Viewer that uses feet and inches

I wonder if any opensource programmers will ever make a viewer that allows one to use feet and inches and such to build in.

Why not furlongs, chains, shaftments, spans, cubits, and stadia while you're at it?

And leagues!

Those units aren't in constant use by the millions of people, at least not to my knowledge. Feet and inches are.

There's at least a third of a billiion people who haven't designed things using those units their whole lives, but who have used feet and inches essentially exclusively throughout their lives, and will in all probablility continue to do so until they die. When these milllions of people want to model things around them, the tape measure they have around uses feet and inches, but not chains or spans or cubits. The T-squares at the workplace of millions of people involved in assembling have feet and inches on them and no other units but feet and inches. There are millions of folks with yard sticks that are yard sticks. There are, I suspect, not very many furlong sticks. There are many building plans in feet and inches, not the little used units you mentioned. So there would probably not be as much demand for such little used units.

In other words, feet and inches are a very widely used set of units, currently in broad use by a large segment of the world's population, and the units you mentioned aren't. That's why not.

The beauty about changing from feet and inches to the meters is that you are changing from a nonsensical hodge-podge of measuring units to a system of elegance, consistency and and simplicity. The metric system makes so much more sense. Even someone whose brain has been addled by feet and inches, pounds and ounces, can master meters and grams in a matter of minutes.

It may just be better to keep to one standard of measurements so an understanding is maintained throughout the metaverse. For instance, if you buy a build from an imperial measure builder there would be confusion as to if it would fit a metric sized parcel.
Collaborations would become an issue, all parties would have to have the same standard.

Does anyone remember the Mars lander fiasco of a few years ago? I don't know the details but a lander crashed because only some of the team were using feet and inches. They have standardised on metric nowadays at NASA.

The program I use at work has a nice way of doing units. You set your default units, which we set to inches, so that we can actually do business with our customers. In the input fields, if we want to use feet and inches, we can enter "6ft + 2in" and the program converts that to inches. If we want to use metric units, we can enter ".5m" and it converts a half meter to inches. I suspect I'm the only who knows that the program can do that. I think I'm the only one that read the manual. It allows us to do math in the input fields, so if we have a current value of, say, 2.3778 showing, and want to add 1.234 to that, we can just put "+1.234" on the end of the current value and it will add them together. It will even handle "2ft + 3.6in + 4.7cm".

I don't know of any open source viewers that do this and I'm not sure why anyone would develop one, we have a simple standard for measurements here. The UK has this nonsnese of mixed imperial and metric unitls around, you get used to it but standing around working out how many millimetres are in an inch becomes tedious real quick.

As I recall back in the 70's there was a big push to convert to metric in the US. I was all for it. It's so much easier to multiply and divide things by ten, but people screamed the sky is falling. About the only legacies of that push are the 2 liter soft drink bottles in our stores.
I for one am happy with the meters in SL. I couldn't imagine trying to do the math with inches and yards now.

This is just plain silly.

The metric system that SL is based on all centers around a base 10 system. Move the decimal point around and you're converting from one unit to another. Can't do that with imperial units.

But it's all moot anyway. None of the sizes in SL match anything else. They should probably rename the standard unit of measure a "gridblock" and have done with it. Just let me multiply and divide by 10 in peace.

Screw iddly piddly feet and inches.

I want a virtual world where we measure things in light-years.

I WANT A 10 LIGHT-YEAR MEGAPRIM AND I WANT IT NOW!!!

Well, since it's all inside our computers, I think it should be exclusively hexadecimal units. Once the robots take over, that is all there will be anyway! Power to the powers of two!

Light years ..... miniscule. Gigaparsecs! There's areal unit for you.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parsec#Megaparsecs_and_gigaparsecs

It might not be so bad if you borrowed a RL hack and used a 30 cm "metric foot", taking some of the mess out of conversions.

I prefer not to think of the length units as "meters" anyway. The units of mass are officially Lindograms, right? So the "m" of length isn't an abbreviation at all; it's just Our Fearless Leader's first name. (And it's been around for ages, proving the amazing prescience of the founder Lindens.)

I work with tinies I like to work with smaller then is minimum here...
I want to work with prim molecular measurements that require prim microscope
so there!

Yep but if someone want to put themselves throught the fun of using imperial measurements, it's their choice i guess, if ythere are enough people wanting it someone will program a 3rd party viewer I guess, but don't expect everyone else to start making stuff in imperial for you
Yes I checked the size of a 1m linden cube with a tape measure and it's size definately varies, it measures differently on my 22 " monitor and 19" monitor

In UK the building and engineering sectors have been metric for ages - don't know if that's the same in USA. So it's fitting that our in-world building is metric too. Anyway, in SL we use the Linden metre, which is only about 85% of the RL metre!

United States population: 303,824,646 (July 2008 est.) https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/print/us.html

United Kingdom population: 60,943,912 (July 2008 est.) https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/geos/uk.html

Liberia population: 3,334,587 (July 2008 est.)
https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/print/li.html

Myanmar population: 47,758,181
https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/print/bm.html

Total: 415,861,326

Global population: 6,672,655,719 (http://www.census.gov/main/www/popclock.html)

Percentage of global population using the Imperial or Standard measuring system (roughly): 6.23

You can divide a unit of length by any fraction you want to. In the aerospace industry in the USA we use decimal inches; English units, but all base 10. We rarely use feet, never use yards, and hardly ever have a need to convert between them. So we're always moving the decimal around too, rarely needing to divide by 12 or 3.



That's totally true. People who grew up with the metric system are just as disadvantaged in SL as those of us who use the English system, in that none of us are inherently familiar with the length.

Calling the SL unit a "meter" can be sort of unfortunate and frustrating, but it's appropriate compared to how the meter was originally derived, by taking the world we live in and dividing it into parts. The SL meter is 1/256 of the side of a region, where the RL meter was originally 1/10,000,000 of a quadrant of one of Earth's longitudinal lines. So it's a nice way to try to remind us that these aren't just servers in San Francisco; it's land!

If we go with Suezanne's suggestion, we'd probably just need to use the length of Philip Linden's avatar's foot as the "foot," or, even better, the average length of a noob's prim attachment.

Eh, math is math. I deal with feet, tenths of feet, inches, meters, miles and kilometers on a daily basis along with degrees minutes and seconds coupled with degrees and decimal degrees. If you can read an analog clock, you can do math and thus can handle feet and inches. Otherwise, the common store clerk who deals in pennies, nickels dimes and quarters is a far better mathematician. If you can not handle math, stick with the metric system so you don't have to.

But I do agree with the point that the scale SL uses is pretty arbitrary considering the average AV height is 2 meters and a cubit. (That's just short of 14 hands tall if anyone is wondering)

If I remember correctly, the USA is the only country that doesnt use Metric.

The only numbers I am concerned with in SL are $L's and finding ways to spend them.

I'm not sure if you think that supports the characterization of the size of the inch unit unit using world as big, or in broad use, or not. I'd say it does.

I'd just been thinking that the machines we use at work are manufactured in areas that use the metric system, but they take the trouble of adding a choice of units; the machines can be set to use inches on the displays, which is what we do, since that means the machines are set in the same unit system that customers order things in, which is feet and inches. We essentially ever get orders in metric units. The percentage of orders we receive in metric units is mjuch less than 6 percent; it's more like .00001 percent, or zero.

Why would the manufacturers of these devices have a choice of units? I think it has to do with the desire to business with people that actually exist, in the present, real world, rather than only wanting to do business with them after they convert to metric, which in the real world means not at all.

The unit we get orders in other than feet and inches is the point, the 1/72 of an inch unit associated with typesetting. I've explained what a point is to the order takers many times. For some reason, telling them that the point is a seventy-second of an inch doesn't make them easily able to think of dimensions in points. The reason the customers order things in points is because it's the default unit, and perhaps the only unit, for font sizes in their word processing programs. I doubt many of them could could convert their point sizes to inches using a pencil and a piece of paper. When they place their order in points, the order takers either just record it, or they come to me to find out what it means.

Wondering if an open source programmer might create a viewer that allows entering appropriate number fields in an alternate unit system is of course not at all a claim that inches and feet are better than the metric system, or a call for the abolition of the metric system, as a number of the responses here seem to suggest.

Malachi's comment about spans, cubits, etc. strikes me a snotty, condescending remark, designed to amuse by making me look like an idiot, but now that I think about it, I've changed my mind. A flexible unit viewer, with option for entering numbers in all the units he mentioned, plus more, would be quite interesting. I bet a flexible units viewer would be well received.

Ah come on Suezanne. I buy food and cook in Imperial, and yes I think in Imperial RL but a unit is a unit is a unit. A metre isn't representational of a metre on here and feet would be fiddly. A yard is practically a metre in something not representational. What's the problem?