[lyndonh]

Interesting how the example image for a bad UI shows the good UI using "Metric" vs "English" buttons.

In the England and the rest of the UK we use "Metric" vs "Imperial".

And we use a half metric system; metres and miles, litres and pints.

I notice in the USA the system is a different half metric system. Americans are much more likely to use ounces instead of litres. I also heard they sometimes use "kilopounds" and other such weirdness.

Anyway, this example image is one big fail to me.

[gresrun]

Lived in the USA all my life and I have never even heard of "kilopounds"

[CPLX]

Maybe they mean to reference the oddities surrounding tons, short tons, tonnes, and metric tons?

[RaptorJ]

kilopounds feels like a weird bastard but I think it makes sense. The actual values of the metric system are just as arbitrary as US Custom/Imperial (a particular mass, 1/10,000,000 part of the quarter of a meridian, such and such hyperfine transitions in a arbitrary atom, &.) The value of the metric system is decimalization -- the centi-, kilo-, mega- prefixes. Really, if americans ditched miles and tonnes and stuck to kilofeet and megapounds the systems would not be meaningfully different.

On the other hand, having your prime factors be 2 and 3 rather than 2 and 5 are nice when you divid things into quarters and thirds regularly (inches).

[lyndonh]

I've never had my posts downvoted so much as on HN.

I'm more or less on topic. I'm not engaging in a flame war. I'm not trolling.

Is it the "kilopounds" thing? What can I say, I heard that this kind of Greek prefix gets used with non Metric meaurements. So I said sometimes.