As with most of Asimov's books (I've read the majority of all his published fiction), characters tend to be farly shallow and one dimensional. However, character arcs and deep personalities isn't why I love Asimov in general and this book in particular.
Valid, but rarely used, as it's usually just as fast to say "two hundred meters" instead of "two hecto meters".
However, those prefixes have other (non-SI) uses. A hectare is common way of referring to a 100x100 meter area. And a decare is 10 ares, i.e. 0.1 hectare.
I used to be a reseller of this highly specialized navigation software. The licensing was handled via hardware fingerprinting of the harddrive. I'm not 100% sure on how it worked, but it grabbed some raw data off of the boot device, and from that generated a fingerprint. This fingerprint was then sent to the guys who made the software, and they would then send us a license key and a hefty bill. The license key only worked with syatems running off of that particular harddrive. If a customer had a harddrive failure, we had to send them the actual harddrive for them to verify, so they would issue a free key to whichever replacement drive was used.
I did a lot of experimenting with that software. It was linux based and very tweakable, but the licensing part of it was a bit of a mystery. I managed to crack it through some surprisingly simple out-of-the-box thinking, but one limitation I could never figure out how to circumvent was its refusal to generate a fingerprint from virtual drives.
For starters, it only worked with drives registering as /dev/hdX or /dev/sdX. Anything outside of that and it wouldn't generate a fingerprint.
This was especially frustrating when a well-paying customer offered a nice bonus if we could install it on a macbook for him. After a few days of tweaking I managed to install and run it, only to discover that fingerprinting the drive couldn't be done due to the device node being/dev/nvmeSomething. And after avfew more days of hacking I managed to fake that too, and they outright refused to issue a license due to them not wanting to support our unofficial hacks.
Where was I going with this? Oh, right, vmware.. i never managed to get it to run in vmware. We had this other well paying customer who wanted the ability to alt-tab between the software and Windows. Unfortunately, any fingerprinting done from within vmware, regardless how I set up the storage, resulted in a fingerprint file with no data.
Fun fact: the software ui was written in raw xlib. I got to know the owner and lead dev fairly well, and he hinted that the codebase was a complete mess to the point where something as simple as an input dialog for a config option I recommended was A LOT of work.
New guy at my job, polish dude. He seemed decent enough, just a bit.... odd... but most of us were; after all, we were the kind of people who are willing to work on ships on the wrong side of the world for weeks, sometimes months at a time.
I trained him to do the job I did, so he could run opposite of my shift, with some assistance from the chief tech and various others. The rest of the crew were pretty experienced, so it made it easier when he needed help with the more complex stuff. He did reasonably OK for a newhire. Nothing spectacularly good, but nothing spectacularly bad either.
Until the crewing department told us he had been arrested back home, multiple counts of murder, and we were unlikely to have him onboard again, so we needed to train his replacement.
Turned out he was a serial killer who killed people for their properties. He's in prison now, and I'm sure you can google the person. I'm not sure what his actual name was, but we called him Winny. Any poles here who happen to remember the case and could link a news article? This happened roughly 10 years ago.