On Monday 11 June 2007 19:26, Joey Hess wrote:
> I prefer not to use these new prefixes, because the old ones only became
> confused due to the efforts of drive manufacturers. Who are perfectly
> capable (and equally financially motivated) of pulling the same trick
> with the new units, standards body or no.
I don't believe that to be true. There are other computer-related contexts
where SI prefixes aren't used for powers of two, although perhaps most of
them don't involve bytes. For an average user, knowing two sets of prefixes
should be easier than knowing exactly in which situations to interpret the SI
prefixes as binary prefixes. Drive manufacturers used the SI prefixes in the
correct, albeit unexpected way. The fact is that with the IEC prefixes, all
ambiguity is removed, so if someone claims that a storage device is 32 GiB
when it's in fact 32 GB, there can be no doubt as to the fact that they are
lying. Or what kind of tricks did you have in mind?
> Also, the "ib" prefixes sound stupid. Furthermore, the "KiB"
> abbreviation wastes a lot more screen space than "K", while actually
> converying no additional useful information. Many programs use every
> available character in a nominal 80 column screen and would have to drop
> information, precision, or significantly change their display to use the
> "KiB" unit.
You seem to fancy the K-is-1024--k-is-1000 convention, which doesn't work with
any higher power. But even if we accept that K unambiguously equals 1024,
then to be consistent either K should be KB or KiB can be shortened to Ki.
That's a single character, not "a lot".
> Debian has approximately as small of a chance standarising this
> throughout the distribution as we do standadising the spelling of
> "colo[u]r" or "standardi[sz]e" throughout the distribution.
If everybody waits for somebody else to change first, then no change can ever
happen.
--
Magnus Holmgren holmgren@lysator.liu.se
(No Cc of list mail needed, thanks)
"Exim is better at being younger, whereas sendmail is better for
Scrabble (50 point bonus for clearing your rack)" -- Dave Evans
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