used nickels in Canada and Mexico too...
Canada has a 5¢ coin, same size and shape as a US 5¢ coin, and I believe many Canadians call theirs a nickel as well.
They even call their 10¢ and 25¢ coins dimes and quarters too in my experience. Most of the Caribbean countries coinage is the same as US, and even though I haven't been there, I'd wager they do too.
We do have nickels and dimes in Canada. But we get more creative with the large-denomination coins. When the $1 coin was introduced in the 1980s it immediately became known as the "loonie" because (a) it has a loon on it and (b) we all thought the gov't was nuts. Then in the '90s they added a $2 coin, which led to some naming controversy; ultimately "toonie" was adopted, although I personally supported "doubloon" which is much more clever in my opinion.
Bob Mansfield is a smart guy if he is throwing out the opportunity to get rich and opting for the opportunity to enjoy life and undoubtedly improve the quality of his life.
I had the opportunity to live where I wanted, work my own hours and be remunerated on a per project basis and have never regretted my lifestyle choice.
Money can't buy everything, as no doubt Bob Mansfield realises.
Maybe whoever is lucky enough to take over this silent role can fix two design flaws? Shiny screens and fingerprint attracting touch screens. Neither of these are Apple specific issues but then Apple usually innovates rather than follows the crowd. I for one would find Apple a hard one to resist if their products alone had these features over the competition's shiny, smudgy offerings.
Excerpted from the American Heritage College Dictionary:
nickel: 1. Symbol NI A silvery hard ductile ferro-magnetic metal element used in alloys and in corrosion-resistant surfaces and for electroplating. Atomic number 28 .... 2. A U.S. coin worth five cents, made of a nickel and copper alloy.
dime: 1. A coin of the United States and Canada worth ten cents. .... [ME tenth part < OFr. disme < Lat. decima (pars) tenth (part) < decem ten. ...]
But you all knew that, didn't you! Note that it's spelled 'nickel', _not_ 'nickle'.
David H.
Bob Mansfield sounds like a good person but Apple products are becoming to difficult wo work on and are disposable. You can't change the battery on an iPad or IPod without buying special pentalobe screwdrivers and now this has come to the laptops. MacBooks especially the new retina display models have become the same way. You can;t even change the battery inside without destroying the machine. Waht ever happened to the easily fixable Pismos and Wall Streets PowerBooks. Unfortunately Apple laptops and others are now (No User Serviceable Parts Inside) and Apple will charge a lot to fix them. Hopefully this changes and at least the easy swapping of hard drives, RAM, and batteries comes back. Especially at the price Apple charges for stuff.
I too, like Bob, walked away - 'retired' - from my job a year prior to additional monetary inducements...however, unlike Bob, the amount was closer to $,$$$s than $,$$$,$$$s.
One year later, I laugh at the $.$$$s more. Because I learned something: life under one's
own flag is sweeeeeeeeeet!