Viewer that uses feet and inches

Modifying the building editor to display size and position values in alternate unitsi and to allow entering numbers in different units is not a big programming task.

Evaluating simple expressions is such an easy programming task that even I've done it, in more than one language, in postfix and infix.

Hmm one of the girls can do that survey and calculation thanks

yea tell that to NASA!

i'm curious why the U.S actually used the inches and ft method?? does anyone know why?

I have 2 tape measures at work, one with both metric and imperial and one with just metric, I used to like the dual system one, but it's now been neglected in the depths of the toolbox for a couple of years now with my imperial spanners which I can't reason why I own since the last car in my garage I used them for was made in 1976.
Perhaps we could even have imperial currency too, 16 Linden shillings = 1 Linden Farthing, 12 Linden Farthings = 1 Linden Penny, 42 Linden Penny's = a Linden Pound
Hmm When are we going to get metric time?
Though 4 Linden days = 1 RL Day I think at the moment, but that could change depending on whose sim you're in

Those tapes are cruel! No matter how I need to measure, there seems to be a guarantee built in that the units I want to use, to leave an inconspicuous tick mark along the edge of something, will be on the wrong side.

We've had vaguely related problems at work with rulers that have dimensions marked in opposite idirections on opposing sides. Near the ends, it's not a problem, but near the middle, where the values are close to each other, people get confused and read the wrong number.

I just got back from the drugstore, and stopped to see if they had a metric tape measure. In both the sewing section and the hardware section, the units were inches and feet only.

I'd imagine the issue comes down to simplicity from the programmer's point of view -- the decimal coordination and dimension system is very easy to implement, and to take input from. For the feet/inches you'd likely need both a different UI widget to display the dimensions (so it can handle the ' and '' combined in the field, as otherwise what's currently one field would need to be split into two) ... and then also a parser that takes numbers entered in that manner and converts them into metric system used under the hood. Not to mention there's extra can of worms that's scripts -- if the scripts are still measuring things in decimal system, it can be confusing for people who have their viewer set to feet/inches but are given weird numbers when their script measures that 3' cube...

Because we're lame.

In the border states like Arizona, many road signs are in kilometers and miles, both. Think how much money it would cost to make new road signs for every single road in the US. The mind boggles, esp considering that we tend to pay $500 for hammers and toilet seats with our tax dollars. Precious metals like gold, silver, copper, etc are still traded in ounces and pounds in the commodities market. I can't see us moving to metric any time soon, although I wish we would. The Standard system is outmoded and goofy.

As I've stated multiple times since the thread title, I'd be quite content with just inches, with a toggle to switch from one unit to the other. I made no suggestion about altering scripting at all. I made no suggestion of any sort in the initial post. I made a speculation about the possibility of programmers in the open source community writing a viewer that allows entering numbers in feet and inches. I should have just said inches, or in "alternate units" , and if I could go back in time and alter the thread title, or had the powers of a Linden moderator, I would, but I can't and I don't, so I won't and I won't.

If a non Linden, open source programmer made a viewer that allowed toggling between meters and inches in the build editor, everyone that doesn't want to use inches would be free to not use the viewer, and would not notice any change of any sort. Those who chose to use the "units diversity" viewer, who liked it, could, and those who get confused by the fact that when they ask the system to use inches, it uses inches, could uninstall the program, add the url of the place with the download file to their list of blocked sites, and take several short naps to recover. I doubt it would do them any serious permanent harm.

Are you asking why we do still, or why we did originally?

I don't know the history very well.

But within my industry (commercial aerospace) it is not because anyone thinks the Imperial system is better, it is because it would be very problematic to change over, primarily for the reasons Suezanne suggests: familiarity, but also because of all work that has been done in the past that we are still using.

I have a very intimate familiarity with the units of measure I grew up with, and using them in my job simply makes me a better, more efficient engineer. Of course I could learn to switch and would eventually get used to it, but it would take a while to work all the "bugs" out of my head. And to make several hundred thousand of us switch would just be a painful mess that no company wants to try.

Probably even more important, though, is that there is an unfathomable mountain of data in the industry at large, and also a lot of propriety stuff within every company, that is old, but still perfectly valuable, that would take thousands of man-hours to convert it all, or would be too much of a pain in the ass to convert on a daily basis once we did all switch.

This brings interesting issue still -- how would such viewer handle dimensions smaller than full inch? Given that (if i understand correctly) the inch is broken into 64 parts rather than use decimal system, should the viewer expect the user to manually convert say, 5/8th of the inch to 0.625 etc, or should some different system be used? And would seeing something like "5905.5118 in" be intuitive to person used to the imperial units system? That's equivalent of 150 m, btw.


Which is precisely why i said such viewer could become confusing to the user -- because it'd mix different measurement systems in different components...

Decimal inches. To enter 3/4 of an inch you put in .75. That's how the system in my workplace's design program works. When you set programs such as CoreDraw to use inches as the default unit, that's how they work.


Inches on a common ruler are split up into halves, fourths, eighths, maybe sixteenths, and in the first inch the 32nds are sometimes displayed .

We had a short ruler that had inches and decimal inches, but no one ever used it. I suspect it got thrown away to prevent confusion.

Most adults I've had experience can't really read the fractions on rulers, or do arithmetic involving fractions. Generally they can't do things like convert one third to two sixths. Using the word ratio leaves them staring vacantly. They don't what the numerator and denominator are. I had to teach the lead assembler how to read a ruler. The owner of the store thought Pi was equal to 3.2, exactly. The coolness of pi being an infinite non-repeating decimal managed to escape being learned by him in the course of acquiring a bachelor's degree in a technical field.

One customer asked how big something was, and the worker replied something like "2 feet by 3 feet." The customer responded with "How big is that? Is it as big as a lady's dress?"

"That depends on the lady," replied the worker.

yes i was asking why we did originally..i know that it would cost too much and cause a ton of confusion if we changed..i just really never asked why we even started in the first place lol

i've worked in my fathers business since i was 10 years old and pretty much run it now so i know the expense it would cause for us being custom builders and industrial but does anyone know how we started with using the system we have now?

Because when we declared independence from Great Britain, our culture was predominately British in origin. We kept their measurement system. We're lucky that the founders were able to introduce decimal currency.

thank you =)
i had asked some time ago about the UK in another forum if they used miles and mph or kilometers and the answer ended up being yes miles because of the cars being rated per gallon per mile..a lot responded saying their signs used miles not kilometers..i always thought it was only U.S. using miles..i guess if it wasn't for forums we would probably never even ask the questions but i do find the answers suprizing at times even though i had never really thought of it before the threads were started in the past.. lol
to me it is the best part of forums..learning about things we never thought about until they pop up..
kind of like ..Did you know that such and such causes such and such? omg i never thought of that till now ..thats so neat!!!!
lol

I think you've missed the real point of the comments about SL meters not being real meters.

You shouldn't be relying on RL measurements at all. It doesn't matter whether you're talking about 8.5 by 11 (U. S. standard letter size paper, in inches) or 210 by 297 (ISO standard A4, in mm). These numbers don't match SL scale - not because the SL meter is wrong (as someone else says), but because SL scale isn't consistent. It will only look right for those avatars who have chosen to size themselves to your scale (instead of the common 7' tall avatar). Or it will only look right for furniture built to that scale.

All you should worry about numerically is the ratio, and you don't need a change in the viewer to do that. Enter 0.85 for one dimension and 1.1 for the other. Then resize by dragging corners, keeping the proportions, but getting a final size that looks right for your environment. It still won't look right for avatars or objects built to a different scale, but at least it will match your need.

Not quite, you did something odd to it so that pints and gallons were smaller and the same with men's shoe sizes!!!

as long as their hand sizes are not messed with
you know what they say about a mans hand size and i think i know why they use 12 over ten now*giggles* even though either would be more than enou..........whoops sorry for drifting!!!

This might be useful.
http://www.onlineconversion.com/length_common.htm

I just checked 3 metal and 1 cloth tape measures and 2 rulers and a yard stick that I found in my house and they are all marked with meters and feet. They are all quite old, and so am I. When I went to school in the 50's and 60's we learned all this stuff.

I'm surprised the learn that it is not as easy for everyone as I had assumed.

This is all quite true, but i think Suezanne's point is, when common rulers she can acquire use imperial system rather than metric, it becomes difficult to carry out the "enter 0.85 and 1.1" part of the procedure... because the ruler provides these numbers in system that isn't very compatible. E.g. 1'8" x 1'6" won't result in the same ratio the metric 1.8m x 1.6m would.

Then again, for the smaller stuff i suppose one could convert feet to inches and then enter amount of measured inches as if they were centimeters (i.e. if the ruler says 20 inches then enter it as 0.20 etc) and then just scale things up once all done.

by the way, 1SL meter == 1RL meter.

peoples are just too stupid to realise they just mesure themselve wrongly (regular avatar measurers give you your height from footplant to eye level ~80-90% of your actual size.

I learned the metric system long ago. I never used it outside of school for measuring or building or making anything. Any plans for projects that I've seen have given the units in feet and inches.

I know that an inch is 2.54 centimeters, and that a meter is 39.37 inches. Knowing that doesn't mean that when I think about far I walked to school, I think of the value in kilometers instead of miles. Knowing that doesn't mean that when I gauge people's height, I guess their height in meters or centimeters instead of feet and inches.

I was surprised that the tape measure and measuring cloth at the drugstore didn't have metric units. At least the school rulers do. Not that it does any good. Most adults in the US can't do the math they were taught in the fourth grade.

There's a reason why the measuring devices at the drugstore didn't have metric units, of course; the reason is that there's no demand for it.

I did notice the comment about SL meters not being real meters. I disagreed with it to myself but made no comment here. I'm not getting paid to correct every error that I see. One might have an amusing discussion of just what it means for SL meters to be equal to real meters or not, since SL meters don't actually refer to any units of real length. They are just numbers in a computer program.

I've not been confused about the SL avatar heights being taller than real world heights, or the inaccurate results reports by common free av height measuring scripts, for over four years now.

As for it being only the ratio that matters, just shift the decimal points over so they fit in the editor, then scale proportionately by eyeball, well, if I was content to make size things by eyeball, then I think I could create objects of a satisfyingly correct ratio by eyeball as well. I don't want to guesstimate and hem and haw and shrink and expand things until it looks good enough to suit me, but is wrong. I want to be able easily enter numbers in the units that come naturally to me as a result of my life, and have the results be as accurate as the limits of the floating point numbers used in SL code and the peculiarities of dimensions, sizes, positioins, etc., used in SL allow.

Sadly, I think you're right. A lot of U.S.'ers are positively math phobic.

I guess I don't do exactly the same kind of building you do. I know about how long a meter is and I have no trouble knowing about what size to make things. Then I just want the math to be easy for typing in positions for lining things upright.